[EM] PR favoring racial minorities

[Juho]

On Aug 28, 2008, at 11:36 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:

>> One more approach to semi-computerized voting. A computer displays  
>> the personal alternatives and then prints a ballot. This solution  
>> hides the personalized nature of the ballot and still avoids the  
>> problem of voter voting for candidates that he/she should not vote.
>
> One could augment the semi-computerized voting by making it print  
> all candidates

That could be thousands, so maybe a subset in many cases.

> , but randomly order (last behind all others) the ones that are not  
> applicable to the districts.

I guess one would need to know the district (or the person if the  
candidate lists are personal) to "decipher" the vote in the  
calculation process. That information could help also the malicious  
readers. Or did you mean that the random data would be part of the  
vote but would be just noise since different ballots would cancel the  
effect of each others.

Voter would have also have to trust that the printed ballot is what  
it should be.

The technique that I proposed above would work best with bullet votes  
(e.g. with open lists). Also short votes (that list only few  
candidates) are quite ok (some risk if one votes for the most distant  
candidates in all directions).

> Then the ballots would have to be examined more closely in order to  
> figure out what house is its center.
>
> That's not to say it would make it impervious to such attacks: the  
> random ordering might easily have "... > DistantCommunistA >  
> DistantRightWingerA > DistantCommunistB > ..." because the  
> randomizer doesn't know (and can't know) what's "reasonable".  
> Filling out the random-last with a Markov simulation of other  
> ballots would be more "reasonable", but that'd require a  
> postprocessing step and it might mess with the proportionality, so  
> I don't think that would be worth it.
>
> However we look at it, we return to the problem that ranked ballots  
> can be fingerprinted. The only solution I can see for that is to  
> have a summable system and add the individual ballot in matrix (or  
> array) format instead of ballot format. But most PR methods are not  
> summable! Are there other ways of preventing ranked ballot  
> fingerprinting?

One could break a Condorcet ballot A>B>C to separate pairwise  
preferences A>B, A>C and B>C (is this what you meant with the matrix  
format?). If there are also many other candidates (tied at bottom)  
one could use e.g. A>*, B>*, C>*, cancel B>A, cancel C>A, cancel C>B.  
That information could be derived also from a more understandable (=  
easier for the voter to check) set of opinion fragments A, B, C, A>B,  
A>C, B>C.

IRV ballots are trickier. Raph Frank already mentioned the idea of  
truncation and combination of this with candidate given preference  
lists.

If you allow me I'd like to advertise trees once more. Trees (=  
hierarchical open lists) can be seen as very truncated ranked votes.  
Bullet vote to one candidate is inherited by his/her nearest group  
and so on. When the tree is formed one can expect all common thinking  
patterns to get their own branch in the tree. If there are lots of  
people who are green and also somewhat right wing and also a little  
bit feminist there would probably be such a branch in the tree with  
few candidates to choose from.

Adding the ability to rank three of the candidates of the surrounding  
small group would offer a pretty good vocabulary of typical green/ 
right/feminist opinions. And since the three would be from a  
relatively small set (maybe 5 out of 100) the number of combinations  
might still be safe (reduce the allowed number of ranked candidates  
to two or one if needed).

Juho




		
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