No. I've done plenty of metamoderating since the last time I saw a mod point (many years ago). Actually, I don't think Slashdot has even asked me about metamoderating recently, but I'll try to keep an eye open.
Again, you're picking at a nit in a suspicious way. My larger context made it quite clear that the bit you choose to quote is NOT broadly representative of my views, though you could (and did) complain that my summary of your viewpoint was unduly narrow. I see a couple of one-word fixes, but that does not seem to be what you're asking for. Nor are you actually offering clarification of your own viewpoint with your (again suspicious) multiple appeals to external authority.
The substantive parts of my prior comment were obviously ignored, so I'm just going to conclude that this discussion has pretty much run to its conclusion.
Pretty sure that this discussion has been helpful to my thinking anyway. For example...
I've thought of a really powerful feature of the negative voting in the case we've been discussing, where one candidate has a net positive total while the other wound up in the red. The very fact that so many voters wanted to make the extra effort to vote AGAINST the other candidate tells us that they did NOT want to vote in favor of the winner. In a sense, that means their negative votes expresses their lack of a positive option, and that in itself is good reason to penalize the winner with a shortened term of office.
I think you're looking at it incorrectly to see negative campaigning as a free speech issue. There's a whole lot of confusion around that notion. People should not be censored, but not all speech is equally valuable. In the case of elections, negative campaigning is psychologically advantageous because it's relatively easy to increase fear and hate and then to get people to vote because of those strong emotions. The big money bastards who are buying the elections evaluate their political advertising in terms of bang for the buck. For example, they actually see it as a kind of sound investment to have spent all that money for decades to demonize Hillary Clinton. That's how they got their YUGE tax cut.
Only a little, and it's because OSS has weak economic models.
Idealism is good, but it needs support, including financial support. I basically feel like defying you to name any OSS economic model that has successfully competed against the greedy bastards. I don't have time now, or I'd start listing the failures.
What I do have time to say is that I think OSS programmers should be paid fairly, and the money should be there BEFORE they start working on the project. I also think the projects should be linked to users who are willing to PAY for the work, even if each potential user is only chipping in ten bucks or so. A software service driven by OSS that incurs ongoing costs should be funded on a similar basis, with the beneficiaries of the software helping to cover those ongoing costs. None of this needs to be driven by massive greed for YUGE profits, but just by the goal of recovering the costs and paying people fairly for their time and work.
I already noted that my time is intruding, so I can't repeat the whole description of how this could be done. Or maybe you have a better idea of how to achieve these goals? You can find LOTS of details in my old comments on Slashdot, or ask nicely and I might have time to rehash it before the story dies and falls off the front page.
In your second comment, you directly addressed the main problem I had with interpreting your earlier comment. The normal reference for "goes negative" is for the attacker, not the victim of the attack who is forced into the negative position. However, the creation of such misunderstandings is one of the trolls' favorite tactics. (It seems to me that Slashdot must have nuked some of the trolls recently. At least they seem less intrusive than usual.)
Maybe the crux of the issue is that I think we need to change the incentive system in elections so that negative campaigning and ad hominem attacks are fundamentally counterproductive. (However more than that I think we need to get the big money OUT of politics and now I realize that the entire discussion never veered in that direction. Or did I miss those comments?) It might not be fair to penalize the winner for the turd nomination from the other side, but it bothers me much more when a negative campaign "succeeds". Allowing for negative votes could capture more of the reality of what is going on. I can actually think of some gaming-the-system approaches where nominating a turd might be the best tactic for a turd party, but in that case I think the other candidate is going to be in such an overwhelming position as to even polish the turd a bit just to avoid the negative outcome.
You actually introduce a different problem when you talk about losing the election as a penalty. I actually think that is part of the problem. Someone WANTED to serve his community, someone spent lots of precious time and worked hard trying to get elected, but loses and gets absolutely NOTHING for it. I actually think there should be some way to keep the top two or three candidates IN the government, though I didn't bring it into the discussion of election mechanisms. Or maybe I'm just being too generous, because I also believe that most of the professional politicians are just in it for the money and power. I think the good politicians are amateurs who tend to lose the elections and they never become professional politicians. Too often they lose precisely because they took a principled stand on one or more issues.
