It would change the long-term outcome.

If you wanted voting secrecy but were unhappy with the proposed implementations of option 1 and 2, you'd vote 4 > 3, leaving room for future alternative proposals.

If you were against any form of voting secrecy, you'd vote 3 > 4, shutting the door on future proposals.

Well, the claim here is that Option 3 and Option 4 are the same in essence so if they had been reflected on the ballot as a single option, then that option would have won out over Option 2, changing the outcome.

Assuming I understand this anyway. The way the votes are reflected is confusing to me

But it's deceptive and political to complain 3 and 4 are too similar but then not also state that 1 and 2 were too similar. 2 also lost votes to 1 being similar.

Also 3 and 4 were not similar. 3 would have changed the constitution to require public voting, 4 would simply do nothing and leave the issue an unanswered question.

This wasn't the general public. This was a few hundred people who carefully follow and care about the Debian project. I'm highly skeptical anyone who voted was "confused".

They use ranked choice voting so this shouldn't matter, as far as I understand RCV eliminates the lowest option one-by-one, passing the votes to the next option on each ballot as if the eliminated option never existed.

The discussion seems to be about ballots with 3 > 2 > 4, and when 3 was eliminated the votes went to 2, allowing it to pass. That's a bit strange because you'd expect a ballot to always have 3 next to 4 since they are so similar.

Debian's vote system does not use instant runoff voting (which is eliminating the lowest options one by one). Instead, it uses Condorcet voting, which picks the options defeating all the others in pairwise competition. (If no such option exists, it gets more complicated. Also, the NOTA option is special and is used to check majority or supermajority requirements before the actual Condorcet process starts.)

Thank you. This is the first comment that clearly explained the issue.

3 > 2 > 4 is very clear in that it means "I would most prefer to reaffirm public voting, but I do support secret voting so long as verification is allowed. I oppose secret voting without verification.". It's a meaningful vote. Why are people disagreeing about this?

Because public voting is the status quo, so 3 & 4 are identical in what they would (not) change in the procedures. 3 is just an additional statement of support. If you support public voting (3) you also support 4 over 1/2.

Not necessarily. As I understand it, 4 (NOTA) is special, because in a vote to change the constitution of Debian, you need 3 times more votes for a change than NOTA votes. Thus 3 > 2 > 4 would mean "I prefer 3, but if the majority supports 2 I will side with them instead of against them". In this case, I can imagine people thinking "I personally think public voting is fine, but if a lot of people think we should have secret votes, I have no problem with changing the constitution to allow those."

Public voting is not status quo outside of Debian. In the real world the only places that have public voting are places that are controlled by dictators.

It’s very common for boards and other organizational entities to use public voting. I’d argue that it’s a feature of legislative processes.

I do think ranked choice voting is dumb and adds low value and high complexity. This thread with hundreds of comments affirms that notion.

Most (all?) US legislatures don't have private voting and are not controlled by dictators; not sure about other countries. Voice voting does happen in some contexts and doesn't leave a record of who voted how, but most contested votes are recorded.

To me, Debian Developer feels more like a position of responsibility and representation than a member of the public. But I'm not one, and I don't know what the expectations are.

As well as many, many organizations that aren’t governments.