[EM] Reducing the field for online elections

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

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