Well, it seems I've missed the anonymity hubbub and resolution but as I haven't seen these points raised, I still wanted to post.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
...I seen nothing at all to suggest a reason for the names of the voters in the poll to be public. Nothing at all...
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Then let me help. There are two major reasons I prefer public voting, use it in the lit club and wish it had been used here despite any objections.
First, since I know many of the posters - some well, some only vaguely - I like to know who voted for what. Yes, people can post what they voted for; however, that information is spread across a thread and harder to find and only some people post. With a public poll, in one page you can easily look at who voted for what. This isn't important only for posters I may take a recommendation from but also the opposite - I'd like to know what posters whose tastes I don't agree with voted for.
That, however, is only small fry compared to the second reason. With anonymous voting comes the prospect that the vote can be ruined by sock puppets and no one would be the wiser. And not only sock puppets, but just any mischievous non-sock-puppet posters who want to have a laugh and vote for x knowing that no one will know they did. With public voting, it's all out in the open. If there are any suspicious votes, they are public to view so that we can make our own assumptions about how worthy that vote is. Mobileread for the most part is a better forum than most with more intelligent and mature posters but it's not immune from these sorts of things and with what will probably be a relatively small voter turn-out (it will probably not be getting thousands of votes in each poll like other anonymous online polls) and possible extremely close vote margins, each vote is important.
Surely, if one is worried about the less savoury dark aspects of the internet then there is a stronger case for public voting here than anonymous voting. Paul is attempting something on a pretty large scale for MR as it's turned out, and putting a lot of work into this and so I'm hoping it goes as well as possible. For the majority of us I think it would be more enjoyable to have public voting, and I would rather risk a small minority not voting in the poll because they don't want to reveal what they voted for rather than risk the very easy and completely undetectable tampering that could happen with anonymous voting.