[EM] ranked methods and ballot secrecy

[Jan Kok]

In the discussion about voting methods at
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/01/2139227&tid=226
"Orzetto" raises a point that I haven't seen mentioned before, that ranked
ballot methods are more susceptible to vote selling and coersion than
simpler methods such as Plurality or Approval.  That post is copied below.

I would note that Condorcet is potentially slightly less susceptible to vote
selling and coersion than IRV because IRV requires the chain of preferences
"A>B>C" to be kept intact for each voter, whereas Condorcet only needs the
pairwise preferences, so A>B>C could be reported on separate ballots as
three pairwise preferences:
A>B
A>C
B>C

Cheers,
- Jan


http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=124076&threshold=0&commentsort=
0&tid=226&mode=thread&cid=10412579

Sorry, tried and miserably failed. (Score:2)
by orzetto (545509)  on Saturday October 02, @08:53AM (#10412579)
I understand that in theory this Condorcet thing is nice. However, we had
something like that in Italy - we could vote for up to four preferred
candidates.

Can you imagine the results? with 30 candidates for each party, there are
30*29*28*27 = 657720 possible combinations. This means, if you want to get
elected with mafia help, you simply need to get 10 idiots nobody knows in
your party's bottom list, and give everybody in your local poll station
clear instructions about whom to vote: me, and three jerks nobody would vote
in a certain sequence: if they are 10, you have 10*9*8 = 720 combinations,
more than the size of an average poll station.

Then, you place a picciotto at the poll station, who will have a check-list
of combinations. If some combination is missing, somebody's car will be
burning soon.

This law was abolished with a referendum in the early nineties, which paved
the way to the loss of power of the cleptocratic government parties;
however, the success was short-lived as the cleptocratic forces reorganized
in a better propaganda-focused group (a phenomenon known as trasformismo in
Italy), and hold now office (other than direct control of most of the
media). But that's another story...