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[python-committers] Timeline to vote for a governance PEP

Donald Stufft donald at stufft.io
Sat Nov 3 00:38:59 EDT 2018 
> On Nov 3, 2018, at 12:20 AM, Tim Peters <tim.peters at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> [Tim]
>>> Nevertheless, I probably won't vote - I object to public ballots on
>>> principle.  That's been raised by others, so I won't repeat the
>>> arguments, and I appear to be very much in a minority here.
> 
> [Eric Snow <ericsnowcurrently at gmail.com>]
>> Would it help if we only published who voted, and kept their votes
>> private?  Publishing the actual votes probably doesn't make a
>> big difference here, relative to the broader Python/tech community.
> 
> That would probably be enough to convince me to vote, but I don't want
> to hold things up either.  If I'm the only one, why bother?  It's not
> like my vote will change the result ;-)
> 
> BTW, the years I was on the PSF Board, I always wanted everyone to
> know how we voted on everything.  But I was elected to that position,
> so was voting as a representative of those who elected me.
> 
> But nobody has any more business knowing how I vote on a PEP than,
> say, how I vote for the local mayor.  That's between me and my
> conscience.  Your vote is between you and yours, and I want actively
> _not_ to be able to see how others voted.
> 
> Although I'm all in favor of making the PEP ballots public, if
> stripped of personally identifying info.
> _______________________________________________


FWIW I tend to agree with Tim on public vs private ballots, although unlike him I don’t feel strongly enough to abstain from voting on this one particular vote.

On a practical matter, keeping the ballots secret will rely on either having a trusted person to tally the election results or using some software that will do it for us. There is https://civs.cs.cornell.edu <https://civs.cs.cornell.edu/> which we could use that does offer private ballots and offers making the ballots (with or without a name attached to them) public. It doesn’t support “pure” Condorcet but it should be easy enough to take the public but anonymous ballots and compute to determine if there was a condorcet winner or if one of the methods had to break a cycle, and if there wasn’t a condorcet winner, just re-run the election. Beyond that, I’m not sure what other options there are for anonymous ranked voting.
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