Amendment: Require Notice of Private Ballot Edits

During the general election which just concluded, the Election Commission had to deal with difficult involving processing private ballots through the XenForo conversations feature. Specifically, a voter submitted a private ballot during the voting period, which was posted to the voting thread as specified by procedure. Then, at an unknown time, the voter edited their ballot to something else. The edit was only spotted after the voting period had concluded. Regrettably, XenForo's private message system, conversations, does not display when messages were last edited, meaning that it is impossible to know with certainty when the private ballot in question was edited.

Forum administration has proposed to simply remove the ability to edit private messages, but this seems like an undesirable solution to me, because it would negatively affect many other legitimate uses of the conversations feature. Instead, I would propose that we can resolve this issue through a change in the electoral procedures.

The clause in the Rules of the Election Commission that is relevant here is s 4.4:

4. During voting, private ballots will be announced in separate posts. If a private ballot is changed, the corresponding post will be edited accordingly.

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Because of the second sentence, the election supervisors are required to record into the record any valid edit of a private ballot. Unfortunately, technical limitations mean that we run into the current situation, in which it is ambiguous whether or not a ballot was edited in the legal timeframe. I would say that this means it is not tenable for the Election Commission to continue to record edits to private message ballots, due to the danger of counting an invalid vote.

In my mind, the simplest way to solve this is an amendment to s 4.4 of the Rules of the Election Commission to require all private voters to expressly notify the election supervisors that they have changed their ballot:

4. During voting, private ballots will be announced in separate posts. If a private ballot is changed, and the voter notifies the Election Supervisors that they have changed their ballot, the corresponding post will be edited accordingly.

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I would appreciate the thoughts of my fellow Election Commissioners.

I'd refrain from commenting for now.

I don't think notifying the supervisors is enough. Consider the possibility that an edit happens, the ESs are notified, the change is made, and then another edit happens. It would be easy for the voter to come back and say that the new ballot was recorded incorrectly.

Here's my thought on what should happen.
1. Voter casts a private ballot.
2. Supervisors record the ballot to the voting thread.
3. Supervisors post the contents of the voting thread back to the user in the private conversation to confirm what was posted.
4. If the voter wishes to change the vote, or catches that the supervisors recorded it to the thread incorrectly, they make a new post with the new ballot.
5. Supervisors edit the ballot on the voting thread to match the new ballot, then repeat step 3.

Basically, no more editing in the conversation. Require a new post every time, regardless of whether it's the voter changing their mind or the voter correcting the supervisor. Once the supervisor reads back the ballot, that's locked in until another post with a new timestamp appears.

Sil's comments make sense.

Can we also look at the other election commission rules changes we have proposed previously?

I tend to wonder if we need the "here's the ballot we posted, double check" step, but requiring them to affirmatively request a new ballot for edits is the way to go. I would support that alone or Sil's version.

Sil Dorsett:

I don't think notifying the supervisors is enough. Consider the possibility that an edit happens, the ESs are notified, the change is made, and then another edit happens. It would be easy for the voter to come back and say that the new ballot was recorded incorrectly.

Here's my thought on what should happen.
1. Voter casts a private ballot.
2. Supervisors record the ballot to the voting thread.
3. Supervisors post the contents of the voting thread back to the user in the private conversation to confirm what was posted.
4. If the voter wishes to change the vote, or catches that the supervisors recorded it to the thread incorrectly, they make a new post with the new ballot.
5. Supervisors edit the ballot on the voting thread to match the new ballot, then repeat step 3.

Basically, no more editing in the conversation. Require a new post every time, regardless of whether it's the voter changing their mind or the voter correcting the supervisor. Once the supervisor reads back the ballot, that's locked in until another post with a new timestamp appears.

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I think it should be made explicitly clear that the onus on proof that the posting is correct applies to the voter in clause 3 to check themselves, not to EC. If we are changing the rules, might as well make clear that. (Edit: So I'd prefer Sid's version in full).

I feel like this would be a better solution than what is currently proposed, if admins and forum users at large are open to it: https://forum.thenorthpacific.org/topic/9198321/post-10687599