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Random numbers in election systems are an absolute no-go. Suppose that a court rules that one district must be re-counted, and based on the result there will b
by perlgeek 16y ago
Random numbers in election systems are an absolute no-go.
Suppose that a court rules that one district must be re-counted, and based on the result there will be a new, random candidate.
This creates incentives for going after re-countings if your political opponent has won the lottery, not because the result will be much different, but simply because you get a second chance in the lottery.
It boils down to the thought that repeatability is import for fairness. Somebody claims that your DNA is identical to the one collected from the crime scene? You can make a second test and verify the first one. You think you have been treated unfair in court? You can repeated the trial at a higher court. All the doping tests in sports are verified by repetition.
The list is nearly endless. Even if a random experiment does treat you fair, you can't known.
The second point is that randomness only creates the appearance of fairness on the large scale, single individual still get treated unfair.
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- BoppreH 16y agoElectronic voting?
- joe_the_user 16y agoObviously there couldn't be recounts but since there wouldn't be "outlier" elections (where someone would win by an unusual five votes), that wouldn't matter as much. (Of course, every election could be an outlier so this might not make it pleasing) The result clearly wouldn't be fair in our normal sense of fairness and that would indeed be a huge roadblock. The only appeal would come if a given system looks both unfair, unprincipled and corrupt. Then "just unfair" might be better.
- dabeeeenster 16y agoHow can you have a recount of a single vote?
- JoachimSchipper 16y agoImagine that some civil servants hates, for instance, the BNP. If the proposed system is implemented carelessly, (s)he may elect to "lose" the randomly-chosen vote that would otherwise put a BNP politician in power, and hope that the "next" vote will be for a party more to his/her liking. "Recounts" are nonsense, but I can imagine that an audit might help against the above scenario.
- dabeeeenster 16y agoJust make the drawing out of the single vote a public event.
- DRMacIver 16y agoI sketched a process for how this could work in a blog comment: http://www.drmaciver.com/2011/04/a-perfect-voting-system/comment-page-1/#comment-1585 http://www.drmaciver.com/2011/04/a-perfect-voting-system/com...
- JoachimSchipper 16y agoAs stated elsewhere in the comments, you can make a number of people (e.g. anyone who asks[1]) commit to some number[2] (e.g. by giving out SHA1(their_number)). Then calculate a random number from that (conceptually, addition modulo number of voters; actual implementation left as an exercise to the reader). If the vote with that number was actually cast, that is the vote that is actually used. If not, try the next one until one actually was cast. Pretty repeatable, and recounting is easier. [1] Note that "all candidates" may not be sufficient, since it allows the candidates to collectively choose the outcome by picking their numbers such that one of their own/friends' ballots is chosen. This could be used to elect a popular Labour politician in a remote district where only the major two parties are running, in exchange for electing two unknown Tories. [2] If you're not into crypto, put tickets containing every possible ballot number in a big barrel. Have a trusted/blindfolded guy pick tickets until he finds one that corresponds to a vote that was actually cast. There are lots of solutions, of varying degrees of cleverness. [EDITs: added two footnotes]
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- perlgeek 16y agoThis does account for the repeatability, but the point still remains that it treats individuals unfair, and that the unfairness only averages out over many districts. How would you feel if you got 80% of the votes in your district, but the lottery (even if repeatable) picked your opponent? How would those feel who gave you your vote? I'd certainly felt cheated.
- arethuza 16y agoThose of us who live in safe seats where we don't support the locally dominant party are arguably already being treated unfairly. It wouldn't be so bad if there weren't quite so many safe seats - but given that 382 out of 650 seats fall into this category I think something should change. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_seat#United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_seat#United_Kingdom
- DRMacIver 16y agoIt's worth noting that this solution utterly blows the safe seats problem out of the water. This is probably my favourite feature of it.
- deadbadger 16y agoA related effect, of course, is that it becomes practically impossible for politicians to plan for any sort of career, or parties to make personnel plans with more than a single-parliament horizon. Even a candidate with a hefty 60% support can expect only a single term at more than even odds. Not only would this rob the legislature of experience, it would also mean politicians towards the end of each term would be focused on securing their next job, rather than performing their current one.
- arethuza 16y agoBetter that than the current career plan for a politician: - Oxford PPE - Policy researcher - Safe seat - Minister - Non-exec chairman/director
- deadbadger 16y agoWell, possibly - but the point is that while ubiquitous safe seats are obviously detrimental, so is their elimination at all costs. The problem with safe seats isn't that popular politicians are consistently elected; it's that minority voices in those constituencies are marginalised. You can certainly address the latter by preventing the former, but it's a far from ideal way of doing so. (Edited for ghastly sentence construction, sorry)
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- yummyfajitas 16y agoThis creates incentives for going after re-countings if your political opponent has won the lottery, not because the result will be much different, but simply because you get a second chance in the lottery. For a perfect example of this, see the presidential election in 2000. The vote totals in Florida were within the margin of error, making the election a coin flip with the pretense of counting [1]. Politicians behaved exactly as you describe. [1] At the time I was in college, and had just learned stats. I advocated just flipping a coin in full view on TV and moving on. Everyone thought I was crazy.
- nkurz 16y agoWhile appealingly efficient, I don't think this is sound practice. "In the margin of error" does not mean that it's a 50/50 tossup. But you're usually pretty accurate, so what am I missing?
- yummyfajitas 16y agoA coin flip is simple, decisive, and immune to political machinations. A proper probability estimate is not. Further, if you truly believe in democracy, then a candidate with 49.9999% of the vote is probably nearly as good as one with 50.0001%, right? So the cost of an error is low as well.
- nkurz 16y agoOK, that seems reasonable as long as one is certain that it's 49.9999% rather than a loose standard of "pretty close". What you wouldn't want is to make possible for the clear loser in a 48% - 52% race to demand a coin toss. Or maybe you do: by the precepts of your argument, maybe that would be fine. I'm uneasy with the random approach suggested by the article for fear that a truly crazy candidate might win the lottery, but I'd be good with having all the candidates above some large baseline (say, 30% of the vote) get a proportional shot at the win. I think I'd probably want it to be proportional to the counted share even if there is a margin of error, though.
- 16y ago
- mike-cardwell 16y agoJust make it so recounts can only be done before the final random pick.
- vrotaru 16y agoNot that I endorse anything but a two-step procedure can enforce a kind of repeatibility. * Step 1. A thousand votes are selected randomly. And counted and the counts are made public * Step 2. The winner vote is selected at random in public procedure. Now step 1 can be repeated at a contestant request, but if the counts are roughly the same, step 2 doesn't happen. Actually if the counts are too different, a revote may be in order
- evgenit 16y agoHere's a way to avoid it: Change the process. Do counting, re-counting, appeals, etc. first, until a final decision as to the correct count and valid votes is made (all appeals exhausted or no longer possible due to time elapsed). We have final decisions on all these matters in current systems. This way, you will "know" that the election was fair, since this depends on the ballots, not the candidate. Then do the random step. The drawback is that there may be a month or two between casting votes and having the results, but I don't see why this is a big deal.