On 10/1/06, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > At 08:49 PM 10/1/2006, Ka-Ping Yee wrote: > >I'm talking about "marking the ballot" by filling in bubbles, not > >by scribbling on it. There may be enough down-ballot contests in > >many elections (at least in the U. S.) that the vote-buyer could > >instruct a voter to create a distinct pattern of filled bubbles in > >down-ballot contests. > > (1) complex. people who sell their votes are ... not the brightest > bulbs in the pack. After all, the vote buyers obviously believe that > the votes are worth more than they are paying! (enough more to be > worth the legal risk). Vote-buying may shift close elections; but, > frankly, I think it is rare. Very rare. Except of course, for the > most blatant vote-buying of all: "Vote for me, I'll cut your taxes." > or the alternate: "Vote for me, I'll increase social benefits." Or, > of course, both at the same time, which seems to be what most > politicians aim at. > > (2) not all that easy. Yes, a vote-buyer could design some > distinctive pattern, or even a few of them. But this would allow the > buyer to only validate a few votes. Presumably the buyer is buying > more than a few votes. So how does the buyer know which votes came > from the seller? Designing a pattern that can be varied sufficiently > to identify a large number of voters would take a *lot* of > contests.... And, of course, unless the vote-buyer were only > interested in a single contest, all that variation would have > undesired results.
This can be alleviated by putting different contests on different ballots. There is still the possibility of mischief if there are many candidates in a contest. With Range Voting, each _candidate_ can be put on a separate ballot. Range Voting ballots can be made simpler (and make it more difficult for voters to identify their ballots) by reducing the number of rating-choices available. For example, is anyone going to be upset that they can't give some candidate a 53? The choices 0, 10, ...90, 99 or 100 should be sufficient, with I think one exception: I would like to vote max-1 for second choice and lesser-evil candidates. (It's symbolic, and also can be used for distinguishing non-favorites from favorites for allocating public campaign funds.) Of course, there is the whole OTHER problem of mail-in ballots - a much bigger problem from the standpoint of vote buying/coersion, as well as ballots for certain precincts "accidentally" getting delayed or lost in the mail. Cheers, - Jan ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
