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From: csu@alembic.acs.com (Dave Mack)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups
Subject: Re: These new voting schemes
Message-ID: <1989Oct26.233155.13966@alembic.acs.com>
Date: 26 Oct 89 23:31:55 GMT
References: <4771@ncar.ucar.edu> <15249.253f3716@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <37123@looking.on.ca> <4806@ncar.ucar.edu> <1989Oct25.051238.4241@alembic.acs.com> <903@ecijmm.UUCP>
Reply-To: csu@alembic.acs.com (Dave Mack)
Organization: Alembic Computer Services, McLean, VA
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UUCP-Path: uunet!alembic!csu

In article <903@ecijmm.UUCP> jmm@ecijmm.UUCP (John Macdonald) writes:
>In article <1989Oct25.051238.4241@alembic.acs.com>
>    csu@alembic.acs.com (Dave Mack) writes:
>
>>The NO vote threshhold, as has been pointed out repeatedly, suffers from
>>the weakness of allowing a small group of people who disapprove of the
>>*topic*, not the name, to block the creation of the group. Any mechanism
>>that can be abused eventually will be. (I can see the memo now: "All
>>AT&T employees WILL vote NO on comp.windows.motif!" [No slur of AT&T
>>intended, of course.])
>
>
>I'm sure that this has also been countered repeatedly.  Any group large
>enough to block a topic by the 100 NO rule is also large enough to
>block almost all topics by the current 100 excess yes over no rule.
>Only a small number of cases would be *changed* by adding the 100 NO
>vote rule.  Of course, as we get continually larger voting turnouts,
>this will change.

We have recently seen votes that had over 800 votes counted, and at least
one recently which had over 100 NO votes and still passed. As the net
grows, the number of voters will grow, making the 100-NO-vote rule
increasingly unequitable and prone to abuse. 

The 100-NO-vote rule provides a mechanism for censorship on a net-wide
basis. That wasn't what Peter Da Silva intended when he suggested it,
I'm sure, but it could be used that way. It's a bad idea.

Dave Mack