[EM] Does Range need an abstention/participation tally?

[Kathy Dopp]

Jameson,

If you want to make a modest pretense of caring about the
integrity/verifiability of the vote tallies, you need to retain and
report the number of ballots cast and vote tallies for each type and
location of ballot cast.  I.e. for precincts or ballot definition
types.  Not that any on-line voting system could be verified as
accurate, but if you simply report the aggregated results, then any
suspicious-looking patterns in the data will be entirely hidden.

Kathy

> Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:15:01 -0600
> From: Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com>
>
> I'm working on sketching out data structures so that Helios
> Voting<https://vote.heliosvoting.org/>,
> an online, open-source, cryptographically-verifiable voting system, can use
> advanced voting procedures such as Range, Majority Judgment, and SODA.
> (Condorcet is a significantly harder problem but probably doable, and IRV
> is essentially impossible).
>
> My question is: for the Range voting structures, is it acceptable to just
> keep one tally (total score) for each candidate, or do you also need a
> tally of number of voters who rated/didn't rate a candidate? The latter
> would be used for average-based schemes; so this question is equivalent to
> asking, are such schemes important enough to be worth making the data
> structures more complex? Since I'm the one signing up for the programming
> work here, I'd appreciate it if answers that ask me to do more work have a
> reasoning and a strength (ie, "I'd kinda prefer it" versus "I think it is
> absolutely necessary").
>
> Jameson--

Kathy Dopp
http://electionmathematics.org
Town of Colonie, NY 12304
"One of the best ways to keep any conversation civil is to support the
discussion with true facts."
"Renewable energy is homeland security."

Fundamentals of Verifiable Elections
http://kathydopp.com/wordpress/?p=174

View some of my research on my SSRN Author page:
http://ssrn.com/author=1451051