> I spent last night tweaking my reporting scripts so I could quickly > turn out the HTML report this morning. Unfortunately, once > I started collating results, I ran into some problems. What I > found what that 33 ballots appear spoiled, due to a bug handling > abstentions. (213 of the 246 ballots received have no abstentions > and are fine.) The affected ballots have hash IDs
damn The hash list serves little purpose here ... but it gives a count. > 4b4a44efeb8945823211d2af418110d4809d69c8 ( snip a pile of hex ) > 836f7ebf62000fbc550a2983d80fd5ea808e232e > > Since I am effectively the Elections Committee, my > proposal--after apologizing for not catching this test case--is > that I delete these 33 ballots so that those members may revote, Is there anything in the constitution that covers of the possibility of force majeure or data loss or corruption via electronic ballot processing? I doubt it. At this point we have 33 ballots which we *may* not ever get back. If we get all 33 ballots then we *may* not get the same data as before. In either case the pristine status of the input data has been made somewhat muddled now. I guess we could pretend that the data never existed. But it did and we can not wash that away. > extend the election until we have 33 new ballots from those members > or until 235959 PDT Thursday (whichever occurs first), and issue nag > mails for those periods. At this point you can not cut off people and say that if they don't get their votes in ( again ) then their votes don't count. We actually *need* those ballots. > (Ballots submitted during this extension by > members who hadn't voted during the original period will be ignored.) That is valid because they were never in the data set. > An alternative is to invalidate all 33 ballots entirely, but that is > 1/8 of the received votes. impossible. out of the question in fact. > Suggestions, objections welcomed; flagellations accepted. If there are > no comments by 113000 PDT today, I'll act according to the above proposal. I guess we have to muddle forwards now don't we ? Without question you can not simply throw away valid ballots that were submitted by people in accordance with the process we had in place. They did their job and executed the ballot process correctly. One can not throw away their data. So the nag emails should go specifically to those people affected and no one else. All 33 of them must be reached unless something truely disasterous occurs that prevents the ballot recovery. Dennis
