Nominating standards and goals

[Charles Fiterman]

At 09:12 AM 10/6/98 -0400, you wrote:
So far the list stands at.

Honesty
Proven fraud magnets like written ballots and slow
counts are excluded.
Secrecy
You vote in secret. Your community votes in secret.
Simplicity
Its easy to understand the system. Half the voters
are below median I.Q. and 10% are in the bottom tenth.
You can't exclude them.
Openness
Easy access to the system.
Convenience
In and out quickly.
Pervasiveness
Lots of elective offices.
Decisiveness
The system returns an answer it doesn't demand a run off
or another election.
Participation
People are encourged to vote by some mechanism but not at
gun point.
Accuracy
Votes can be balanced several ways.
The most unpopular candidates lose
Being hated is more bad than being loved is good. e.g. if
some stand will make 5% of the people hate you and 5% love
you it should be a mistake to take that stand.
The most acceptable candidates win
The people with the broadest acceptance win even if they
aren't the most loved. They do after all have to run things.
People aren't punished with loss of power for voting the way they feel.
People who vote dishonestly feel badly about themselves
and often stop voting alltogether.
You can't hurt a candidate by having someone with stands near to theirs enter the election.

The system should avoid gross paradoxes as they cause loss of faith in the system.

Unknown candidates lose.
There should be a way to distinguish between candidates who have a
consensus, and those who are simply in the middle because the most
popular candidates are also the most hated.

No advantage to stating insinsere hatred.
If "most hated" candidates are to be excluded, there should be a way
to distinguish truly hated candidates from those who are ranked last
merely because they compete with the voter's favorite -- in other words,
there should be no advantage to insincerely ranking a competitor last.

We are nominating only goals not methods.





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