On Sep 24, 2008, at 12:07 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
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 common approach, I think, is to sequentially number the ballots during the initial count so that the count is repeatable.
It's worth noting that many (most?) STV counting methods are sensitive to ballot order to some extent. Meek/Warren is not, which is one of the attractions of those methods.
It's also worth noting that, for all practical purposes, most if not all voting methods have a random element (or at least a means outside the actual counting rules) for breaking ties, and this must be taking into account during recounts.
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