Less than an hour to go!!!

Soon(tm) we will know our new moderators!

would it be automatic or does it need some kind of intervention from stack exchange staff?

I'm pretty sure it's automatic

I could be wrong, though. I guess I've never thought to pay much attention.

In any case, I suspect SE staff will act quickly if it does require their intervention

nice

in any case, i'm sure that any possible result would be fine, you guys are very good candidates

maybe elections in other SE sites are more problematic

I expect mikeazo and Ilmari Karonen to take the first two spots.

@Reid Printing over a hundred ballots and counting them surely takes a while.

After all, it's not a proper election if there are no paper ballots.

@cygnusv Yes, this may be the case if there is actually the need for a primary phase.

how could that be?

@CodesInChaos Even if we'd use good old crypto voting schemes?

aren't we in the election phase?

@cygnusv Yes we skipped the primary phase because we only had 5 nominees. But I think in SO or SU with many more candidates there will also be some "bad" ones.

I think IACR uses fancy crypto voting.

@CodesInChaos What do they vote?

Oh ok, but in our case the things should be pretty easy

@SEJPM: They use Helios voting for... stuff...

@SEJPM Board of directors or something. The only place I encounter IACR is their preprint server.

@Reid Should I know "Helios voting"? There isn't even a wikipedia article on it...

vote.heliosvoting.org @SEJPM

The technical specs can be found at documentation.heliosvoting.org

@SEJPM AFAIK it's the most popular crypto voting system.

v3 is what IACR uses. v4 is still in progress.

@Reid Well I guess they've got the personal / "volunteers" to develop such stuff...

T-1

20s

voila: crypto.stackexchange.com/election/1

635 voters were eligible, 224 visited the site during the election, 149 visited the election page, and 122 voted

didn't expect that one...

Counting votes for Cryptography Stack Exchange Moderator Election 2015 using Meek STV.
5 candidates running for 3 seats.

 R|mikeazo    |e-sushi    |Ilmari Karo|CodesInChao|Reid       |Exhausted  |Surplus    |Threshold
  |           |           |nen        |s          |           |           |           |
==================================================================================================
 1|  44.000000|  29.000000|  15.000000|  30.000000|   4.000000|   0.000000|  13.499999|  30.500001

Waaait I might have run it wrong. Give me a sec

congrats to the new moderators! :D

Congraz @CodesInChaos

and thanks to all the candidates too

Yeah I did. Those results may be wrong

I use Scottish instead of Meak

Nope, they're right

Congrats, guys!

:)

Congrats @CodesInChaos @mikeazo @e-sushi :)

@mikeazo, Congratulations, you're a mod - again.

@SEJPM me neither.

Congratulations @e-sushi (let's see if this reaches him)

@Undo, any ETA on the diamonds?

@SEJPM We need a CM to do that, there'll be one around in a few minutes

@SEJPM Thanks!

interesting, the nationalities (or at least, location) of the moderators are preserved after the elections

didn't expect tht

2 germans, 1 american

The other two are German, right?

I think so

I think that is right.

@mikeazo well if you are american and it says two germans than I guess the other two are german...

well, I have not checked it

@mikeazo Codes is german and according to his twitter profile sushi is as well.

anyone know what the format of the election data is?

@mikeazo Here, join the Code Review potential July challenge:

crypto.stackexchange.com/election/1

@SEJPM Sure does… ;) Humble thanks @all! Btw: In case you need me for anything and I´m not available here “ad hoc”, always feel free to ping me via twitter @esushi_tm – that´ll reach me wherever I am (assuming I´m awake). As for time-zones, I tend to find myself working at night frequently… so please feel free to ignore the fact I´m located in Germany.

@rolfl Wait a second, you have a FUN-TAG on CodeRev(Meta)!?

More than that, we have fun people too ;-)

@rolfl Well I guess crypto is just too serious for that (although we do have games...) :(

@Undo I´m not sure about that either. Checking myself… I don´t think I actually made it (unless I´m misinterpreting the raw votes).

@IlmariKaronen Have been you to the Helsinki Hacklab?

@e-sushi SE doesn't simply add all the votes together, that'd be too simple. They use same fancy, shiny math to get to magic results using obfuscated (open source) tools.