Hmm... Since you are misquoting me, that raises a strong suspicion you're a troll, but I see some wiggle room because of the interpretation of the "tested in the real world" phrase I actually used. I do not regard a couple of professional societies as part of the "real world" I was referring to. I know that I was thinking about the "real world" in terms of governments with powers of taxation and police and armies and things like that. Your interpretation of "real world" seems to include "unimportant things that do (or did) exist", which is pretty huge. I'm pretty sure we also interpreted "tested" differently. I could have worded it differently, but I think the meaning in context was sufficiently obvious (and different wording would not matter in the case of an insincere troll).
My initial concern was that the system seemed unlikely to work well. The historical evidence you provided seems to indicate that it does NOT work well. Though the approval voting has been around for some years, it has only been adopted by a few minor organizations, and some of the adopters have already dropped it. Initially I was skeptical simply because I'd never heard of it, but thanks to your link, I now have some evidence that it doesn't work well and can even speculate as to why not. (I actually went back to the link to look for comparisons to corporate board elections and saw the part about known weaknesses.)
You could have responded by strengthening your argument. Your link mentions organizations that played with the approval voting system before dropping it. What were the problems? Do you have any suggestions to fix those problems?
Actually wording it that way made me think the biggest problem is probably just the cognitive load on the voters (and even though I don't recall seeing that mentioned in the Wikipedia article). Most voters don't want to study ALL of the candidates, especially when they are pre-vetted candidates and presumably all worthy and qualified. If so, then the problem is how to motivate that effort, and right now I see no way.
However, I also realized that this system could be seen as logically equivalent to my third suggestion. By voting for all of the other candidates, it is logically equivalent to casting a negative vote against the omitted candidate. I think the explicit negative vote would still be better because (1) It can explicitly capture an important truth about a flawed election, and (2) It only requires one more decision rather than many more decisions.
I note you did not respond in any substantive way to my concerns nor to my hypothesis about why some organizations might like the system.
I really don't think I write that unclearly, but I do think that some trolls like to play dumb, and I'm beginning to wonder in your case.
No, that is NOT what I am suggesting. I'll try to say it one more time, but I'm hard pressed to understand your confusion. If you understood the problem, then it would be great if you could suggest an idea to fix it. There actually is a deeper problem here, but maybe the real problem is that I'm taking some aspect of the problem for granted because I think it's too obvious. (I included one such possible aspect below.)
Let's try again. There are basically 3 cases here:
(1) Both candidates have net positive votes. This is an indicator that the election was positive, at least as the voters perceived it and that most of them felt there was a candidate they wanted to vote for. No problem and no reason to penalize the winner.
(2) Both candidates have net negative votes. I'm taking that as a strong indicator that the election was perceived as highly negative by most of the voters. Remember that they would still need to take an extra step to express that truth by voting negatively for the worse of the two evils. Many people felt that way about the election of 2016. I think the winner of such a mudslinging contest should still lose something, but I'm not sure what. Throw out the election and try again? However, as a result of another branch of this discussion, I realized that if this kind of thing happens, then it is quite possible one of the minor party candidates will win the election by NOT attracting any negative votes, and that threat alone might stop the negative campaigning. Maybe I need to back up and clarify that negative campaigning is part of the problem?
(3) One candidate is net positive and the other is net negative. The problem here is the question of why the negative. Did one of the major parties really nominate a turd, or did the other candidate "succeed" with an extremely negative campaign? You'd think it should be obvious, but who's going to judge? (In theory it should be the nonpolitical courts, but remember Bush v Gore and the Gorsuch seat?) Therefore it seems the race was tainted and I think one solution is to penalize the suspicious winner with a half-term in office. If the winner does a good job, then it's going to be easy to win reelection. Maybe there should be a penalty for the loser, too, but I'm uncomfortable with that because it might be a hatchet job.
