Ask Slashdot: How Would You Use Computers To Make Elections Better?

shanen writes: Regarding politics, is there anything that Americans agree on? If so, it's probably something negative like "The system is broken," or "The leading candidates are terrible," or even "Your state is a shithole." With all our fancy technology, what's going wrong? Our computers are creating problems, not solutions. For example, gerrymandering relies on fancy computers to rig the maps. Negative campaigning increasingly relies on computers to target the attacks on specific voters. Even international attacks exploit the internet to intrude into elections around the world. Here are three of my suggested solutions, though I can't imagine any of today's politicians would ever support anything along these lines:

(1) Guest voting: If you hate your district, you could vote in a neighboring district. The more they gerrymander, the less predictable the election results.
(2) Results-based weighting: The winning candidates get more voting power in the legislature, reflecting how many people actually voted for them. If you win a boring and uncontested election where few people vote, then part of your vote in the legislature would be transferred to the winners who also had more real votes.
(3) Negative voting: A voter could use an electronic ballot to make it explicit that the vote is negative, not positive. The candidate with the most positive or fewest negative votes still wins, but if the election has too many negative votes, then that "winner" would be penalized, perhaps with a half term rather than a full term.

What wild and crazy ideas do you have for using computers to make elections better, not worse?

Comments

Simple

[oldgraybeard]

I would not use computers! Paper ballot feed in to (Yes computer based) non connected totaling systems. Just my 2 cents ;)

Re:Simple

[0100010001010011]

Paper ballot with scanners.

Rather than a mono-culture require that no 2 bordering counties may use the same brand scanner.

After the early election results are in share ballots with 2 neighboring counties to use on their machines.

If the machines report different numbers you hand count them.

Bonus companies for how accurate they are. Those that are more than 1% off get no payment for the machines and the company is not allowed to make machines for the next election cycle.

Re:Simple

[doom]

Paper is pretty secure here, where most anyone and especially members of all parties, can watch the whole process.

Yes, that's pretty much it. There are scams you can use with paper ballots, but they're harder to get it to scale [1]. Arguably, a hybrid system (as is common these days) of paper ballots counted electronically could be better than a pure paper system-- then you can use computer techniques to look for problems, and paper hand counts to check afterwards.

Equally important is that the process is so simple that the average person can easily understand the process.

Yeah, exactly. You might have your spooky crypto-magic uncrackable system deployed perfectly, but it's too complicated for citizen's to understand, you could get demagogues whipping up distrust for the system. Counting the vote accurately doesn't help if no one believes you.

[1] One year, the coast guard found the lids of ballot boxes floating around in the San Francisco bay...

Re:Simple

[ShakaUVM]

Agreed. All digital voting is the biggest threat to democracy ever seen.

Re: Simple

[dskoll]

Really? You ever try to rig a paper ballot election? You'll find it almost impossible to commit massive fraud, something that's trivial with computer voting.

Re:Simple

[mridoni]

Paper is pretty secure here, where most anyone and especially members of all parties, can watch the whole process.

Yes, that's pretty much it. There are scams you can use with paper ballots, but they're harder to get it to scale

That's important, but there's more: with paper ballots, literally anyone, on a small scale, even without any formal education at all, can understand the principles involved and monitor the process, before or afterwards. With electronic voting, you need people with experience (and very possibly degrees) in cryptography and security. Not only this severely restricts the number of people who are able to assess if the process is rigged, but also it makes the process "less democratic", given that the greater part of the population, in practice, is hindered from exercising their right to check that the election process was really fair.

Take the average of the desires of the voters

[jader3rd]

Instead of voting for a candidate, have the electorate vote on a number of issues (combination of recent past issues and issues on the docket). Then take the average, and the candidate of the political party that is closest to the average, wins. Parties can do whatever they want to determine candidates.

Down side is that for those who already feel like voting is like busy homework, this will add to the load.

Ranked voting

[Anonymous Coward]

Computers would make this easier but are not required.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting
http://www.fairvote.org/rcv

Re:Ranked voting

[swillden]

Computers would make this easier but are not required.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting http://www.fairvote.org/rcv

I used to be big fan of ranked voting, especially with Condorcet evaluation with Schwarz Sequential Dropping. Then I tried to explain it to a few people and changed my mind. Instant-runoff is a little simpler, but still pretty complicated -- and actually a bit tricky to execute correctly since it's inherently multi-pass (Condorcet is simpler to execute). Simplicity matters because what's just as important as having a fair election, is having a fair election that voters can understand and trust.

I think the best scheme overall is approval voting. The mathematical properties of approval voting are almost as good as the best ranked voting schemes. It's a little more vulnerable to strategic voting (which is when voters might have reason to vote other than their true preferences, as is the norm in plurality-rules schemes), but really not very much. In theory it also doesn't capture quite as much nuance of voter intent since it doesn't allow one to express a preference between two acceptable candidates. But it does allow voters to express another important element of intent which ranked ballots don't allow: acceptability. And it's brain-dead simple to understand.

If you don't know how it works, here you go: An approval voting ballot has all of the candidates listed. You mark all of those that are acceptable to you. The candidate with the most marks wins.

Such a system eliminates the strong two-party bias that plurality-rules systems have (Duverger's Law, that bias is called). In very few cases does it ever make sense to vote other than your true preferences. And it encourages parties to field broadly-acceptable candidates.

Tallying is a single-pass process and counts can be provided by sub-regions for totalling (unlike IRV, where the runoff phases require reinterpretation of the ballots at each runoff). If it's desired, you can even specify a minimum win threshold -- if no candidate gets, say, 50% approval then no one wins and you re-run the election with a new slate of candidates. There's an obvious risk of never getting a winner here, so such a system should probably progressively lower the required approval level to be sure that someone eventually wins, but the flip side is that such a system would mean that the 2016 US presidential election would never have put either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump on the ballot; both (all) parties would be looking for someone with broader appeal.

However, approval voting can be done with or without computers, so it's not really relevant here. IRV can also be done without computers, though it's kind of tedious without them.

Long Live The Republic

[CarterMeyers]

Go back to a republic - where only land owners get to vote. Then use computers to adjust the weight of each vote based on how much land you own.

Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[klingens]

Use an algorithm to create congressional districts with census data so each district has approx. the same amount of possible voters and the smallest circumference. No more rigging to create safe districts for either party with ridiculous borders.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[jonwil]

Do it like they do in Australia.
Changing the electoral boundaries is done by an independent body (the Australian Electoral Commission).
It is done on a regular basis and is designed to ensure that each state has a suitable number of representatives based on its population and that each electoral district has a similar number of electors.

Generally the AEC will try and keep related areas in the same district (e.g. a specific suburb will all be in one district for the most part) and they also take submissions from people into account when drawing up the boundaries.

Since its done independently and people get to have a proper say, no-one can argue its unfair to them (e.g. they cant say "hey we dont think its fair that our poor black neighborhood is in a district of mostly rich white people" because they had the opportunity to complain/object to that decision and because no-one can argue that the decision was in any way political.

I would use computers...

[hey!]

To look up all the excellent work done by mathematicians, economists, political scientists and cryptographers on (a) how to conduct votes and (b) how to use votes to select candidates, before I bang together my own half-baked proportional representation scheme.

The maybe I'd write an R routine to detect gerrymandered states (actually quite easy if you've taken the first step above) and then hack into politicians' social media accounts so I could blackmail them into outlawing partisan gerrymandering.

Voting Can Be Improved But Not With Computers

[crunchygranola]

There are is a very active field of "voting theory" research about how voting systems can be improved, but little of it has to do with computers per se, though they can make implementation of the post-vote processing more convenient. That is to say, it is not the "computer" that is improving anything. Various forms of preferential voting have a lot to recommend them, along with variations like "instant run-off".

In general it is a good idea to identify actual problems (e.g. widely unpopular candidates winning due multiple candidates splitting the vote; spoilers being run to siphon of votes from specific candidates, etc.) and propose actual fixes that are subjected to formal analyses, large scale simulations and such to validate that they are improvements.

The suggestions of the OP mostly sound like "let's just try something different" rather than carefully considered improvement proposals.

Re:Use to stop illegal voters

[doom]

Not that it matters to you, but no one can find any evidence of these hordes of fraudulent voters swaying any recent elections. You've gotta go back decades before you find even half-way plausible stories to that effect.

As a doorstop

[Opportunist]

Or maybe a paperweight.

You MUST NOT use computers for voting purposes. Even if every bit used is open source, even if you open source hardware, software and everything can be audited and everyone can verify that the hash of the binary is the same that a binary you compiled from the source is the same, even if you do EVERYTHING to make sure that anyone is able to audit it, it's a VERY VERY BAD idea.

Not because it can be manipulated. But because you cannot silence the ones claiming it's still fraud and that all the computer savvy people cooperate to overthrow democracy and humanity altogether. Because they can't audit it, because you need to know how computers work and how to audit computers to actually perform one.

Paper and pencil have one key advantage: EVERYONE can audit it. It takes the ability to see and the ability to count. Even reading is entirely optional because all the ballot slips are identical and you can simply go and count the ones with the cross at the same position. Every party can send whoever they want to supervise the election, no special education or skill needed.

It's less about actual election fraud. It's more that nobody can sensibly claim there had been one. We live in a time of fake news and creative reporting. Is it that far fetched that any party who loses an election would start rumors about rigged voting machines that could of course be audited, but only be a select few (aka "the elite")?

With paper and ballot, it's trivial to debunk anything like this. They could have sent literally ANYONE to supervise the election process. They could send ANYONE to recount the ballots. Any claim to fraud would instantly fizzle.

Hackproof way to use computers in elections:

[rnturn]

Stack computers on top of one another until you have a surface tall enough to fill out a paper ballot.

Bennett Haselton

[drafalski]

Has anyone asked Bennett Haselton? I'll wager he has an idea or three...

That would be good, not bad

[raymorris]

Over half of Americans don't know who the vice president is. That's how interested many of us are in policy and the political process. A supermajority can't distinguish the Republican platform from the Democrat platform when it is handed to them with the party name redacted.

I don't have my car fixed by someone who doesn't know what an "engine" is, I don't have dental cavities filled by someone who can't point to my bicuspids, and I don't want national policy decided by people who don't recognize the name "Mike Pence", nor know how many senators there are.

> I think it's clear that if you want representative democracy to work and be considered legitimate, you need fewer barriers to voting, even if people like you think a DMV visit is reasonable.

And that's the reason the founders created a republic, not a democracy. The federal budget isn't American Idol. If you're not interested enough in participating in society to either have a driver's license or swing by and pick up a (free) ID, maybe you're not the person who should be deciding federal law and other national policy, based on "I heard he was born in Africa"or "because she's a woman". Maybe the decisions of national policy SHOULD be made by people who have enough interest to do more than "text your vote to 1-800-bumper-sticker".