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Why people voted for someone is different from why the winner was chosen from the votes cast. The former is impossible absent forcing everyone to write justific

Why people voted for someone is different from why the winner was chosen from the votes cast. The former is impossible absent forcing everyone to write justifications, the latter though does have a range of understandability. A lot of voting systems, mostly ranked systems, are essentially black boxes. These can't easily be understood because often, one can't publish intermediate voting tallies without compromising anonymity. These systems can't be easily audited, independently validated or manually recounted. Answering why someone won from the votes cast in these is exceptionally difficult (which of course makes them wonderful targets for election rigging). That said, FPTP isn't the only easy to understand voting system. Approval voting is just as easy to grasp since aggregate intermediate tallies can be released like with FPTP.

dragonwriter 1y ago
> A lot of voting systems, mostly ranked systems, are essentially black boxes. These can't easily be understood because often, one can't publish intermediate voting tallies without compromising anonymity. There are some voting systems where intermediate tallies are complex to produce, very large, or hard to understand, but I can't think of any where they would compromise anonymity.
- Aloisius 1y ago
  By intermediate tallies, I mean ones that could be directly used with others to compute the final result. This can't be done most ranked voting systems in common use in races with truly unique cast ballots - likely in races with a large number of candidates - since one can't do the aggregation necessary to ensure the level of anonymity necessary to prevent someone from verifying you voted the way you told/paid them to. Without them, you can't produce the intermediate counts (often done at the local level) that can be used to calculate the final result.

dragonwriter 1y ago

> A lot of voting systems, mostly ranked systems, are essentially black boxes. These can't easily be understood because often, one can't publish intermediate voting tallies without compromising anonymity. There are some voting systems where intermediate tallies are complex to produce, very large, or hard to understand, but I can't think of any where they would compromise anonymity.

Aloisius 1y ago
By intermediate tallies, I mean ones that could be directly used with others to compute the final result. This can't be done most ranked voting systems in common use in races with truly unique cast ballots - likely in races with a large number of candidates - since one can't do the aggregation necessary to ensure the level of anonymity necessary to prevent someone from verifying you voted the way you told/paid them to. Without them, you can't produce the intermediate counts (often done at the local level) that can be used to calculate the final result.