So have you (and the other responder) invested any real money in cryptocurrency? If so, you're welcome to your gold rush. Don't say I didn't warn you.
I actually think there is still time to profit from the foolishness. However I do NOT think I am smart enough to know when the bubble is going to burst. Once you start gambling, it's just too easy to play one more more hand and put down one more bet.
As regards your "substantive" reply, please tell me what function you think is performed by a bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency. I already know many functions that actual software performs.
Why should a certain string of digits have a special value because it satisfies some arbitrary mathematical equation, even a fancy one? There in an infinite supply of digit strings and also an infinite supply of equations. The notion of "mining" is that there is some sort of scarcity involved, but infinite is infinite, NOT scarcity.
The fundamental premise of cryptocurrency is fatally flawed. Just a speculative bubble on the theory that someone will pay a higher price in the future.
Of course that's also the state of the stock market prices right now. It will be interesting to see which bubble bursts first, but I think the stock market can't burst as completely as the cryptocurrency bubble will.
Now that sounds sort of like the proposal to eliminate the Electoral College by state-level actions. However, that only requires the commitment of states having more than half of the Electoral College votes, not all of the states.
I'm still trying to understand the implications of my third wild and crazy proposal in the original question... I'm wondering if negative votes would also work to increase the effective power of the minor parties. If the major party candidates attracted lots of negative votes, then their net totals might be so small that a minor party could sneak in and capture the election?
Perhaps you're some sort of pure mathematician who regards approval voting as elegant, but your link did NOT seem to prove your case. In fact, I would now cite it as evidence against what seems to be your position and in support of my initial reaction. (Or perhaps I wouldn't, but that's one of those Wikipedia problems.) Of course I can't be sure of a negative, but I have read quite a lot of related material, and I suspected this might be some sort of theoretical bauble, the kind of thing a society of mathematicians might like. One thing I noticed about most of the examples was that they are the kind of professional groups that have lots of "elevated" members and relatively weak interpersonal frictions. In that context, this system might produce pleasant results, especially for the losers. (And yet, even within such constraints I noticed that many of the users dropped the approval voting system.)
Right now sort I'm inclined to question [since you seem to dislike the diplomatic "doubt"] your sincerity, but pure mathematicians of my experience rather often leave such an impression. Not intended as a pointed criticism, just a question. I actually regard myself as a pure solutions researcher in an analogous sense of "pure".
Perhaps we would have a friendlier discussion of the mathematical proofs of the single-decision test-and-decide algorithm? The one where you skip n/e before accepting the next candidate that beats all prior candidates, yielding a 1/e probability of picking the best candidate. (I have run that description past several real mathematicians, and the heavier ones have somehow recognized it.) I've read two proofs of the main result, and have devised a direct proof for a secondary result of the probability of skipping the best candidate. However there's yet one more part, and I have no idea how to prove that 1 - 2/e represents the terminal permutations of unlucky orderings (except by subtraction). It might start with 1/e * (n/e - 1) / n for a base and then ((n - (n/e)) choose 2) / 2 as part of the final chunk?
Sorry I wasn't clear, but in that case one of the candidates still has a net positive total, while the second candidate has more negative votes than positive. The reason I think that kind of negative election should still penalize the winner is because there is no easy way to distinguish between a legitimately awful candidate who truly deserved the negative votes and character assassination through aggressive negative campaigning. It's essentially another aspect of risk aversion in that it's easier to increase fear.
Of course the desired outcome is positive campaigns based on the REAL issues, not negative ad hominem campaigns. The simple metric of such a campaign would be that both candidates get positive vote totals. My suggestion is actually biased in that direction because voters would have to take an extra step to make the negative vote, but people tend to accept the default. A voter is really going to have to hate a candidate to want to go to the effort of voting negative. (No, I can't even say if I would have bothered to vote negatively in the 2016 presidential election, though I am certain it was an incredibly negative campaign with an even more incredibly negative outcome.)
