[oclug] Is OCLUG cheating again?

[Hugh Campbell]

On Monday 11 April 2005 07:20 am, Francis J. A. Pinteric wrote:
> What is this garbage?
Just the results of the vote that Bob Clark and I did.  I summarized the 
results manually in the posting to the list.


> We expected human counted results.
And I assure you that you got them


> Who authroized electronic vote counting?
Nobody


> Who cheated?
Nobody, to the best of my knowledge.  I just count them - I don't make them.

By way of explanation, the votes were actually tabulated on a spreadsheet - 
that is what the pdf file shows.

The first year Bob and I did this, it took us ages to count all the votes - 
well over an hour I think, because we had to keep _recounting_ them.  We did 
it a total of four times before we were sure that we had the correct totals.  
It was surprisingly confusing to do.

So the next year, I did the count on a spreadsheet - each ballot is manually 
numbered sequentlally when it is counted, so that anyone (but especially the 
vote counters while we were doing the count) can go back through the actual 
paper ballots and compare them to the spreadsheet to ensure that all votes on 
the ballot were correctly counted.

The spreadsheet tallies votes horizontally to ensure that no more than 6 votes 
were cast per ballot (it wasn't so obvious when we were selecting 9 
candidates in the past), and vertically to count the number of votes per 
candidate.  

That is the reason why I produced a pdf version of the spreadsheet results - 
anyone who cares to may see exactly what we saw, and do the counts 
themselves.

Francis, I will send you a copy of the pdf offlist.

Best regards, and let me know if you have any comments or criticisms.  Always 
open to suggestions.

Hugh