A secret vote

Hey Frédéric,

We don't have specific support for anonymous voting at the moment (it's on our list, but not a top priority at the moment). One option for this that will work today is to start a poll and send out a series of invites to the emails addresses you're interested in participating. When clicking on these links while logged out of Loomio, each member will be able to provide a name for their vote, so you could 'anonymize' the vote by agreeing on an alias beforehand that everyone will use.

(You'll have to make sure they're logged out when they vote though!)

Hi, I'd really like to see secret voting too.

I think it would be dangerous to make participants think they are participating in a secret ballot if the admin can see the votes linked to the accounts, and hiding the votes also means a participant cannot audit the decision process... It may sound benign for a sport club, but Loomio can be used in more critical situations (political organizing in a police state).

I feel Loomio should avoid the sloppy road of half-baked e-voting systems that do not offer guarantees of true anonymity and auditability, and focus on open collaboration.

I agree with Julien Carnot.

I think that one of the founding principles of liquid democracy consists in transparency. Thus secret votes dont seem adapted.

-------- Message d'origine --------
De : "Julien Carnot (Loomio)" [email protected]
Date : 05/11/2017 11:10 (GMT+01:00)
À : [email protected]
Objet : [Loomio Community - Help / Ayuda] A secret vote

FYI, I've put up an experimental branch with this functionality here:
https://github.com/loomio/loomio/pull/4388

If we get it merged, I'll turn the feature on for a few groups who have requested it to see how it goes; happy to loop you in when this happens @fredericdesforges @davidian1024.

I'm having a tough time buying into the argument that Loomio shouldn't support this feature; if you or your organisation believes that all voting should be transparent, then you have the really simple option of not using the feature for your decisions :) However, we've been requested this feature several times, including by paying customers, and I think there are some valid use cases for this, such as nominating candidates for a position or gathering feedback about an experience (For example, what if a company wanted to raise a check saying 'I have experienced harassment while working here?' This is much more likely to gather an accurate response given anonymous submissions.)

Anonymous voting can also help reduce 'me-too'ism, where someone feels disinclined to disagree with something simply because many other people (or perhaps a certain other person) has agreed. I'd gently caution that all organisations may not be like your organisation, and that there are plenty of times and places where anonymity gives people the security to make their voice heard.

With something like someone could start to use Loomio as a mass polling platform; for example a grad student wanting to do research on a somewhat sensitive topic like family medical history could raise an anonymous poll to gather responses without needing to insist that respondents use an alias.

@juliencarnot I wonder at your use of the word 'admin' here. The current functionality would be that the only folks who can see anonymous votes are those who have access to the database; coordinators of a group or the author of a poll are not able to see the votes of an anonymous poll. (on a slightly more technical level, anonymous polls do not serialize their stance's participant to the client unless they belong to the current user; so you're able to see and update your own vote as normal, but all other stances on the poll appear as anonymous). This means that short of getting ahold of someone else's Loomio account, email, or the Loomio database itself, it will not be possible to reveal who voted what. It's not cryptographically secure, but it is a far cry from sloppy or half baked.

@gdpelican First of all, my apologies if you took the words sloppy & half-baked for your work on this branch, it was not my intention and I'm sure it's better thought out than many e-voting solutions out there.

By admin, I was referring to the instance administrator/sysop. There again, I place more trust in the Loomio team to have good security practices and work ethics than in most SaaS providers, but the beauty of Loomio is that people can set up other instances and that the solution can be used by most people, regardless of their understanding of what secret really means in the Internet context.

I understand the use-cases and the reason behind group-less polls and secret voting, but still feel that there are other solutions from Doodle to Typeform (and someday, blockchain-based voting solutions) that can easily be linked to from a group discussion or used casually by an individual, and that Loomio should remain focused on decision-making for groups rather than try to become a mass-polling service. Then again, this is just a personal feeling!

It isn't realistic to think that decision-making for groups can be accomplished without protected voting, since this may be required for dispute resolution. Expecting people to go elsewhere when security is need is actually likely to compromise security. Strong security should be considered essential, if Loomio is going to be anything but a toy.

Hey folks,

I've implemented and deployed a beta version of this feature. If you'd like to try it out in your group (@fredericdesforges, @davidian1024, etc), please send a message to [email protected] saying you'd like to turn on anonymous voting for your group :D

Looking forward to hearing further feedback about it :frog: