On Sat, Nov 01, 2003 at 10:44:30PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > My thesis, as I unfortunately and apparently failed to make clear in the > original post, is that, given that we view as desirable the practice of > ranking one's ballot preferences sincerely, that there is a procedural > mechanism for subverting that desirable property.
As I understand it, these mechanisms only work reliably when the people doing the subverting have comprehensive information about who is voting for what, and when the people being subverted have little or no access to this kind of information. And, even there, it's a matter of taking advantage of a close vote -- even with complete omniscience, if there's a clear enough of a majority, there's no way to manipulate the voting system to hide that majority. However, in what I remember from an earlier post, you seemed to be talking about a significant group of participants dominating the vote against a much larger group of non-participants. But voting systems can't be immune to that. But neither of these correspond to what it seems like you're talking about. > I raise that only for the sake of being thorough, though. That's not a > practical fear, as long before an infinite number of votes are held ( :) > ), the Project would rebel against it in some way. Probably by amending > the Constitution or abandoning the SRD temporarily or permanently while > the system is reformed. Perhaps you could be a bit more thorough and post the message id of the message which presents the mechanism fully? [Or just restate the mechanism, in complete detail?] > I hope the above helps. I'm afraid not. Maybe I missed a post. Thanks, -- Raul
