How is the Knoll Aid 2.0 Truth Commission coming along?

This is done to avoid sneaky violations of the elections rules where the candidate gets his/her friends to play dirty, then claims no knowledge. The EA would need proof that the candidate directed it — such proof is nearly impossible to get, and if the candidate can easily avoid consequences in any case, supporters may just decide to play dirty of their own accord. When the candidates are held accountable, they (in principle) tell their supporters “If you don’t follow these rules, I could be disqualified”, and things tend to work out.

If I’m the EA, I first need to talk with a lot of people to establish what exactly happened. If something bad happened, I have to establish whether it likely had an impact on the outcome. In first-past-the-post, if this is a 100-vote effect and the margin of victory is 150 votes (or the candidate doing it lost), it didn’t change the outcome, and a reimbursement penalty would suffice. This analysis is more complicated in Condorcet, but still possible, and the more-detailed information available this year on when votes are cast might even allow the EA to pick out unusual patterns in voting behaviour.

If the allegations are proven and may have materially affected the outcome, the candidate can be disqualified, the voting in that race can be redone or perhaps reopened to dilute the questionable votes (with severe campaign restrictions on the culprit), or some other creative solution could be found. Votes cannot be subtracted — this is disallowed by Code and doing it reliably isn’t possible with secret ballots, let alone ranked ballots.

Given the preparation required for paper balloting and the rather limited number of ways candidates can be punished at this point, I’d probably just withhold the results of that race and deal with it in a few days.

I don’t know the person who filed a complaint- but I do know that several people have now denied it. Until it’s been confirmed, I do not want to publish the names of the people implicated, because as far as I’m concerned, so far it’s just hearsay. So why do I even bother posting on it? Because students want to know what happened. Because it’s still news that might affect the election. Because I feel that students should know what possible ramifications are if this is true. And no, I’m not accusing you of anything, Rodrigo- you also are reporting on a story. I just chose to do the same thing differently. I’m not looking the other way, I just don’t want to mention a name, as rumours tend to stick, and until there’s more evidence that this happened, I do not wish to add fuel to the fire. See my previous post on the role of rumours in elections.

I am curious as to how do you know the student who reported this is lying, and what his motivation is to do this.

According to Kommander Keg, it was indeed a violation. And last year we saw the same thing happen and Messoloras getting disqualified. I think that, as in general, people are afraid of pushing hard issues, and prefer to be bland and dry, and look the other way when their friends do something wrong.

http://ubcstudentmedia.wordpress.com/2009/02/03/exclusive-eyewitness-for-laptop-cookie-strategy-speaks-out/

and this is the post that has a lot of comments by different people on this issue:

http://ubcstudentmedia.wordpress.com/2009/02/02/extra-laptop-cookie-campaign-strategy-plagues-ams-elections/