On Oct 15, 2006, at 7:02 , Dave Ketchum wrote: > Note that many voters will vote the same as for Plurality, for > which a special form might be possible.
Yes, there is space for optimisation. Storing plurality style votes as they are should not be a big problem (for privacy in most cases). In situations where there are many candidates (e.g. 100) voters probably typically name only few of their top preferences. Let's say that the voter votes A>B>C. One could first break this vote in three separate votes: A, B and C. But this is not exactly the same as the original vote, so one needs to fix the preferences between A, B and C. That would lead to additional [A>B], [A>C] and [B>C] ballots (where brackets mean that these ballots refer to only one pairwise comparison). This type of vote splitting saves a lot in the number of ballots if number of candidates is low and number of candidate entries is low in each vote. Privacy is still quite good. Voters will have it more difficult to check that their vote is recorded as intended (if they are supposed to check the paper ballots). Maybe sufficient number of voters are able to make the required checks to keep the probability of error/cheating detection high. > I would DEMAND that the record being prepared for hard disk have > the ballots in true random order (sometimes those needing a random > sequence of numbers use a formula that would give the same results > tomorrow as it did today), > Thinking, without studying, could the space used for > accumulating data for records for this hard disk be such that no > data would be lost even with expectable power failures? I think all this is doable with open source but of course requires more work than ordinary software development. Some remaining threats/problems: - open source and known platform also makes it possible to develop alternative code that could be somehow smuggled in to the voting machine (and the code could delete itself / return to the original code after the election) - we may need solutions also for the case where only very few voters have voted with the machine ad we therefore need to merge those votes with some other lots of votes to guarantee privacy Juho Laatu Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
