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

[Juho]

On May 14, 2007, at 13:26 , raphfrk at netscape.net wrote:

> Juho wrote:
>
>
>
> > > (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.
> David Friedman has posted on his blog that when he lectures, one of  
> the issues he has is
> determining if the students actually understand what he has just  
> said.  The problem is that
> if he asks "Did everyone understand that?", nobody will raise their  
> hand as they don't want
> to be seen as the one who doesn't understand.
>
> His proposed solution is that each student would be given a yes/no  
> button.  They can
> then answer questions using the button.  This would not achieve  
> perfect privacy, but
> it would likely greatly increase the accuracy of the result.  He  
> could then repeat any
> section of the lecture that doesn't hit a threshold.

Yes, good example of a situation where privacy pays off. I have spent  
many hours in meetings and sometimes wondered also if other real-time  
feedback like "I agree", "proceed a bit faster" etc. could have been  
useful.

>
> Something similar could be used in a town meeting type setting.   
> OTOH, it might break
> the consensus building effect of the town meeting.  If there is no  
> penalty in acting to
> prevent consensus, then it is less likely to occur.

One could also combine discussions and anonymous feedback so that  
even though extensive discussions, lobbying, propaganda,  
argumentation, questions and negotiations would take place the  
results of those discussions could be seen in the outcome of the  
private feedback/polls/votes.

Juho

>
>
> Raphfrk
> --------------------
> Interesting site
> "what if anyone could modify the laws"
>
> www.wikocracy.com
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