[EM] Debian leader elections analysis

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 05:49 PM 11/1/2005, Warren Smith wrote:
>I have written a page on this topic which you can read at
>    http://math.temple.edu/~wds/crv/Debian2003.html

 From this page:
><http://www.debian.org/vote/2003/vote_0001>2003: 4 canddts+NOTA; 
>M_Michlmayr wins;
>488 unique votes cast out of 510 accepted votes (200 rejected). This 
>was the only one of these 7 elections which was fairly difficult to call.
>    * Total unique votes cast=488, which is 58.6% of all possible 
> votes, according to Debian.
>    * The fact that 200 votes were rejected as invalid versus 510 
> accepted as valid, even after 5 years of experience and the best 
> software developers in the world voting and programming, strikes me 
> as very strong evidence that Debian's Schulze beatpaths voting 
> system is just too complicated. It perhaps also proves that IRV 
> voting is also just too invalid-vote-genic.

If I read the Debian info page correctly
http://www.debian.org/vote/2003/leader2003_stats
then I think Warren has misunderstood it. The large number of 
rejections came from votes where the vote was not validated (did not 
pass "sig check"). These are not votes at all, really. There were 
only 23 actual "bad ballots."

(which might mean blank ballots or some other form of spoilage.)

And I will point out that one disaffected member attempting to send 
phony ballots could account for all sig check rejections. Though 
probably there was more cause than that. Since they sent 
acknowledgements, it is quite possible, also, that the rejected 
ballots were duplicates, i.e., were later submitted correctly.

In 2005, there were only three "bad ballots." The rest of the 
rejected ballots failed "sig check."