51–59 of 59 posts
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That's a very, very good point. I don't even see an easy workaround, either... Hrm...
What about letting people change their vote?
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How would a picture of a ballot prove that it was your ballot, that the picture hadn't been doctored, and that the ballot hadn't been doctored?
I don't think that's very salient. You could raise analogous objections for Internet-based voting weaknesses, or most information leaks in general.
There are some papers describing systems to do this that seems like they could work. But they're pretty complex.
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What about letting people change their vote?
You'd also need to let people arrange to vote and then later cast a fake vote, for the case of coercion at the voting deadline And that only works if the upcoming coercion is known in advance.
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Also, instant-runoff is easier to explain, because it's literally the same as holding hypothetical runoff elections on election day. With Concordet voting, listing someone as your second choice can cause your first choice to lose, which would probably confuse a lot of people.
It would be misleading to gloss over IRV's significant failings if we're talking about criteria failure. * 8 people vote: A, C, B * 5 people vote: B, C, A * 4 people vote: C, B, A IRV eliminates C, despite the majority of voters preferring C over B (12 to 5). The order of elimination means that significant secondary preferences are often ignored.
6 * Republicans, Libertarians, Democrats; 5 * Democrats, Libertarians, Republicans; 2 * Libertarians, Democrats, Republicans.
Liberians are eliminated (despite the majority of voters preferring them over the Democrats), and Democrats win.
Notice how when you use party names, it makes more sense? The Republican and Democrat voters are simply voting "anyone but the other major party". If they are neck-to-neck on primary votes, then the secondary votes of the minor parties start to be counted. This is a feature, not a bug.
Internet voting is untenable from a security perspective. An election is orders of magnitude more complicated than most online transactions, because your vote is just as important to me as my vote. Whereas filing your taxes online is a one way transaction between you and the government, voting is one big symmetrical transaction between every member of the electorate. This makes it really tricky from a security perspe…
It's MUCH more difficult than banking or taxes. Not only must your vote be secure and counted; it must be anonymous! Not even you should be able to prove to anyone else who you voted for and there must be no audit trail that could tie an individual vote to a person.
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It's MUCH more difficult than banking or taxes. Not only must your vote be secure and counted; it must be anonymous! Not even you should be able to prove to anyone else who you voted for and there must be no audit trail that could tie an individual vote to a person.
I vote by mail as required by my state. I could show anyone my ballot after filling it out but before mailing it.
While internet voting could perhaps help, I think a much simpler and more powerful change would be to switch to a Condorcet method of voting. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_voting ) Nothing would do more damage to the two-party system than for the argument "if you vote for a third party, you throw your vote away" to be demolished.
Instant-runoff voting would probably be more practical. It's already used in America in some jurisdictions, so promoting it to the more major offices like President isn't as big a leap as Condorcet (since Condorcet's not actually used by any US jurisdictions).
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Sure, but you really should not underestimate how important it is that everyone understand how their vote is counted. I had a roommate who worked for a voting reform nonprofit and he said even gathering signatures for "simple" IRV is quite challenging. It's just too hard to explain quickly.
Top 10 lists are not a novel concept for most people. Individual votes are precisely like that. Cumulatively, the person who did the best on everyone's lists wins. It's far simpler than the system we have now. The plural of anecdote isn't evidence, I know, but: I had Condorcet voting briefly explained to me at a young age, and I grasped it immediately. I couldn't do the math, but it was conceptually really easy to gr…
Unfortunately, HN readers are not representative of the general population. It's not that complicated, no, but I can see people having a lot more trouble with understanding Concordet voting than with understanding IRV.
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It would be misleading to gloss over IRV's significant failings if we're talking about criteria failure. * 8 people vote: A, C, B * 5 people vote: B, C, A * 4 people vote: C, B, A IRV eliminates C, despite the majority of voters preferring C over B (12 to 5). The order of elimination means that significant secondary preferences are often ignored.
Here's another hypothetical example: 6 * Republicans, Libertarians, Democrats; 5 * Democrats, Libertarians, Republicans; 2 * Libertarians, Democrats, Republicans. Liberians are eliminated (despite the majority of voters preferring them over the Democrats), and Democrats win. Notice how when you use party names, it makes more sense? The Republican and Democrat voters are simply voting "anyone but the other major party…
Further, I don't think real-world voting would match up exactly with the above. There are people that would vote R/D/L and D/R/L, both of which are lacking from this example that would swing things away from the Libertarians.