[EM] Reducing the field for online elections
Kristofer Munsterhjelm
km_elmet at t-online.de
Sat Aug 26 03:10:52 PDT 2023
Another suggestion if we're just brainstorming. This one is for online
elections like say, Debian or Wikipedia.
Votes are cumulative style, either l_1 or l_2. At the start of the
primary, every voter's ballot is "locked". Randomly and over time, the
voters' ballots are unlocked, and they can then tentatively vote for
candidates. The voters can also update their votes at any time until the
ending phase.
The current total/score is updated continuously and the voters may use
that total to inform how they update their votes. The threshold is
prominently shown (e.g. the Hare or Droop quota).
Near the end of the election, voters' votes are randomly locked. The
time until a ballot is locked is also shown on the voter's display, and
known to the voter from the start.
The gradual unlocking of ballots incentivizes the initial voters to more
thoroughly look into the candidates' positions because the initial
scores will inform the feedback process; and the gradual locking near
the end is meant to discourage sniping attacks where a coordinated
minority pretends to vote for someone else, then shifts their votes to
their true favorite at the last second.
Once every ballot has been locked, the first k by score proceed to a
more traditional general (probably ranked voting).
The core idea is that the voters would be able to see which candidates
are safe and thus reallocate their votes to either spend on other
candidates or to look into which of the above-threshold candidates they
like the most.
This is definitely not perfect. The path dependence means that it's most
likely not monotone, and the continuous nature means there's room for a
lot of sophisticated strategy involving making your candidate look more
hopeful than he is. It can't be done for large-scale political elections
either because online election security is near impossible. But it might
be useful in some contexts - possibly!
(If you want to be real fancy, you could probably use control theory
ideas to stabilize the system further. E.g. when ballots are changed,
the scores are not instantly updated, but there's a rolling average
instead. But I'll leave that to people who know more about control
theory than I do.)
-km
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