Actually I think the only time negative voting could (should?) make a major difference would be in a three-way (or multi-way) race. Imagine that the race is almost evenly divided among three candidates, two of whom are equally okay with you and one that you detest. Your hated candidate might win because the other votes are divided so equally, but if many of the voters who dislike that candidate were able to concentrate their negative votes, they would thus make sure the winner will be one of the other candidates.
However I've actually moved on to an even crazier idea. Are you interested in a votemobile?
You should read Putin's Kleptocracy to learn about the latest wrinkles (no pun intended) in manipulating paper ballots. I was trying to get the name of the technique that most interested me, but instead found the book Protest in Putin's Russia, where a different version of the same technique is described. Unfortunately, I still couldn't find the amusing name for the technique. Something like caterpillar or daisy chaining.
The way it works is that Putin's henchman goes to vote early. He gets his blank ballot, but he does NOT cast it. He stops in the hallway leading to the ballot boxes, where he marks his ballot for Putin, and waits for the next voter. He asks the next voter if he'd like to make some money (I think the book said about 50 rubles) for his blank ballot. In exchange, he also gets the completed ballot, which he takes down the hall and puts in the box. Lather, rinse, repeat for as many votes as Putin can buy.
Of course there is no secrecy in this, and all of the voters who sold their votes know the election was rigged. Several reasons they don't do anything about it, but I think the main ones are that they know Putin is going to win anyway, so they might as well take the money, too, and if they do make a fuss they know Putin's police are NOT going to do anything about it beyond arresting them for taking the money for their ballot. Actually, it could be worse than that if they make too big a fuss. Making a big fuss about Putin is one way to get whacked in today's Russia.
Hate to remind you, but #PresidentTweety admires Vladimir and wishes he could have so much direct control over the FBI.
I think I disagree with your comment, but it's obvious that you forgot to include the copyright notice on your sig. Don't you understand the recursive humor of this joke?
I wish that Slashdot had some convenient mechanism whereby I could go back and review the newer comments. I'm going to do one more scan for funny and insightful, but the discussion is too large to read all of it in a reasonable amount of time. Right now there are 244 visible comments, and I read the entire visible discussion around 200. Took me a while...
I found many parts of the discussion quite thought provoking and I hope you enjoyed having your thoughts provoked as much as I did. My thanks to the thoughtful contributors (and I wonder why the trolls seem relatively less visible than usual these days (Or perhaps I've merely gotten better at ignoring them?)).
After I digested the comments, my thoughts seem to have branched onto a different track, but since this story is reaching its natural lifespan, I wrote up my newest and craziest idea in a fresh venue. Perhaps you'll be amused?
I think I have either answered your questions or the answers are obvious, so I am not sure of the basis of your concerns. You might be trolling me, or perhaps the ideas are too complicated and I will be unable to explain them to your satisfaction. Notwithstanding, I'll make a brief attempt:
The QR code is NOT a secret, but a direct translation of what the ballot shows. You can also test it by recalculating the QR code that the ballot is supposed to represent and making sure that it comes out the same. Your second question is even more obvious, in that the paper ballots are there precisely in case there is a recount for a close election. However I do think that even non-contested elections need to have some auditing to make sure that the data is reasonable. The usual approach is random sampling to make sure there are no gross irregularities that could substantially alter the results. Part of my suggestion was intended to help make the routine auditing much quicker and less expensive.
However my thoughts have already diverged in a crazier direction. I seem to lack focus, but perhaps you will be amused by the "ultimate" votemobile solution?
I mostly think I need to think about your ideas some more to understand the implications. In particular, I didn't mention or yet consider the winner-take-all nature of American politics in connection with the voting system you are describing, especially at the presidential level, where it's hard-coded into the Constitution (and the Amendments). Personally I think coalition government is a better system precisely because it splits things up the way your system seems to. On the surface, it seems like your system is a way for a third party candidate to get meaningful votes without dooming the leading party that is most similar to the third party, but if there is only one winner, then it's hard to visualize any stable situations except for two balanced competitors and one permanent winner.