@e-sushi ... and was documented that they use this OpenSTV system-thingy. crypto.stackexchange.com/election/1

Not that magic:

@SEJPM @e-sushi It's called the Single Transferable Vote algorithm.

Nicely explained by CGP Grey

LOL Well, that´s what´s a bit confusing to me as I can also reproduce chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/22480982#22480982 without a problem using “Scottish STV” using that same tool (OpenSTV). Yet, choosing “Approval Voting” turns up with what I posted.

@Adi So “Scottish STV” would be the correct one?

@Emrakul Gotcha

Jepp. Meek

@Adi Was just abusing Google to find something like that. Guess those 21 options in OpenSTV just confused me a bit without having had a glimpse at that Q. Thanks for confirming – much appreciated (bookmarked for further reference as I´m sure it´ll come handy one day).

No problem

Loading ballots from file crypto-stackexchange-com-2015-election-results.blt.
Ballot file contains 5 candidates and 122 ballots.
No candidates have withdrawn.
Ballot file contains 122 non-empty ballots.

Counting votes for Cryptography Stack Exchange Moderator Election 2015 using Meek STV.
5 candidates running for 3 seats.

 R|mikeazo         |e-sushi         |Ilmari Karonen  |CodesInChaos
  |----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------
  |Reid            |Exhausted       |Surplus         |Threshold

@Adi The basic idea is simple, but I didn't get the details of Meek yet.

@CodesInChaos My understanding of STV counting algorithms (Hare, Meek, Wright, etc.) doesn't go beyond passing their names as parameters to openstv cli

I decided long time ago that understanding STV itself is good enough for me :D

@e-sushi Have you gotten an email or anything yet?

@CodesInChaos I´m just discovering the fun diving into that. In short (as far as I got it uptil now): fractional votes… spread from “candidate 1” down to “candidate 3”. He/She reaching “Threshold” wins. Then things are scaled up according to @mikeazo´s 0.693182… yet, I have to admit that´s where I stop grasping the actual details. Guess if no one finds a nice wrap-up, we´ll just have to check on the sourcecode of OpenSTV to see the actual calculation functions. ;)

I'm not sure why it's taking so long to get your diamonds to you folks

@Undo rechecked a sec ago… nope, no SE mails.

@Emrakul It's only 530 there now, and the election ended an hour ago.

And we have CMs in all kinds of timezones

I was provided with this for STV: youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI

@Undo Doesn't the moderator agreement come before that?

@CodesInChaos Nope, the mod agreement just gets in your way before you can actually use your diamondy privs.

Hmmm... sure?

Ahh,, yess. that's the way it works.

That's how it worked when I got appointed

Once on main, once on meta

diamond allows you to accept the agreement

The diamond shows on your profile even before you accept the agreement

You also show up on /admin, with a giant red asterisk by your name

@CodesInChaos Related to that Youtube video, I guess the following wraps up STV logic in a TL;DR way.

@e-sushi That much I understand. But the details of quota and weight adjustment still elude me.

@CodesInChaos See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_single_transferable_votes yet?

(scroll down to “Meek” section/header)

@e-sushi Yes. But I didn't fully understand it.

Probably need to implement it, to really get the details.

@CodesInChaos LOL - Just what I was thinking… already fired up my editor to create a simple C thingy. ;)

If anyone decides to implement it, for fun or fortune, then feel free to submit your code to Code Review as part of the July cjallenge. I will be doing that myself.

It's festive

@CodesInChaos @rolfl In case it helps: found an implementation hidden in scorevoting.net/WarrenSmithPages/homepage/votetest2.c (C file) that just begs to be (ab)used. Wasn´t able to verify things yet, but the “MeekAlg123(…)” function looks pretty complete.

There are a bunch of implementations around.... the idea on Code Review challenges though, is to take whatever code you want (whether you wrote it from scratch (or not - if it is OK licensed)) and to clean it up, and make it your best personal effort, and then throw it to the vultures to see if you can improve it any more... ;-)

Crypto mods can expect diamonds after the CM's and devs return from the coal-face ;-) ^^^^

Diamonds require carbon, some pressure, and some time.... that's how the SE folk do it ^^^