Making the ballots secret

[MJ Ray]

While trying to find the definition of the multi-winner SPI method for
Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, I spotted this little gem in Article Five of
http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/by-laws which relates to comments I
made elsewhere:

  "Ballots concerning election or removal of officers shall be secret
   ballots."

At present, ballots are (correctly IMO) described as confidential, not
secret, on the voting pages like
https://members.spi-inc.org/vote/election.php?ref=6

One way they are not secret is that votes seem to be stored on that
server indefinitely.  Any webmaster of members.spi-inc could see all
of our past votes back to at least 2004, right?

I don't want to change the by-laws, so can the election system be
changed to offer a secret ballot instead of a confidential one?

One possibility is to require the secret cookie to change one's vote.
That does mean if the secret cookie is lost after voting, a vote can't
be changed (has-voted would need to be tracked seperately).  Also, I
don't know whether recent developments in MD5 hash collisions make
this unsafe.  Comments?

Any other ways to fix this?

Thanks,
-- 
MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
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