[EM] No geographical districts

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Raph Frank wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 2:00 AM, Stéphane Rouillon
> <stephane.rouillon at sympatico.ca> wrote:
>> Hello Juho,
>>
>> using age, gender or other virtual dimension to build virtual districts
>> replaces geographic antagonism by generation antagonism.
>> The idea is to get equivalent sample that are not opposed by intrinsec
>> construction.
> 
> A simple option would be to convert the date of birth into a number,
> but have the year the the least significant part..
> 
> 16-04-82 would become 160,482
> 
> The public could then be sorted by those numbers.  In effect, you are
> splitting people by the day of the month they are born on, if there is
> a tie, you use month and only use year at the end.
> 
> This would give a mix of ages, genders and any other measure in each district.
> 
> It is pretty much equivalent to just randomly distributing the voters
> between the districts, but unlike a random system, it is harder to
> corrupt.

It could have a similar result to having alphabetic ranked ballots, only 
with birthdays instead of last names. The selection would be biased in 
the direction of those that are born close to January. It may not 
matter, but it would appear unfair.

If you have computers, you could just sort by SHA512(name concatenated 
with birthdate concatenated with the year of the election). That's 
probably overkill (since even if you could break SHA-512, which would be 
a feat by itself, you'd have to convince the favored member to change 
his name to something suitable), but then there'd be a sufficient margin 
of safety. Randomness without randomness.