[18] in UA Discuss
Re: Detailed Election Results
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Quentin Smith)
Tue Oct 6 15:42:38 2009
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 15:42:12 -0400 (EDT)
From: Quentin Smith <quentin@MIT.EDU>
To: Sun Kim <sun_kim@mit.edu>
cc: Steve Kelch <phire14@gmail.com>, ua-elect@mit.edu, ua-discuss@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <d512b8310910061226y47dd598dxebfb8f31cf69a1da@mail.gmail.com>
On Tue, 6 Oct 2009, Sun Kim wrote:
> 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.
What is the precedent of inconsistency? As I said, I have found that all
the results from 2000-2007 were released, and they stopped there only
because no one seems to have maintained the ElectComm website. Beyond
those, it looks like
- Spring 2008
- Fall 2008
- Spring 2009
were also all released, though I can only find the results in The Tech,
and nowhere on the ElectComm site. So I can't really find much evidence to
suggest that ElectComm has frequently not released results. Perhaps you
misinterpreted the failure to maintain the Election Commision website (and
the resulting broken links today) as an original intent to hide the
results.
I think there is a very clear benefit: releasing the election results
allows voters (i.e. your constituency) to verify that their votes were
properly counted, and provides a significant check against election
misconduct.
--Quentin
>
> 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
>>
>>
>
