Open Stack

On Oct 3, 2016, at 12:18 PM, Clay Gerrard <clay.gerrard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> After the nominations close, the election officials will assign each candidate a non-identifying label, such as a random number, and those officials will be the only ones who know which candidate is associated with which number. 
>> 
> I'm really uneasy about this suggestion.  Especially when it comes to re-election, for the purposes of accountability I think it's really important that voters be able to identify the candidates.  For some people there's a difference in what they say and what they end up doing when left calling shots from the bubble for too long.

This was a concern of mine, too, but IMO there haven't been too many cases where a TC member has said they would support X and then fail to do so. They might not prevail, being one of 13, but when that issue came up they were almost always consistent with what they said.

> As far as the other stuff... idk if familiarity == bias.  I'm sure lots of occasions people vote for people they know because they *trust* them; but I don't think that's bias?  I think a more common problem is when people vote for a *name* they recognize without really knowing that person or what they're about.  Or perhaps just as bad - *not* voting because they realize they have on context to consider these candidates beyond name familiarity and an (optional) email.

I think that with so many candidates for so few seats, most people simply don't have the time or the interest to look very deeply into things. I know that that shows up in the voting. Take the election from a year ago: there were 619 votes cast for 19 candidates. Out of these:
- 35 ballots only voted for one candidate
- 102 ballots voted for three or fewer
- 175 didn't even bother to vote for 6
- only 159 bothered to rank all the candidates

So I think that there is evidence that unless you are already well-known, most people aren't going to take the time to dig deeper. Maybe anonymous campaigns aren't the answer, but they certainly would help in this regard.

> I think a campaign period, and especially some effort [1] to have candidates verbalize their viewpoints on topics that matter to the constituency could go a long way towards giving people some more context beyond "i think this name looks familiar; I don't really recognize this name"

Agreed 100%! It was made worse this year because the nominations closed on a Saturday, and with the late rush of people declaring their candidacy, gave no time at all for any sort of campaign discussions before voting began. There really needs to be a decent period of time allowed for people to get answers to whatever questions they may have.


-- Ed Leafe