[Catlady]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

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.

So you want public voting because it makes it easier for you. This reminds me of an argument I had on the phone with a pollster doing marketing research on some product--I didn't want to answer certain demographic questions and she kept saying, But it's just used to help market the product, and I kept saying, And exactly why should I want to help the company market the product?

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.

I've been told it's rather silly to worry about an opinion poll like this as an invasion of privacy; I would suggest it's even sillier to think these polls are important enough for someone to tamper with. What exactly would be the point? Is there some prize for having nominated the books that get the most votes?

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.

It's not a matter of worrying, per se, as much as a reluctance to provide information for no legitimate reason. Go to a store, the cashier asks for your phone number. Websites ask for e-mail addresses, sometimes before you can even browse. Kobo wants your age when you enter a trivia contest. Smartphone apps want access to your contact lists.

We shouldn't have to explain why we want to keep personal information private, whatever it is. The burden should be on the other side--why do you want to know?