Ranking can violate secrecy.

[Charles Fiterman]

One of the major goals of election rules is secrecy. This means not only do you get to keep your vote secret but you have to. Someone who buys your vote can't know if they got what they paid for. To insure this we void ballots with marking on them. If you draw a flower on your ballot we void it. That flower could be a secret signature. The history of elections teaches us that it pays to be paranoid, there are real crooks out there and they aren't stupid.

Suppose we have many offices being decided in an election and for some unimportant office there are seven candidates that means there are 5,060 ways to fill out the ballot for that office in a ranked election. But there are only about 1,100 voters in a precinct and you can always separate a precincts ballots, they are warehoused for years after an election. This means someone can buy your vote and your signature on that vote is how you voted on the office with 5,060 ways to fill it out.

If you're wondering how I got this paranoid I was one of the early programmers for automated tellers, machines that hand people money. Doing that will make you very parinoid indeed. Yes Virginia there is a Mafia. I live in the Chicago area where we have Democrats stealing local votes and Republicans conducting a crude frontal assult on the entire democratic system.



Charles Fiterman Geodesic Systems
414 North Orleans Suite 410 Phone 312 832 1221 x223
Chicago IL 60610-4418 FAX 312 832 1230
http://www.geodesic.com

As the complexity of a system increases our ability to make
precise and yet significant statements about its behavior
diminishes until a threshold is reached beyond which precision
and significance or relevance become almost mutually exclusive
characteristics. -- Lofti Zadeh