From: Marc Feeley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sun, 9 Nov 2008 01:49:37 -0500
On 9-Nov-08, at 12:17 AM, Alan Bawden wrote: > Now I confess I'm still in the dark about how exactly such a combined > vote could work in a way that appears to be fair.... And I'm -still- in the dark on how this can be done. If people will be sending us a -single- message that contains -both- a ranking of candidates, -and- a short essay that requires our judgment, how do we avoid the appearance of bias when rejecting a voter given that we already know who he would be voting for if we allowed him to vote? I know you have said -you- trust the SC to be fair, but there are others who have publicly stated that they do -not-. I'm tired of having people pissed off at me, and I don't want to give anybody any excuses to complain more. I've thought about this some. My first reaction was to say that it is fair given that all voters are treated equally. However, if one considers the accessibility to the voting process then I would have to say it is unfair because some people can access the voting process (registration and vote on the web) more easily than others. By comparison, this kind of bias seems relatively minor to me. In fact it seems that any election procedure has some slight unfairness of this sort built it. E.g., I'm not particularly upset that when I voted last week I had to walk about 4 blocks to the polling place, while others in my precinct only had to walk across the street. It is a question of the voter having enough free time, having the technical facility to access the registration and voting forms, and being reminded of the deadlines before they are passed. I'm specifically thinking of those who registered for the R6RS vote, but did not actually vote. Well I'm not sure you should read too much into that. During the final week of the R6RS vote, I reminded people several times to vote, so any voter who was reading his or her mail had plenty of warning that the deadline was approaching. Why those people chose not to vote I have no idea, but the fact that they did not vote does not necessarily indicate some kind of failure of the process. For example, some may have simply failed to find the time to read the report, and thus were unable to make up their minds. Of course no procedure can be totally fair, but the goal is to be as fair as possible. I think that having a single submission of registration and vote is closer to the ideal. Except we still have no idea how to handle a single submission in a way that doesn't open us up to an obvious charge of bias. I don't know how it is in the US, but here in Canada you have to show an ID when you go to the polling station. To me the "registration" is a form of ID of being a Scheme "citizen", so I find the single event registration+vote to be natural. But does the person who checks your ID know how you are going to vote before he has to decide whether or not to let you pass? - Alan _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
