[17] in UA Discuss
Re: Detailed Election Results
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sun Kim)
Tue Oct 6 15:26:28 2009
In-Reply-To: <e7b2d5b80910061147m477b74a9y3338b8fec74cc8b6@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 15:26:21 -0400
From: Sun Kim <sun_kim@MIT.EDU>
To: Steve Kelch <phire14@gmail.com>
Cc: Quentin Smith <quentin@mit.edu>, ua-elect@mit.edu, ua-discuss@mit.edu
The Tech article is misleading as "the preserving the privacy" was
*not* the official statement of the Election Commission. I also do not
believe privacy is a good enough reason to withhold the results. Our
official stance is thus:
In the past, the UA Election Commission has been inconsistent in
releasing the number of votes for each candidate. As Election
Commissioner for the next year, I plan to keep this information
restricted since there is little benefit of knowing how many votes
each candidate received e.g. won by/lost by. We will keep all the
information on the UA server in the event of an official complaint
regarding the integrity of the election.
I am disappointed in the Tech for misconstruing some of my
correspondences with the writer and the disregard of the official
statement that was made clear to me would go in today's issue.
"Preserving the privacy" is a misrepresentation of the stance of the
Commission; it is instead a comment I made in passing to the writer as
a reason, albeit a weak and misguided one, before my final e-mail to
the writer in which I made absolutely clear what the official stance
was.
The precedence of inconsistency and my perceived lack of benefit were
my personal reasons to withhold the results. I am confident that there
are no, to my knowledge, any inconsistencies that would cause me to
question the integrity of the election. If Judboard rules that it is
my place to release the numbers, I will do so.
Sun
On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 2:47 PM, Steve Kelch <phire14@gmail.com> wrote:
> I can't second the complaint, not being a student anymore, but if I could I
> would. What's private about an election? Are you worried someone is going to
> have their feelings hurt by only receiving a few votes? Tough, maybe they
> should have campaigned harder. This isn't a popularity contest. It's
> explicitly the Election Commission's job to be neutral and unfeeling. It is
> an egregious breech of transparency in *any* large scale election to not
> reveal the vote count.
>
> How else would people be able to:
>
> 1) Judge whether the vote tally approximately matches reasonable
> expectations
> 2) Ask for a recount in the event of a very close race
> 3) Explicitly learn to which degree certain platforms did and did not
> receive a popular reception, to better help those who did win the election
> to tailor their efforts
>
> Steve
>
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 2:29 PM, Quentin Smith <quentin@mit.edu> wrote:
>>
>> Hi-
>>
>> I want to formally complain about the Election Commission's decision to
>> not released the detailed election results, as has been done in almost every
>> prior election. (As of the last time the Election Commission website was
>> updated, which is sadly back in 2007, all the results from 2000-2007 were
>> released to the public; I believe newer results are/were stored on the
>> vote.mit.edu server, so I can not tell if they were ever available.)
>>
>> It really hurts the UA's transparency and causes people to believe that
>> the Election Commission has something to hide from the voters and
>> candidates. Is there any reasoning for not releasing the results? The
>> explanation that Sun gave to The Tech that he wanted to "preserve the
>> privacy of all candidates" is specious; I would expect the losing candidates
>> to be among the most vocal in support of releasing results.
>>
>> --Quentin
>> UA CIT
>
>
