[EM] PR favoring racial minorities

[Raph Frank]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 9:36 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm
<km-elmet at broadpark.no> wrote:
> One could augment the semi-computerized voting by making it print all
> candidates, but randomly order (last behind all others) the ones that are
> not applicable to the districts. Then the ballots would have to be examined
> more closely in order to figure out what house is its center.

Well, I am thinking that the computer is compromised.  It can then
record the ballot order for each voter.  In effect, the random list
becomes like an ID for each ballot.

> However we look at it, we return to the problem that ranked ballots can be
> fingerprinted.

True, but at least that is only due to the private vote info.  Having
each voter have unique ballots means that it is possible to
'fingerprint' a ballot without the voter cooperating.

Btw, apparently in the UK, they do have a record that matches ballot
to voter.  The ID number is on the back of the ballot, so is not
normally observed when counting.

>  But most PR methods are not summable! Are there other ways of
> preventing ranked ballot fingerprinting?

You need the number of combinations to be much lower than the number of voters.

For example, you could limit things so that the voter can only rank 3
candidates and the list of the candidate who is first on the ballot.

If there are 10 candidates, then there are only around 1000
combinations and as long as the number of voters in the constituency
is larger than that, then there will be multiple people with each
'fingerprint'.

Ofc, that assumes randomness, you could still fingerprint by asking a
person to submit an unusual vote.  However, that can't be used much,
as once you have lots of people doing it, you flood those options too.

Also, summability doesn't always help.  Range is summable, but there
are so many valid ballots that you could have voters ID their ballots.