gen-vote@phri.UUCP (delete net.general) (02/19/86)
From: Jim Olsen <cubsvax!columbia!topaz!ll-xn!olsen>
I think your voting procedure is seriously flawed. As stated, a
'keep' vote requires significantly more attention and effort than a
'delete' vote. It is certain that many 'keep' votes will be counted
as 'delete' votes because the voters didn't read the instructions.
(There are _always_ lots of people who don't read instructions.)
An unbiased voting procedure would be far preferable. For example,
requiring the voter to insert the word 'yes' or 'no' in the Subject
line, and rejecting (or manually counting) votes not containing one
of these words.
----------------
[This is indeed a problem, and I'm not quite sure what to do about it.
On the one hand, you are absolutely correct that the voting procedure
does have an (untended) built-in bias towards "yes" votes in that if
you don't do anything about it, the default is to vote "yes". On the
other hand, it has been made very clear what the proper procedure is;
if somebody is too lazy to read the directions before casting his or
her vote, there isn't much I can do about that. Every election has
rules and if you don't follow the rules you can't expect the people
running the election to read your mind.
So far, it looks like 10-20% of the "yes" votes were actually intended
to be "no" votes as indicated by the body of the letter. As you might
imagine, I havn't seen any obvious mistakes the other way around. A
few votes have been tossed as being neither "yes" or "no" based on the
Subject line. I consider this to be an unacceptably high proportion
of mis-counted votes. I'm really not looking forward to it, but I
have been considering doing a manual tally of the votes if this trend
keeps up. -- RHS]
--
Roy Smith, {allegra,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016