[EM] YVC vs. EMMM

[Jan Kok]

There is a class of voting methods commonly used by young American
school children, and probably by children all over the world.  These
methods (EMMM, 1P2P...) guarantee that every voter's vote counts (as
does my YVC0 method that I proposed in a previous post), but furthermore
gives every voter the opportunity to influence the outcome in his or her
favor (whereas with YVC, voters have no way to know how to vote so as to
improve their chances of a favorable outcome).  It's interesting to
compare these two classes of methods:

YVC: intended for use with a small number of candidates and a large
number of voters.
EMMM: the set of candidates is always identical to the set of voters.

YVC objective: pick the winning candidate.
EMMM objective: pick the candidate who is "it" (usually considered an
undesirable status, to be avoided).

Tallying method: choose candidate R, where R = D mod N, and N is the
number of candidates.
YVC0: D is the number of ballots cast.
EMMM: D is a constant associated with the specific election method.
Different methods have different values of D.  The value D is weakly
encrypted within a public key associated with each election method.

YVC: Essentially impossible for any voter to know how to vote so as to
improve the chances of a favorable outcome to that voter, because of the
difficulty of knowing exactly how many people will cast ballots.
EMMM: In theory, voters can determine D and N before the election and
then vote so as to obtain a better expected outcome than if they voted
randomly.  In practice, voters generally don't vote strategically
because the values of D are not widely known; the specific election
method is sometimes not chosen until after the votes are cast; even if D
and N are known in advance of voting, most voters can't do the
computations needed to optimize their vote in the few seconds before the
polls close; and different election officers interpret and apply the
election procedures differently.

YVC: Strategy free.
EMMM: All-ey all-ey in free!

:-) :-) :-)
- Jan