However my general thoughts on the topic went in a completely different direction... I must be nuts? But perhaps you'll find the votemobile idea amusing?
No, it's merely that certain levels of stupidity tend to personally offend me. You have adequately answered my question about the troll. I regard this "discussion" as terminated.
Doesn't matter how many time you repeat your lies. The truth value will not change.
Actually this reminds me of one of the strategies that Putin used to win some of his elections. At certain vulnerable voting places, Putin's goons were positioned between the place where the ballot was given to the voter and the place where it was deposited. They would buy the blank ballot and give the voter a ballot that was marked for Putin. Then they marked the blank ballot for Putin and sold it to the next voter in a kind of daisy chain. I forgot the word for it. Something like caterpillar ballots? (Read Putin's Kleptocracy for details.)
This is actually related to the objective of my third proposal. I think the negative votes are better than your quorum approach. My own thought is that if both candidate have positive totals, then the election is regarded as basically a good one. If one candidate goes negative, you know it was a highly negative election, and even if it might have been deserved, the winner should only get a half term. The interesting case is when both candidates go negative, which may have been the result of the presidential election in 2016 if negative voting had been allowed. Do you let the least negative candidate "win" for a short term, or should you just throw out the election and disqualify those candidates from the redo?
I deliberately left them brief. If you have any sincere interest, you have to ask more politely than that. I've actually read a lot of the voting theory stuff, especially around the Byzantine generals' problem.
Yeah, a simple search of the fake news. In the REAL world when they investigated the claims of vote fraud, the most partisan investigators the GOP could find just couldn't find the evidence. It's fundamentally impossible to conceal a conspiracy involving lots of people.
Election fraud is quite different. Let's take partisan gerrymandering as an example. The essential trick involves 2 principles: #1: Draw lines so your districts are safe. #2: Waste your opponent's votes are concentrated into the smallest number of sacrificial districts.
Sounds like a variation of my suggestion of guest voting. If I understand you correctly, the main anti-gerrymandering feature is that highly irregular districts would create more convenient opportunities for traveling voters.
However I think that guest voting accomplishes the same effect, but while still respecting the principle of one-man-one-vote. An electronic ballot could even show the map and let you pick the district you want to vote in, while a paper ballot could just list all the candidates with your district's candidates at the top and the instruction to pick any one. (Might be a long list if the district is highly gerrymandered.)
I didn't mention a more complicated variation. Allow voting in multiple districts, but divide your vote up. Computers are good with fractions, too.
Slashdot Mirror
No. I've done plenty of metamoderating since the last time I saw a mod point (many years ago). Actually, I don't think Slashdot has even asked me about metamoderating recently, but I'll try to keep an eye open.
Again, you're picking at a nit in a suspicious way. My larger context made it quite clear that the bit you choose to quote is NOT broadly representative of my views, though you could (and did) complain that my summary of your viewpoint was unduly narrow. I see a couple of one-word fixes, but that does not seem to be what you're asking for. Nor are you actually offering clarification of your own viewpoint with your (again suspicious) multiple appeals to external authority.
The substantive parts of my prior comment were obviously ignored, so I'm just going to conclude that this discussion has pretty much run to its conclusion.
Pretty sure that this discussion has been helpful to my thinking anyway. For example...
I've thought of a really powerful feature of the negative voting in the case we've been discussing, where one candidate has a net positive total while the other wound up in the red. The very fact that so many voters wanted to make the extra effort to vote AGAINST the other candidate tells us that they did NOT want to vote in favor of the winner. In a sense, that means their negative votes expresses their lack of a positive option, and that in itself is good reason to penalize the winner with a shortened term of office.
