[EM] danger of coercion (Re: First U.S. Scientific Election Audit...)

[Juho]

On May 13, 2007, at 6:16 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

> I have also considered that, where
> coerced cooperation is a reasonable possibility, a certain percentage
> of ballots could be extracted and separately counted under closed
> conditions. Images of these ballots would not be made public.

A simple and quite effective rule is to simply reject all votes that  
have additional markings. Simple ballot format (not much information,  
not much writing to do) makes identification of coerced ballots more  
difficult, and reduces the number of rejected ballots (with the rule  
described above), and the need to fill another ballot if the voter  
spoils the first one.

> (2) Direct democracy generally requires open voting. Coercion seems
> to be rare;

Open voting opens a door to coercion. A violent husband of might  
easily tell his wife how to vote. Open votes also are likely to lead  
to less votes to candidates that represent minorities and/or values  
that the voter does not want to reveal publicly. This could apply to  
minorities (political, ethnic, sexual, religious) or any deviation  
from the family, village, working place or country tradition and  
favoured values.

> I'm sure that
> people do sometimes alter their votes because they think they will
> not be popular; but actual coercion is another matter.

I note that you already covered the "popular opinions". I think the  
border line between following popular opinions and being coerced is  
not a clear one. Also border line between individual voters being  
coerced vs. whole society "banning" some opinions is not clear.  
Therefore secret ballots are a good main rule (exceptions allowed but  
justification needed). Strict rules that try to eliminate coercion in  
individual cases even if the coerced votes would not have any  
meaningful impact on the overall result is (in addition to protecting  
the rights of the individuals) a good precaution that aims at  
guaranteeing that the system will not one day start to corrupt as a  
whole.

Juho



		
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