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SE creates rather transparent elections, including statistics such as

2,159 voters were eligible, 565 visited the site during the election, 386 visited the election page, and 212 voted

This information is visible for everybody after the election has taken place. During the voting period, it is visible for moderators on the site, but hidden from others.

As a moderator, I am accustomed to discussing a lot of things about the site with the chat regulars. I started discussing such statistics of the running election in chat (in the presence of the current candidates), and only realized that they do not have access to it after they told me so.

My feature request is that there should be some kind of warning telling moderators that this information is supposed to be kept private until the voting period is over. This will prevent inadverent reveals.

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Are you sure this information is private? I don't actually know, but there there's precedence for having additional views available as an advanced privilege (like viewing the split between up-votes and down-votes). That wouldn't make sharing this information in any way problematic.

Personally, I don't see a down-side to making this information generally available to everyone if it's already being generated, but that's not my call nor my specialty.

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    We've been assuming it's private because only mods see it.
    – Catija
    Feb 20, 2018 at 0:07
  • I saw the information on the current Cooking election, but other users in the chat room (including a 30 K user) didn't, so we thought there has to be a reason for it to be kept mod only. Making it public also sounds acceptable.
    – rumtscho
    Feb 20, 2018 at 0:14
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    @rumtscho I forget exactly, but I believe the information was added so CMs could see how many people have been participating while it's in-progress, and it was made a simple "has diamond" check. The downside of showing it to all users is that the wording of the message makes it sound like the election ended (it uses past tense always), plus the number "visited during the election" is always 0 until the election phase starts, which can be confusing. It's not sensitive information, just a lazily-implemented "always shown for some people anyways" box that wouldn't be super helpful to everyone.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Feb 20, 2018 at 2:17

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