Raph Frank wrote:
On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 2:00 AM, Stéphane Rouillon
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hello Juho,

using age, gender or other virtual dimension to build virtual districts
replaces geographic antagonism by generation antagonism.
The idea is to get equivalent sample that are not opposed by intrinsec
construction.

A simple option would be to convert the date of birth into a number,
but have the year the the least significant part..

16-04-82 would become 160,482

The public could then be sorted by those numbers.  In effect, you are
splitting people by the day of the month they are born on, if there is
a tie, you use month and only use year at the end.

This would give a mix of ages, genders and any other measure in each district.

It is pretty much equivalent to just randomly distributing the voters
between the districts, but unlike a random system, it is harder to
corrupt.

It could have a similar result to having alphabetic ranked ballots, only with birthdays instead of last names. The selection would be biased in the direction of those that are born close to January. It may not matter, but it would appear unfair.

If you have computers, you could just sort by SHA512(name concatenated with birthdate concatenated with the year of the election). That's probably overkill (since even if you could break SHA-512, which would be a feat by itself, you'd have to convince the favored member to change his name to something suitable), but then there'd be a sufficient margin of safety. Randomness without randomness.
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