[EM] STV and weighted positional methods

[Raph Frank]

On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 10:27 PM, Kathy Dopp <kathy.dopp at gmail.com> wrote:
> OK, well if you consider people who require transparent checks and
> balances "paranoid' then I will honestly tell you that I consider
> people who blindly trust that all computer programmers are 100% honest
> and infallible is  stupid and gullible then and possibly hasn't
> studied computer science himself.

Not 100% of programmers are trustworthy.  However, there would be a
flood of people pointing out that there is a problem with the count if
the government counted them up incorrectly.  (assuming they release
the ballot data).

> PLEASE go get an education on how trivially easy it is for ONE (1)
> programmer to arrange to fraudulently count votes for an entire county
> or state. There are so many reputable web sites of engineers and
> computer scientists where you could start that it is far far too
> numerous to list.

I don't support electronic voting machines.  IMO, voting should be
done with paper ballots.

We do PR-STV using paper ballots in Ireland.  The counting is done in
public.  Representatives from the media, political parties and other
groups are all present watching the counters do the manual counting.

> Misleading statement at best. In plurality voting methods a randomly
> selected partial count will give any desired probability of accurate
> election outcomes because plurality is precinct summable. In STV/IRV
> only a 100% manual count or an extremely extremely complex audit that
> virtually no auditors could understand would do.

So, you mean take 5% of the ballots at random and just recount those
ones.  It may be a reasonable method for determining if a recount
needs to happen, but I am not sure that it is a good way to do a
recount.

Also, I am not so sure that wouldn't work for PR-STV.  A
representative sample should give the same result as counting all the
ballots subject to random variation.

>> In any case, I like Abd Lomax's ballot imaging proposal for
>> verification.  Images of all the ballots would be published on the
>> internet and people could then process them as desired.
>
> Duh. And then have you forgotten what we already discussed just this
> a.m. already?  There is no method that a normal voter could use to
> easily count those.

Well, you could check a random few ballot images and make sure the
official rankings associated with those ballots are correct.

> Prove me wrong if you think you can by creating a SS that can automate
> counting for STV for an example...

I don't think spreadsheets are the be all and end all of programming simplicity.

In plurality, how do you see voters actually making sure the count is
correct?  It's not like they would actually handle the ballots
themselves.