On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 7:19 AM, Juho Laatu <[email protected]> wrote: > 4) To hide the individual votes for > privacy and security reasons. Published > ranked votes open up some doors for vote > buying and coercion. It is quite easy to > generate unique votes when the number of > candidates increases. (Also individual > ballots are interesting from point 1, 2 > and 3 point of view, but dangerous.)
One option here would be to restrict the number of rankings. If the number of voters is higher than Candidates ^ Rankings, then most possible configurations are likely to receive at least 1 'hit'. Another option would be to do it based on the ballot data. For example 1) Start with 1 "pile" of all the ballots 2) Split all piles into sub-piles based on highest ranked difference 3) For each group of sub-piles (from same pile), combine the smallest sub-piles together until the smallest has at least N N (say 10) ballots, 4) Declare all sub-piles as piles and return to 2), unless no change was made in 3) So, if the ballots were 30) A>B>C 20) C>A>D 13) C>B>D 1) A>B>C>X>Y>Z The process would be: Pass 1 Pile A> 30) A>B>C 1) A>B>C>X>Y>Z Pile C> 20) C>A>D 13) C>B>D Pass 2: Pile A>B 30) A>B>C 1) A>B>C>X>Y>Z Pile C>A 20) C>A>D Pile C>B 13) C>B>D Pass 3: Pile A>B>C 30) A>B>C 1) A>B>C>X>Y>Z Pile C>A>D 20) C>A>D Pile C>B>D 13) C>B>D Pass 3: Sub-Pile A>B>C 30) A>B>C Sub-Pile A>B>C>X 1) A>B>C>X>Y>Z Pile C>A>D 20) C>A>D Pile C>B>D 13) C>B>D Sub-pile A>B>C>X hasn't enough ballots, so is combined with the next lowest sub-pile, A>B>C Pile A>B>C 30) A>B>C 1) A>B>C>X>Y>Z Pile C>A>D 20) C>A>D Pile C>B>D 13) C>B>D No change has occured, so end. The results would be declared as 31) A>B>C 20) C>A>D 13) C>B>D This gives a loss of accuracy, but hopefully not to much. Also, it doesn't work if you are providing ballot images. > In summary, maybe raw digitized ballots > are good enough in most cases for the > computers, but humans may need more > compact information (not necessarily > summable) for various reasons. The theory was that the ballots would be published and non-profit/bored programmers could convert them into rankings. The government would publish a block of ballots and their associated official rankings. If there was errors, it would be possible for them to provide a series of links to offical ballot/rankings pairs which clearly don't match what is actually on the image. > The > privacy point may set requirements on > what to publish and what not (some > countries are already now quite strict > on this). You could have a rule that a ballot is only valid if it doesn't have marks. Also, ballots images could have parts of the image censored, to cover up those marks. Ofc, the actual boxes where the person indicates the rankings would have to be shown. This somewhat goes against the principle of multiple independent groups imaging the ballots for comparison to the official list. In principle, you could require that they mask off all parts of the image other than the ranking boxes and the ballot ID number. I guess it depends on the lengths people would go to. In principle, you could require that the seller use a special font when filling in their ballot. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
