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Comment by nknighthb | Hacker News Reader

There is only one correct response: "We thank the researchers who pointed out our mistakes, and apologize to all voters for our failure to adequately secure a vital system.".

The only correct response now, on the other hand, is the immediate firing of this "CIO", who clearly does not have the mentality necessary to be a CIO or a public servant.

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They should also thank the researchers for not making 66,000 votes count towards something ridiculous, because unless I thought they would freak out about my way of proving a point, I would probably have did that when I told them how to secure their thing.

Then again, thanks to the wonders of the group voting ticket, the bar for getting a clearly ridiculous result is pretty high:

"In the New South Wales Legislative Council election of 1999, the Outdoor Recreation Party's Malcolm Jones was elected with a primary vote of 0.19%, or 0.042 of a quota."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_voting_ticket

This kind of result is perfectly valid. If candidates A and B are polarising, and candidate C is a compromise candidate, and you have a preferential voting system, then it makes sense that many people would put A or B first, and C second, producing a victory for C despite almost zero of the primary vote.

Of course, realistically, what probably happened in this case was more to do with party preferences and backroom deals, because you can give the voters an awesome voting system but then they'll just turn around and ask someone else to tell them what preferences to give anyway...

By ridiculous, I mean "steve the armadillo" just got elected. Or something of that sort.

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