I think you're looking at it incorrectly to see negative campaigning as a free speech issue. There's a whole lot of confusion around that notion. People should not be censored, but not all speech is equally valuable. In the case of elections, negative campaigning is psychologically advantageous because it's relatively easy to increase fear and hate and then to get people to vote because of those strong emotions. The big money bastards who are buying the elections evaluate their political advertising in terms of bang for the buck. For example, they actually see it as a kind of sound investment to have spent all that money for decades to demonize Hillary Clinton. That's how they got their YUGE tax cut.
Has open source changed the world?
Only a little, and it's because OSS has weak economic models.
Idealism is good, but it needs support, including financial support. I basically feel like defying you to name any OSS economic model that has successfully competed against the greedy bastards. I don't have time now, or I'd start listing the failures.
What I do have time to say is that I think OSS programmers should be paid fairly, and the money should be there BEFORE they start working on the project. I also think the projects should be linked to users who are willing to PAY for the work, even if each potential user is only chipping in ten bucks or so. A software service driven by OSS that incurs ongoing costs should be funded on a similar basis, with the beneficiaries of the software helping to cover those ongoing costs. None of this needs to be driven by massive greed for YUGE profits, but just by the goal of recovering the costs and paying people fairly for their time and work.
I already noted that my time is intruding, so I can't repeat the whole description of how this could be done. Or maybe you have a better idea of how to achieve these goals? You can find LOTS of details in my old comments on Slashdot, or ask nicely and I might have time to rehash it before the story dies and falls off the front page.
Gotta bike. Bye for now.
In your second comment, you directly addressed the main problem I had with interpreting your earlier comment. The normal reference for "goes negative" is for the attacker, not the victim of the attack who is forced into the negative position. However, the creation of such misunderstandings is one of the trolls' favorite tactics. (It seems to me that Slashdot must have nuked some of the trolls recently. At least they seem less intrusive than usual.)
Maybe the crux of the issue is that I think we need to change the incentive system in elections so that negative campaigning and ad hominem attacks are fundamentally counterproductive. (However more than that I think we need to get the big money OUT of politics and now I realize that the entire discussion never veered in that direction. Or did I miss those comments?) It might not be fair to penalize the winner for the turd nomination from the other side, but it bothers me much more when a negative campaign "succeeds". Allowing for negative votes could capture more of the reality of what is going on. I can actually think of some gaming-the-system approaches where nominating a turd might be the best tactic for a turd party, but in that case I think the other candidate is going to be in such an overwhelming position as to even polish the turd a bit just to avoid the negative outcome.
You actually introduce a different problem when you talk about losing the election as a penalty. I actually think that is part of the problem. Someone WANTED to serve his community, someone spent lots of precious time and worked hard trying to get elected, but loses and gets absolutely NOTHING for it. I actually think there should be some way to keep the top two or three candidates IN the government, though I didn't bring it into the discussion of election mechanisms. Or maybe I'm just being too generous, because I also believe that most of the professional politicians are just in it for the money and power. I think the good politicians are amateurs who tend to lose the elections and they never become professional politicians. Too often they lose precisely because they took a principled stand on one or more issues.
Hmm... Since you are misquoting me, that raises a strong suspicion you're a troll, but I see some wiggle room because of the interpretation of the "tested in the real world" phrase I actually used. I do not regard a couple of professional societies as part of the "real world" I was referring to. I know that I was thinking about the "real world" in terms of governments with powers of taxation and police and armies and things like that. Your interpretation of "real world" seems to include "unimportant things that do (or did) exist", which is pretty huge. I'm pretty sure we also interpreted "tested" differently. I could have worded it differently, but I think the meaning in context was sufficiently obvious (and different wording would not matter in the case of an insincere troll).
My initial concern was that the system seemed unlikely to work well. The historical evidence you provided seems to indicate that it does NOT work well. Though the approval voting has been around for some years, it has only been adopted by a few minor organizations, and some of the adopters have already dropped it. Initially I was skeptical simply because I'd never heard of it, but thanks to your link, I now have some evidence that it doesn't work well and can even speculate as to why not. (I actually went back to the link to look for comparisons to corporate board elections and saw the part about known weaknesses.)
