Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] electronic voting systems

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Tue, 4 Apr 2006, McIntosh Jason wrote:

> I haven't looked at condorcet voting, but I'd say take small steps - an 
> electronic system of some sort would be the first.  I just don't trust 
> electronic voting unless I have some way to make sure my vote WAS 
> counted somehow.  Essentially, a paper trail I think is needed.

Yes, we need paper, but *you* can't confirm that your vote was counted 
even if you have paper.  Maybe you can confirm that at least one person 
cast a ballot like yours (if you can get that kind of information out of 
them).  Someone else will do the confirming -- just like in Florida a 
couple of years ago.

Regarding small steps...  We can work on electronic voting for the current 
voting system.  That's a step.  Another step that can be taken 
simultaneously is to inform people about the value of the Condorcet 
approach.  It can be taught in high schools and used in high school 
elections.  It's pretty easy to understand the basic idea:  Every voter 
ranks his preferences.  Then, for every pair of candidates we see which 
was preferred by the voters.  If we are lucky, and we usually will be, one 
candidate will be preferred by a majority to all other candidates.  Done. 
But that brings us to the tricky part.  It is possible that Candidate A 
will be preferred to Candidate B, Candidate B will be preferred to 
Candidate C, but Candidate C can still be preferred to Candidate A (this 
is often called a "majority rule cycle" or "circular ambiguity," but I 
like to call it an "intransitive result").  No matter what we call it, we 
need to have a secondary way chosen in advance for dealing with it.  This 
might be the best choice of a system for dealing with intransitive 
results:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method

You can read more about Condorcet here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method
http://www.google.com/search?q=condorcet

If you want more deep analysis of the problem with our voting system, 
check out these pages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duvergers_Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem

Mike

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