On 8/25/07, Jobst Heitzig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > So there are two main devices for solving the challenge: vote trading > > and randomness. > > There is a third one! One of the oldest voting methods that have been > studied can also solve it at least in part. I wonder who will first see what > I mean :-) >
I tend to be in agreement with Forest that vote trading and randomness are the only solutions. I have no clue what you are thinking of, but I suspect when I hear it I'm going to think its in the range of what I'd consider "cheating". :) Randomness is a weird one....it is great that it can get people to vote honestly, but then it can just pick the "wrong" one. Vote trading generally means the ballots can't be secret, so elections would be inherently corruptible by anyone with money. Not good. And I wouldn't think it would be ok given your problem description, which is for a single election. But....I suppose if we were able to talk about mulitple elections, where a voter can earn "credit" for compromising which can be spent in later elections, you could build that into the system in a way that doesn't require losing the secretness, and would solve this problem nicely. Obviously range voting would solve this problem perfectly, if only humans were eusocial animals -- most of us being sterile worker-people, whose only Darwinian interest was the good of the collective. Sadly, we're not, so range voting is (in my opinion) best left to bees and the like. ( http://rangevoting.org/ApisMellifera.html)
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