[EM] secret ballots and proxy voting

[Peter Zbornik]

Dear Bayle,

to clarify, the voters pick their proxy based on his/her voting record, but
don't actually know who, specifically is voting.
The voters just have a "vote stream".
The voter should in any case have the power to change the vote, if the
proxy votes differently, than the voter would like.
In order to de-motivate the proxy from selling his/her vote to the Mafia,
he/she should not know how many votes she/he has.

Best regards
Peter Zborník



2013/4/8 Peter Zbornik <pzbornik at gmail.com>

> Dear Bayle,
>
> your proposed square-root solution violates the principle of "one person,
> one vote, one value", as votes have different weights.
>
> A better solution to the Mafia problem in proxy voting is to have public
> voting but secret voters and proxies.
> This solution has the positive side-effect of focusing the debate on
> issues and not on people.
>
> Best regards
> Peter Zborník
>
> Dne pondělí, 8. dubna 2013, Bayle Shanks <bshanks3 at gmail.com> napsal(a):
>
> >
> > Typically when large numbers of people are voting you'd like to have
> > secret ballots so that the Mafia can't buy votes or intimidate people
> > and also so that people feel free to make unpopular choices.
> >
> > However, when the people voting are representing others, you often
> > want to publish who voted for what so that the constituents can use
> > the past voting records of their representatives to decide whether to
> > vote for them in future elections.
> >
> > In a proxy voting system, where voters can allow other voters to vote
> > for them 'by proxy', and particularly in a transitive proxy voting
> > system, where the proxies can be re-proxied (e.g. Alice can give a
> > proxy to Bob who can give both Alice's proxy and his own to Caroline),
> > you want to satisfy both these objectives.
> >
> > You want everyone's vote to be secret, because you don't want the
> > Mafia to intimidate them or buy their votes, and you want unpopular
> > outcomes to be feasible.
> >
> > But you also want everyone's votes to be
> > public, because you don't want to give your proxy to someone who says
> > they'll do one thing with your proxy and then actually does another,
> > without you ever knowing.
> >
> > One fear is that the Mafia will say, 'You'd better give me your proxy
> > or you'll be punished'. I think you can probably fix that by not
> > giving proxy holders very precise information on how many proxies they
> > hold, when they were given, or who gave them.
> >
> > Even if each person casts their own vote secretly, but can see which
> > way their own proxied vote was vast, the Mafia just has to
> > secretly ally with a small number of proxy givers in order to see
> > which way the proxied votes are being cast (note that even if the
> > system let the vote caster know whose proxies they hold, they
> > don't know which proxy-ers are allied with the mafia).
> >
> > One idea is just to say, if you accept proxies your votes are
> > public, otherwise they are secret. This essentially reduces the
> > transitive proxy system to ordinary voting however because
> > it provides no way to have proxy holders who can cast proxied votes in
> > a way that the Mafia can't control.
> >
> > Here's an idea I had to deal with this problem.
> >
> > Give each person two ballots: a secret ballot and a public ballot.
> >
> > Everyone can see which way they vote their public ballot. If they hold
> > proxies from others, the proxies' secret ballots follow their secret
> > ballot and the proxies' public ballots follow their public ballot. The
> > originators of the proxies don't ever find out which way their secret
> > ballots were cast.
> >
> > To tally the vote, for each candidate, you sum the secret ballots for
> > that candidate, then you sum the public ballots for that candidate,
> > then you multiply these two sums together, then you take the square
> > root.
> >
> > After transforming sums in this manner, you can use most existing
> > voting methods to determine the winner.
> >
> > For instance, if there are five voters and two candidates, and they
> > vote like this:
> >
> > PUBLIC BALLOT
> >       CANDIDATE
> > VOTER    A       B
> > 1       1        0
> > 2       1        0
> > 3       1        0
> > 4       0        1
> > 5       0        1
> >
> > SECRET BALLOT
> >       CANDIDATE
> > VOTER    A       B
> > 1        1       0
> > 2        0       1
> > 3        0       1
> > 4        0       1
> > 5        0       1
> >
> > then the public ballot tally for A is 3, the secret ballot tally for A
> > is 1, the public ballot tally for B is 2, the secret ballot tally for
> > B is 4; the combined tally for A is sqrt(3 + 1) = 2, the combined
> > tally for B is sqrt(2 + 4) = 2.45.
> >
> >
> > Virtues:
> > * you can use your secret ballot to express your true preference
> > * however, if you care about influencing the election, you can have
> > the most impact if your secret ballot matches your public ballot. So
> > there is at least some incentive not to lie about what you plan to do
> > if you accumulate proxies.
> >
> > I expect that what would happen is that the Mafia would
> > be limited to corrupting public ballots (and people lying about what
> > they are doing with their proxies to attract proxies from the
> > opposition party would be limited to corrupting secret
> > proxied ballots). If the Mafia can only reach a subpopulation of
> > voters, then that subpopulation will effectively have less weight,
> > because the multiplication of the public and the secret tallies
> > effectively downweights voters who cast their public and secret
> > ballots differently.
> >
> > A slightly different approach would be to provide only public ballots,
> > but in addition a way for each person to secretly submit a request to
> > ignore their public ballot while counting votes. So now the Mafia can
> > effectively prevent you from voting but they can't do anything more.
> > You'd have to find a way to implement this so that the Mafia can't use
> > the same information that allows the vote-counters to match ballots to
> > ignore requests to find out how you voted, however.
> >
> > Thoughts? Other solutions?
> >
> > thanks,
> >   bayle
> >
> > ----
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> info
> >a
>
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