Author: FT2.wiki

Description:
In some polls, it is desirable and useful to allow participants to enter comments with their vote. The poll configuration would indicate whether a comment was ( for each vote | for the vote as a whole | not at all)

and whether comments could be seen ( by everyone after the election | by election monitors only | by the candidates for their own votes )

Rationale: In some !votes it is desirable to consider the rationale for votes as well as the pure vote count. A lot of discussions on-wiki work that way. Switching to SecurePoll allows privacy and simplicity, but also removes that option. So votes where the result is to some extent not a matter of pure numbers suffer when moved to SecurePoll or cannot be run on that extension.

Quick examples from enwiki, which uses it internally: -

At a recent CU/OS election almost all candidates polled at under the "minimum level", an unsatisfactory result. Not having any comments, it was impossible to interpret what went on and therefore approaches to improve matters lacked any information what happened.

At RFA the "pass level" is 70 - 80%. SecurePoll could handle RFAs in voting terms, but as a crat needs to be able to assess reasons not just vote count the extension would be inadequate to the task even if the community wished to use it.

Comments would be disabled by default so elections and polls not requiring them, would run without them. However other elections and polls could benefit from a comment capability, and it could allow SecurePoll to be wider used.

Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement