Paper: Should We Vote in Non-Deterministic Elections?
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Recent paper about voting in non-deterministic voting systems: https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/9/4/107 (open access)
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@bmjacobs my intuition is that it will take a lot of education to convince the mainstream public that nondeterminism is a viable solution to certain voting theoretical problems. Putting that aside, what would your position be regarding auditing and transparency for a nondeterministic system, and whether this kind of system could be feasibly implemented without worries about rigging?
score-stratified-condorcet [10] cardinal-condorcet [9] ranked-condorcet [8] score [7] approval [6] ranked-bucklin [5] star [4] ranked-irv [3] ranked-borda [2] for-against [1] distribute [0] choose-one [0]
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@cfrank Yeah, I don't see nondeterministic systems being used for national elections anytime soon, but luckily these arguments also work for smaller/local procedures and there they can be implemented much more easily. I think we could make these systems robust against rigging; what will be much harder is making them robust against accusations of rigging. In this polarized political landscape where conspiracies are flying left, right and center, it would be trivially easy for a demagogue to claim the result of a nondeterministic election was rigged. While nondeterministic systems may be more fair, they could appear to be less fair, which is unfortunate since we need social trust to keep a democracy in place.
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@bmjacobs absolutely, the problem is mainly public perception. Probably at some point if more accessible reforms are made, public awareness will gravitate to more sophisticated solutions.
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@bmjacobs An open source solution using cryptography would go a long way toward making the system robust against accusations of rigging. You could do something like the following: 1) take a cryptographic commitment of each ballot using sha256; 2) sort the list of ballot hashes; 3) concatenate and hash them together or progressively hash them into a single sha256 hash; 4) use the resulting hash as the seed for a CSPRNG (cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator). This procedure is deterministic and thus impossible to rig, but the output will be impossible to predict and functionally random.
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I've said previously on this group that non-deterministic elections can be a good way to simplify proportional representation. It doesn't have to be as crude as simple random ballot where you have one representative per constituency selected by the drawing of a single ballot. As I said here just earlier this month:
Proportional methods tend to just be more complex by their nature. But if you allow them to be non-deterministic then that goes away. E.g. COWPEA Lottery which uses approval ballots. Or if you have a region that elects, say, 6 candidates, voters just rank their top 6 candidates. Then you consecutively pick six ballots at random and elect the unelected candidate that is highest ranked on that ballot.
This type of method, while it doesn't guarantee a very proportional result in each region, would actually give better proportionality nationally than deterministic methods that use these smallish regions (like STV), and they also keep the election candidate-based, which other nationally proportional methods tend not to.
Random ballot with just one representative per region guarantees that honest voting is the best strategy, but I tend to think that it becomes too lotteristic at that point. With e.g. five or six chances to be elected (as in the above methods), particularly popular candidates would not be on such a knife-edge of being elected.
I also think that non-deterministic methods send out a good message - that there are no "safe seats", and that representing the electorate is a privilege and not some guaranteed right.
So while non-deterministic methods might be a tough sell, I personally prefer them for national parliaments.
