At 03:49 PM 9/23/2008, "Raph Frank" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 5:59 PM, Kathy Dopp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
It should be OK as long as the random selection is actually reasonably random.
In theory. But Kathy Dopp is a voting security expert. They like to
be able to recount elections and, if no errors were made, get the
same results. While this can be done with pseudo-random sequences,
I'm not sure I'd trust local election officials, who often have
trouble counting plain ballots as it is, with the complexity.
The vote transfers in STV, using strictly mathematical methods, can
be done centrally. Deweighting is done with *ballots*, not with
votes, as such. I.e., if a particular ballot has been part of a block
of votes that elects a winner, it becomes deweighted accordingly. (If
the exact quota was met, the deweighting is 100%.)
Yes, it can get complicated. Usually, though, the number of winners
is not huge, and deweighting only takes place when winners are
created (and not the last one), so the number of possible
combinations isn't huge.
Asset Voting finesses the problem; I'd expect that most voters, even
if the system remained STV, would simply vote for one. (I know a lot
of people who think differently from me on this, at least at first.
But if I don't trust a candidate to properly delegate authority, I
probably shouldn't trust that candidate in the office, for they are
going to make lots of decisions in office that I can't specify in
advance, including many which delegate authority. Asset Voting would
radically change the way we think about elections; current methods
require us to make compromises with our trust, to choose to trust
those whom we already perceive as being trusted by others. Asset
Voting pokes strategic voting in the eye. Yet ... where is the chorus
of support? When it comes to Range Voting and other methods, the
"bad" strategic voting problems are trotted out ... but if we could
eliminate it, make it essentially stupid and useless, nope, too radical.
What if we could *trust* those we elect? The only way to get there is
to vote only for people we trust! And current methods make this
politically suicidal, they waste such fully-sincere votes, except rarely.
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