[EM] Introduction and non-technical aside

[Kislanko at aol.com]

I'm another newbie to this list, and would like to thank everyone who 
contributes to it for providing resources to help get one up to speed on modern 
voting methods.

I am nowhere near qualified to have an opinion related to any of the 
discussions on the list, but as I followed some of the links in the postings regarding 
reading material (searching for same was how I found the list in the first 
place) I was reminded of this, and it may be of interest to the community.

As I suppose everybody on this knows, a consequence of Arrow's Impossibility 
Theorem is that there is always a (set of) voter(s) whose (identical) 
ballot(s) determine the outcome of an election. Upon re-reading commentary on the 
proof, I remembered that in the early 1950s Isaac Asimov wrote a short science 
fiction story entitled "Franchise" that is relevant.

In this story, a gigantic supercomputer named Multivac analyzed all the data 
about every individual, and picked out the exact individual whose ballot would 
determine the election, and that person was the only one voted.