[Development] Formal voting procedure for Qt Project

Alberto Mardegan mardy at users.sourceforge.net
Sun Oct 17 12:09:42 CEST 2021


Hi!
  I know I'm coming too late with this, but maybe it's something that
can be considered as for future developments of the voting bot:

On 04/10/21 13:08, Daniel Smith wrote:
> If anyone wishes to verify that their personal vote has been recorded correctly, they can email gerrit-admin at qt-project.org to have an independent party with database access verify their vote appears correctly in the system.

IMHO the bot should make the vote public: there should be a static page,
visible to everybody (even non authenticated users), containing a list
of names (or signatures) and their vote next to each signature.

The trick is that these names do not need to be real: once the voter
authenticates him/herself into the system, he/she casts a vote and types
in a signature, which of course does not need to be his/her real name,
but anything that he/she will now know to be associated with the vote:
it can be a name like Napoleon, or a sentence like "The lazy fox jumped
again".

In this way every voter would be able to independently verify that
his/her vote was counted correctly by just looking at this static page
("is my signature there, and with the vote I casted next to it?"), and
everyone interested can know (by seeing that no voter is protesting
about his/her vote not being in the page) that no fraud occurred.

This still leaves the door open to hackers inserting more votes into the
voting bot, but then this could also be tackled by showing at the top of
the page the list of the usernames of the people who voted: if the total
number of voting usernames is not equal to the total number of votes
registered, again we know that the vote is not correct.

Ciao,
  Alberto

-- 
http://www.mardy.it - Geek in un lingua international


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