Re: Conlang Flag: Voting

Jan van Steenbergen wrote:

> Both options are fine with me. Note however that if you work with a
> format like "C>A=D>B" you will probably get a lot of emails that are
> not according to the standard and perhaps even undecypherable.
At least I could email the person back and ask for a resubmission :-)

But assuming we go the web forms route:

> If I'd have too choose between non-anonymous voting and a voting with
> the possibility of people voting twice, I'd definitely prefer the
> former. Anyway, does it matter much if the voting is not anonymous?
I wouldn't have thought so - none of us are shy about expressing our
opinions in public, are we?

As Paul says, at real elections they record who has voted without
recording how they voted, but in this context there's a few problems
with that. Suppose someone *does* vote twice, but the second time they
enter a different name. AFAICS, you can't detect that unless you have
a list of people who are eligible to vote, and if it *does* happen
then you have to discard *all* of the votes because you've got no way
of knowing which vote was submitted by the duplicate voter.

> Excellent. One question though: would this mean that a voter has to
> express his opinion about all 22 flags? What happens if you only "do"
> the first five flags of your preference?
I'm planning to make that perfectly OK.

In the last few hours I've been writing some code to automatically
check whether a vote is valid, and if it is valid, to enable the voter
to check that it is correct before confirming it (it's a good
opportunity for me to practise my php coding). I should have a version
up in the next couple of days that's good enough for testing.

Note that if we end up with more than 26 flags then I'll have to
change the identification codes from letters to numbers, but that's
OK, it's just that letters are prettier.

> Oh, and one suggestion: place the flags in a table instead, so that
> the page will show two flags next to each other. And use a table
> border too, so that it becomes clear immediately which label belongs
> to which flag.
OK, I'll try that sometime.

Philippe Caquant wrote:

> As most of these flags are highly symbolic, would it
> be possible to shortly remind the voter, on the page,
> what each part of each proposal is supposed to mean ?
> Some may have it in mind, some may not.
Anyone who is voting would have already looked up the flags (at
conlangflag.htm) where they are fully explained. I don't believe
there are any people here with such poor memories that they'd forget
what any of the flags meant before loading flagvote.htm, so I don't
see this as a problem. Besides, people can keep conlangflag.htm open
in one window and flagvote.htm open in another if they want to.

Adrian.

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