[EM] There's nothing wrong with Average Rating.

[wclark at xoom.org]

Eric Gorr wrote:

> As an almost off-topic side note, there was a story by Asimov, I
> believe, in which statistical analysis had become so advanced that a
> computer was able to select a single citizen who simply would,
> whether they lied or not (for such things were taken into account),
> select the winner who would have won had everyone been allowed to
> vote.

It's called "Election Day."

Funny you should mention it, because I keep thinking of it as well, in
trying to figure out a zero-information voting system.

One such system I'd been thinking of involved selecting a random subset of
voters and using their ballots to determine the winner of the election,
ignoring all others.  Unfortunately, the same feature of that system which
limits the information available to voters (and thus limits their ability
to vote strategically) also limits the fairness of the vote.  If you
choose a large enough sample to ensure that it be representative, then it
also ensures that it'll be vulnerable to strategic voting.

Other ideas I'd been tossing around involve weighting ballots based on
some globally-computed function over all ballots, which would be hard to
compute accurately beforehand and would thus limit the information
available to strategic voters.

Basically, I'm wondering if there's some way to exploit the fact that in
zero-information elections, the best strategy is to vote sincerely.

-Bill Clark


-- 
Ralph Nader for US President in 2004
http://votenader.org/