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What happens during ACE scrutineering periods:
Essentially S gets a list of all voters, then enter them into Special:Contribs to check if they are qualified to vote. If they are blocked for whatever reason, also compare the blocking date and voting date, and check the reason (to see if it's sock). We also compare the nonpublic information available in the interface to see if there's a match. If you vote for more than once, your earlier vote is usually struck to make sure it is not included in the final tally. This has to happen for more than 2000 accounts while doing our own work on other wikis, stewards work, our real life duties, and other unexpected stuff (new LTA popped up, emergency CUOS request, etc etc), and since we are not regulars @ enwiki, this will take quite a time, usually around two weeks to three.
If a sock is found within scrutineering interface, it is usually (read: almost always) referred to local CUs and we have to wait for local CU's verdict before we can carry on. We don't know much about the local socks and their behavior, enwiki CUs do.
After we are done, WMF has to decrypt the actual vote data.[1][2] Then they calculate the result, we also calculate the result and post it.
When the result is live, we are supposed to download the election records data (also known as dump), install that dump on local system, and verify WMF tally is same as what we get on our local screen. Then we sign it.
That's how I did in ACE2018. Your mileage may vary.
References edit
- ^ Usually only happens on business day.
- ^ your vote data is encrypted, and stays encrypted until the scrutineering is complete. In real world election equivalent, this means the ballot box is locked up, until WMF unlocks it. Nobody (including scrutineers or WMF officers) can make any "preliminary results" or "projection" until scrutineers declare that their job is done.