Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2012/Coordination/Instructions for scrutineers

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

The election commissioners—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.
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.

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 stuff, which is accessible via Special:SecurePoll/list/259. 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/259), along with the option of editing them.

SecurePoll admins can strike votes by clicking on the "Strike" button displayed at Special:SecurePoll/list/259. 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 commissioner do so.

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 cannonical requirements are given on the election frontpage, but essentially boil down to:

The user must have an account which has accumulated more than 150 mainspace edits by 1 November 2012. This requirement is only partially enforced by the SecurePoll software: scrutineers can assume that all voters have more than 150 edits in total, but the date cutoff and namespace restriction is not checked automatically and should be verified manually. Specifically, SecurePoll will let a user with 20 mainspace edits and 130 projectspace edits vote, even though the user does not have 150 mainspace edits. Voters failing the mainspace edits threshold should have their votes manually struck.
Has registered an account before 28 October 2012. This is a new requirement from the 2012 ACE RFC.
The user must not be blocked at the time they cast their vote. This requirement disenfranchises banned users, and anyone voting from a sock where the main account is blocked 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 from a staff or otherwise permitted alternate account, the system will not remove the earlier ballot, if this is identified, the earlier or staff 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 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:ACE2012 if desired; the decision of the scrutineers is final in all cases.

Reporting

Once the scrutineers are satisfied that all votes remaining in the ballot are valid, they should tally the results using Special:SecurePoll/tally/259; complete the results table at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2012#Results, 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.