Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2011/Coordination/Instructions for scrutineers

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Two groups of editors are made SecurePoll admins for the duration of the election: "election administrators" and "scrutineers":

The election admins — enwiki functionaries who are unconnected to any of the candidates in the election. Before the start of voting, they are responsible for preparing the ballot form with appropriate candidate links and instructions; during and after the voting period they act as a liaison between the scrutineers and the enwiki community. For 2011, they are Happy-melon, Tznkai, and Skomorokh.
The scrutineers — Stewards who have low activity on enwiki; they are responsible for enforcing and arbitrating on the validity of individual votes, and certifying the results of the election. For 2011, they are Bencmq, Trijnstel and Vituzzu.

Technical background

SecurePoll adminship is restricted to a single election, and enables access to CheckUser-like data on each vote cast, and to other interfaces within the election. Because of this access to data covered by the WMF nonpublic data policy, all SecurePoll admins must be identified to the Foundation.

SecurePoll admins have access to the behind-the-scenes technical information of the voting interface, which is accessible via Special:SecurePoll/list/240. This is an enhanced version of the public log, which can be viewed for comparison purposes by going to the same location while logged out. It also gives access to the [Translate] tab, which shows the raw election messages displayed on the voting page (Special:SecurePoll/vote/240), along with the option of editing them. SecurePoll admins do not have access to individual ballots, that is, how voters voted on the candidates.

SecurePoll admins can strike votes by clicking on the "Strike" button displayed at Special:SecurePoll/list/240. JavaScript needs to be enabled to see this, because it is a toggle rather than a text message. Clicking on "Strike" changes the icon to "Unstrike", deletes the editor's votes, and adds a note to the associated Vote Log (accessible via the details button in the adjacent column). While all strikes are logged privately, the fact that a vote has been struck is publicly visible in the vote log; the record of who struck a vote is not public. Only scrutineers should ever strike votes; under no circumstances should an election admin do so.

Timeline

Preparations: Until the end of voting, scrutineers can familiarise themselves with the election interface and the voter log and investigate any suspicious activity.
Start of tasks: Voting ends on Saturday 23:59, 10 December. From this point on, scrutineering begins – scrutineers should be the only editors active with the SecurePoll system.
End of tasks: Up to a week is allocated for scrutineering tasks; it is hoped that the tally can be compiled and the results announced and certified by 17 December.

Scrutineers' role

The primary role of scrutineers is to ensure that no abuse or technical error has occurred in the background of the election — for example, the striking of candidate votes or the changing of election messages to benefit or disadvantage a particular candidate (for instance, by swapping the names of two candidates partway through the ballot), by other SecurePoll admins. The scrutineers should verify that the tally has been counted correctly, by checking that the total number of votes cast (support + oppose + neutral) is the same for each candidate and agrees with the total number of votes cast.

The secondary role of the scrutineers is to enforce the suffrage criteria established by the enwiki community for voters. The canonical requirements are given here, but essentially boil down to:

The user must have an account which has accumulated more than 150 mainspace edits by 1 November 2011. This requirement is enforced by the SecurePoll software and scrutineers can assume that it has been met by all voters, unless there is evidence to the contrary.
The user must not be evading a local block at the time they cast their vote. The SecurePoll software automatically prevents an account from voting if it is currently blocked. This requirement disenfranchises banned users, and anyone using an alternate account to try to evade a block on main account at the time of voting.
No user may vote more than once. This disenfranchises alternate accounts, sockfarms, and accidental double-counting. Scrutineers should note in particular that if a user votes once from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:SecurePoll/vote/240 and then again from http://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Special:SecurePoll/vote/240, the SecurePoll software will not invalidate the old ballot, and the user will have accidentally voted twice (this happened, and went undetected until too late, in the 2009 elections); if this is identified, the earlier vote should be manually struck.

Scrutineers are permitted to use CheckUser tools on enwiki to assist them in identifying votes which do not meet the criteria above. There are a number of enwiki CheckUsers (MuZemike, Alison, Tiptoety, and Frank) who are able to share their experience of the more well-known enwiki sockpuppeteers, or to undertake CheckUser activities at the scrutineers' request.

Because the SecurePoll interface provides aggregate CheckUser data for all votes, the unfocused use of that data is against enwiki policy against CheckUser fishing. While scrutineers can and should make full use of the data within the confines of the election, they should not act on identified account abuse except to strike ineligible votes. They should pass on any appropriate data to the enwiki CheckUsers listed above, who will follow the appropriate enwiki policies and procedures for identifying and sanctioning editors, as necessary.

A bot maintains a wiki page with an alphabetical list of voters, which members of the enwiki community monitor and may comment on to identify suspicious voters. The total number of voters here is a useful cross-reference to identify double-counts as described above. Scrutineers are welcome to ask for input from the community or from election officials at WT:ACE2011 if desired; the decision of the scrutineers is final in all cases.

Striking invalid votes

Should the scrutineers decide that a given vote is in violation of the suffrage criteria outlined above, the following steps should be taken:

Find the vote in question in the SecurePoll log at Special:SecurePoll/list/240, and click the "Strike" button.
Make a note in the on-wiki voter log at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2011/Log, briefly describing why the vote was stricken. This description should be clear enough as to whether the strike was as a result of suspected misbehaviour by the voter, or a technical issue. The description should take care not to reveal any non-public information. Some appropriate descriptions might be "apparent block/ban evasion", "apparent double voting", and "software error".

If in doubt as to the suffrage criteria, scrutineers should contact the election admins. If in doubt about suspicious voter behaviour, scrutineers should consult local CheckUsers.

Final checks and reporting

Once the scrutineers are satisfied that all votes remaining in the ballot are valid, they should check that the SecurePoll vote log and on-wiki voter log concur on the number of valid, invalid and total votes. They should then tally the results (i.e. the votes received by each candidate) using Special:SecurePoll/tally/240. Until the results are announced publicly, scrutineers should not reveal to any non-scrutineer any information as to candidates' standings, except in extraordinary circumstances and even then only with the explicit authorisation of two or more of the election administrators.

Once the final checks are complete and results have been tallied to scrutineers' satisfaction, scrutineers should complete the public results table at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2011#Results (see last year's table for guidance), and each scrutineer should sign below to certify them. As a formality, they should post a notification to User talk:Jimbo Wales to inform him that the results are available.