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Date: Sun, 15 Mar 2015 22:38:37 +0000
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Voting irregularities
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Collins)

On 15/03/2015 19:07, Derick Rethans wrote:
> Rowan Collins <rowan.collins@gmail.com> schreef op 15 maart 2015 17:59:17 GMT+00:00:
>> On 15/03/2015 14:19, Anthony Ferrara wrote:
>>> All,
>>>
>>> I ran some numbers on the current votes of the dual-mode vote right
>>> now. There were a number of voters that I didn't recognize. So I
>>> decided to pull some stats.
>>>
>>> The following voters never voted before the dual-mode RFC went up:
>>>
>>> dom - no
>>> eliw - no
>>> kguest - yes
>>> kk - no
>>> nohn - no
>>> oliver - yes
>>> richsage - yes
>>> sammywg - no
>>> spriebsch - no
>>> srain - no
>>> theseer - no
>>> zimt - no
>>>
>>> Some of these names I recognize from list (sammywg and eliw), but
>> many I do not.
>>> The interesting thing happens when you look at the voting direction.
>>>
>>> Currently, the RFC is slightly losing 70:37 (65.4%).
>>>
>>> If we look at percentages, 4.2% of yes voters have never voted in a
>>> prior RFC. But a whopping 24.3% of no voters have never voted before.
>> I think calling this an "irregularity" is going a bit far.
> I don't think it's going to far, if you have people with no clue writing this:
>
> https://plus.google.com/+KristianK%C3%B6hntopp/posts/ijoDNH2M8mB

What I said was going too far was pointing at a cherry-picked statistic 
and calling it "voting irregularities". That has nothing to do with 
people's motivations for voting, and whether they were well-founded.

It's not an "irregularity" when far-right politicians get voted into 
power, however misguided I may feel the voters were; it's simply a 
result of holding an election in the first place. Ultimately, you can 
either give people the right to participate and accept they may act 
unwisely, or you can appoint an unchallengable meritocracy and accept 
that they may act unpopularly.

That's not to say that voting reform can't be considered - at, as Zeev 
says, an appropriate time - but that the rules should be based on 
principles of fairness, not analysis of how past votes would have turned 
out.

Regards,

-- 
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]