Allow a poll to be public but don't show who votes for what

For transparency and fraud protection, the community I am part of always creates public votes. This means that everybody can see who voted for what. This situation is not always desirable, but anonymous votes are also not preferred due to possible fraud.

Is it possible (if no, see this as a feature request) to only list all the usernames who participated in the vote but not who voted for what? This makes it still transparent in the sense that we can see if people create multiple accounts just for voting but while respecting people their right to vote anonymously.

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I wholehartedly agree. Current options are:

  • anonymous voting, where it is unknown even who voted (much less what they voted). Problem is that is subject to “vote stuffing” (e.g. creating fake accounts to tilt the vote outcome) which is likely to succeed as it is completely hidden from everybody’s view.
  • full public voting, with both voters and content of their votes revealed. While it solves “vote stuffing” problem above by exposing it, it introduces a new problem: that in many cases (like e.g. voting for moderators) it will produce highly skewed results, due to many people not wanting to publicly show their lack of trust in someone’s abilities (as that would erode their relationship), but they still think they are not a good fit for a job. So they would either not vote, or even vote contrary to their beliefs to avoid friction. Or similar cases, by voting to remove someone, where knowing who was against them could lead to retaliation attacks (in that and other channels) etc.

So, a third vote option is needed: to show only who voted, but NOT what their vote was, which would work best in such cases. Please consider adding support for it.

see e.g. Moderator selection criteria - #79 by Cartographer10 - This Site Feedback - OpenStreetMap Community Forum for related OpenStreetMap discourse thread and more context.

3 Likes