Brad Ideas - Goals of Voting Systems - Comments

A good summary

brad — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 23:59:09 -0700

I would however ask about the turnout sub-goal I list. This one requires some thought, and is the driving force behind registration drives, register on election day, motor-voter, australian must-vote laws and mail-from-home ballot.

The tough question is, how important is voter turnout? A good system allows everybody to vote if they make the effort. However, you can control the “effort” level and affect an election quite a bit. In some cases the effort bar is raised so high that people call it true disenfranchisement. In other cases, people question the value of setting the effort bar so low that people who barely care still vote, as this affects an election quite a bit too.

How do we make that decision? Which is better, an election with 45% turnout and secret ballot, or one with 70% turnout and vote-by-mail? Or the 96% turnout (up from 47%) in Australia? This is not a question with a simple answer, but every election system ends up making a choice along this spectrum.

Sub-goals

brad — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 23:53:13 -0700

These are sub-goals (though I am enumerating some of them) which is important to understand. No sub-goal is a "must" because there might be another way to implement the main goal. The main goal is that voters are confident that the system has met the other goals, particularly accuracy and precision. There are a number of possible ways to attain that trust.

Perversely, the trust goal may actually be faked so long as the other goals are attained. The trust goal is one of feeling. While some people must truly understand the correct reason why the system can be trusted, it is quite possible that many voters might trust the system for incorrect reasons. As long as everybody is not incorrect, and this universal error does not permit accuracy to fail, the system is still returning the right result.

The confidence goal means that people will treat the government as legitimate, and thus will defend it and support it and in the extreme die for it. This seems Machiavelian of course, and even comes with a risk that if people discover their trust was incorrect, they could act differently. (Though it is not so bad if you learn the system is still valid, though you didn't quite correctly understand why.)

Of course, a system everybody can understand sufficiently to have confidence in it remains the top expression of this goal. It is one of the real burdens to DRE voting machines.

Voting systems

Ping — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 20:42:23 -0700

You might be interested in the "defense tree" I've posted at http://zesty.ca/voting/reqs.html. The higher levels of the tree could apply to voting systems in general, whereas the lower levels are more specific to my implementation.

Two Conceptual Tools for Election System Analysis

Marc Baber — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 06:48:55 -0700

In considering the merits of various existing and proposed election systems, I've found the following two concepts highly useful:

1. Community of Trust: For a specified election system, who are the people I have to trust? Where machines are concerned, who are the people behind the machines that must be trusted? Are there any ways of reliably verifying these people do what they're trusted to do and don't do what they're trusted not to do? What, exactly, am I trusting these people to do or not do? We should seek to eliminate unverifiable trust in individuals who could potentially be the corruptible "weak link" in the chain to ballot processing. In some cases, our trust is divided among a larger group such that all members of the group would have to collude in order to manipulate election results. In these cases, we should seek to maximize the size of the community because the more people who would have to collude to manipulate results, the less likely manipulation is to occur. Similarly, where trust is given to a group, it is wise to have representatives from multiple competing interests within the group to act as checks and balances on each others' participation.

2. WWKD: "What Would K. Do?" (Where K is a corrupt high-level elections official or Secretary of State). This is similar to game theory. To expose any flaws in an election system, I pretend that I'm a powerful and corrupt election official with access to equipment and records and hiring/firing authority over my subordinates and, further, that I want to manipulate an election to favor a specific candidate in a race conducted using a specific election system without getting caught, or at least without leaving any evidence of said manipulation. I advocate that proponents of new elections systems conduct "war games" such as this to expose possible methods of election fraud. In some scenarios, the actors in the game could be vendors, first line elections workers or IT professionals within the elections agency.

Goals of Voting Systems

brad — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 11:02:35 -0700

This week I was approached by two different groups seeking to build better voting systems, something I talk about here in my new democracy topic. The discussions quickly got into all the various goals we have for voting systems, and I did some more thinking I want to express here, but I want to start by talking about the goals. Then shortly I will talk about the one goal both systems wanted to abandon, namely the inability to prove how you voted.

Many of the goals we talk about are actually sub-goals of the core high-level goals I will outline here. The challenge comes because no system yet proposed doesn’t have to trade off one goal for another. This forces us to examine these goals and see which ones we care about more.

The main goals, as I break them out are: Accuracy, Independence, Enfranchisement, Confidence and Cost. I seek input on refining these goals, though I realize there will be some overlap.