4 ms·
As 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)).
by JoachimSchipper 16y ago
As 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]
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- 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.
- DRMacIver 16y agoHow do those who currently get 40% of the vote and 10% of the seats feel? I'm guessing pretty cheated.
- sorbus 16y agoReplacing a broken system with an even more broken system is not an improvement.
- DRMacIver 16y agoI agree completely, but you've not argued convincingly for this one being a more broken system. The current one is guaranteed unfair, this one is expected-fair even if the unfairness may be geographically concentrated.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- perlgeek 16y agoIt seems we've argued over different things. I picked up the "perfect" from the headline and came up with a counter-example. Comparing it with an obviously broken system doesn't make it any more perfect. If you're looking for possible alternatives, I find Germany's model not too bad: two votes, one for per-district representatives and one for parties which is evaluated proportionally. Not perfect, but works out in practise. I'd like one mode change though: instead of giving one vote per list, I'd like to allocate an arbitrary number of votes per list, but you can give at most one vote per candidate or party. That way you can vote for blocks of parties/candidates, or even vote against somebody by voting for everybody execpt that one party/candidate. This would remove a lot of tactical debate if you're vasting your vote on candidates/parties who don't have huge chances for success.
- JoachimSchipper 16y agoCan you explain why that wouldn't lead to the introduction of parties like Tories2, Tories3, ..., Tories100? One could allocate 1/#votes "points" to each party voted for, but that gets you back to strategic voting.
- leot 16y agoEvery voter only gets one vote. Extra parties would change nothing.
- JoachimSchipper 16y agoGood point. You can solve this issue by electing more than one representative from ordered (per-party) lists: the first picked vote for Labour elects Labour#1, the second Labour#2, etc. Labour#4 could still be lucky or unlucky, but Labour#1 will almost certainly be picked (assuming e.g. 50% of the vote for Labour, with probability 1 - 2^-10 = 1023/1024.) However, I'm not sure how much of a (perceived) advantage over proportional representation this gives you.
- lsd5you 16y agoI'm not sure that this is enough as it is stated here and in the original comment. There may be a technical solution that allows it to be done in one go, but an alternative would be to do the count, have a window in which the count can be challenged and then do the draw in a pseudo random deterministic way with seeds coming from a number of sources (e.g. different candidates).
- DRMacIver 16y agoYou know, this is a much better way of doing it. I feel like for a complete idiot for not spotting that up front.