Blind Voting

I don't think that blind voting or secret ballots are desirable for most possible uses of consensus process, but they might be desirable for some uses.

I don't know (or can't remember, anyway) if the Loomio team has ever expressed an opinion on this, so it'd be interesting to see!

I'd love something similar to that, inspired by James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds — where everyone's vote is secret to you until you have voted to. I think this would help prevent groupthink.

I wonder if these ideas could be developed as Loomio plugins?

Hi there! At the moment it's not possible to have anonymous voting. Although a few people have made that suggestion recently through our feedback form, so it will be put into consideration.

Blind voting is not necessarily anonymous. You just need to hider the results until the close of poll (or at least until you have responded yourself).

We currently implement a bit of 'soft', opt-out blind voting, where you do not see the current votes on the poll immediately, but you can click 'show results' before voting to see them.

Come to think of it... it would be pretty trivial to add an option which removes this button and only allows you to see votes after you've voted (like Twitter does). What do you think, @robertguthrie ?

You could still change your vote afterwards, but for the most part I think this achieves the goal.

I think it's legitimate in many cases to see how and why others vote before you vote for yourself (as @gregorycassel said well), so I don't think we should remove the soft-blind mode altogether, but I can imagine a poll option which removes the button. I'm a little hesitant to add another poll option unless we have a good way to keep it out of the way.

It isn't something paying customers (that I know of) are asking for though.

FYI, previous thread on this topic here, for anyone who is interested :)

Allow me to chime in: +1 in favor of a blind voting option!

Hey all, new to the community. We are thinking about using Loomio to vote on candidate endorsements, and in an ideal world it seems like we should do this out in the open, I also imagine some people wouldn't want others to know how they voted. Curious how others might be handling this :)

I think it is important to vote by knowing how all the other voters did. If we consider that Loomio is based on liquid democracy prinicples it is important to consider the first of all the properties : transparency. I know how all the others decide and all the others know how I decide. My opinion is that if they are problems with transparency, you will have to face problems you won't get rid of by using Loomio.
The other important point is flexibility : be able to change your vote during the process.