On Aug 28, 2008, at 11:36 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
One more approach to semi-computerized voting. A computer displays
the personal alternatives and then prints a ballot. This solution
hides the personalized nature of the ballot and still avoids the
problem of voter voting for candidates that he/she should not vote.
One could augment the semi-computerized voting by making it print
all candidates
That could be thousands, so maybe a subset in many cases.
, but randomly order (last behind all others) the ones that are not
applicable to the districts.
I guess one would need to know the district (or the person if the
candidate lists are personal) to "decipher" the vote in the
calculation process. That information could help also the malicious
readers. Or did you mean that the random data would be part of the
vote but would be just noise since different ballots would cancel the
effect of each others.
Voter would have also have to trust that the printed ballot is what
it should be.
The technique that I proposed above would work best with bullet votes
(e.g. with open lists). Also short votes (that list only few
candidates) are quite ok (some risk if one votes for the most distant
candidates in all directions).
Then the ballots would have to be examined more closely in order to
figure out what house is its center.
That's not to say it would make it impervious to such attacks: the
random ordering might easily have "... > DistantCommunistA >
DistantRightWingerA > DistantCommunistB > ..." because the
randomizer doesn't know (and can't know) what's "reasonable".
Filling out the random-last with a Markov simulation of other
ballots would be more "reasonable", but that'd require a
postprocessing step and it might mess with the proportionality, so
I don't think that would be worth it.
However we look at it, we return to the problem that ranked ballots
can be fingerprinted. The only solution I can see for that is to
have a summable system and add the individual ballot in matrix (or
array) format instead of ballot format. But most PR methods are not
summable! Are there other ways of preventing ranked ballot
fingerprinting?
One could break a Condorcet ballot A>B>C to separate pairwise
preferences A>B, A>C and B>C (is this what you meant with the matrix
format?). If there are also many other candidates (tied at bottom)
one could use e.g. A>*, B>*, C>*, cancel B>A, cancel C>A, cancel C>B.
That information could be derived also from a more understandable (=
easier for the voter to check) set of opinion fragments A, B, C, A>B,
A>C, B>C.
IRV ballots are trickier. Raph Frank already mentioned the idea of
truncation and combination of this with candidate given preference
lists.
If you allow me I'd like to advertise trees once more. Trees (=
hierarchical open lists) can be seen as very truncated ranked votes.
Bullet vote to one candidate is inherited by his/her nearest group
and so on. When the tree is formed one can expect all common thinking
patterns to get their own branch in the tree. If there are lots of
people who are green and also somewhat right wing and also a little
bit feminist there would probably be such a branch in the tree with
few candidates to choose from.
Adding the ability to rank three of the candidates of the surrounding
small group would offer a pretty good vocabulary of typical green/
right/feminist opinions. And since the three would be from a
relatively small set (maybe 5 out of 100) the number of combinations
might still be safe (reduce the allowed number of ranked candidates
to two or one if needed).
Juho
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