You could have responded by strengthening your argument. Your link mentions organizations that played with the approval voting system before dropping it. What were the problems? Do you have any suggestions to fix those problems?
Actually wording it that way made me think the biggest problem is probably just the cognitive load on the voters (and even though I don't recall seeing that mentioned in the Wikipedia article). Most voters don't want to study ALL of the candidates, especially when they are pre-vetted candidates and presumably all worthy and qualified. If so, then the problem is how to motivate that effort, and right now I see no way.
However, I also realized that this system could be seen as logically equivalent to my third suggestion. By voting for all of the other candidates, it is logically equivalent to casting a negative vote against the omitted candidate. I think the explicit negative vote would still be better because (1) It can explicitly capture an important truth about a flawed election, and (2) It only requires one more decision rather than many more decisions.
I note you did not respond in any substantive way to my concerns nor to my hypothesis about why some organizations might like the system.
I really don't think I write that unclearly, but I do think that some trolls like to play dumb, and I'm beginning to wonder in your case.
No, that is NOT what I am suggesting. I'll try to say it one more time, but I'm hard pressed to understand your confusion. If you understood the problem, then it would be great if you could suggest an idea to fix it. There actually is a deeper problem here, but maybe the real problem is that I'm taking some aspect of the problem for granted because I think it's too obvious. (I included one such possible aspect below.)
Let's try again. There are basically 3 cases here:
(1) Both candidates have net positive votes. This is an indicator that the election was positive, at least as the voters perceived it and that most of them felt there was a candidate they wanted to vote for. No problem and no reason to penalize the winner.
(2) Both candidates have net negative votes. I'm taking that as a strong indicator that the election was perceived as highly negative by most of the voters. Remember that they would still need to take an extra step to express that truth by voting negatively for the worse of the two evils. Many people felt that way about the election of 2016. I think the winner of such a mudslinging contest should still lose something, but I'm not sure what. Throw out the election and try again? However, as a result of another branch of this discussion, I realized that if this kind of thing happens, then it is quite possible one of the minor party candidates will win the election by NOT attracting any negative votes, and that threat alone might stop the negative campaigning. Maybe I need to back up and clarify that negative campaigning is part of the problem?
(3) One candidate is net positive and the other is net negative. The problem here is the question of why the negative. Did one of the major parties really nominate a turd, or did the other candidate "succeed" with an extremely negative campaign? You'd think it should be obvious, but who's going to judge? (In theory it should be the nonpolitical courts, but remember Bush v Gore and the Gorsuch seat?) Therefore it seems the race was tainted and I think one solution is to penalize the suspicious winner with a half-term in office. If the winner does a good job, then it's going to be easy to win reelection. Maybe there should be a penalty for the loser, too, but I'm uncomfortable with that because it might be a hatchet job.
So have you (and the other responder) invested any real money in cryptocurrency? If so, you're welcome to your gold rush. Don't say I didn't warn you.
I actually think there is still time to profit from the foolishness. However I do NOT think I am smart enough to know when the bubble is going to burst. Once you start gambling, it's just too easy to play one more more hand and put down one more bet.
As regards your "substantive" reply, please tell me what function you think is performed by a bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency. I already know many functions that actual software performs.
Why should a certain string of digits have a special value because it satisfies some arbitrary mathematical equation, even a fancy one? There in an infinite supply of digit strings and also an infinite supply of equations. The notion of "mining" is that there is some sort of scarcity involved, but infinite is infinite, NOT scarcity.
The fundamental premise of cryptocurrency is fatally flawed. Just a speculative bubble on the theory that someone will pay a higher price in the future.
Of course that's also the state of the stock market prices right now. It will be interesting to see which bubble bursts first, but I think the stock market can't burst as completely as the cryptocurrency bubble will.
Now that sounds sort of like the proposal to eliminate the Electoral College by state-level actions. However, that only requires the commitment of states having more than half of the Electoral College votes, not all of the states.
I'm still trying to understand the implications of my third wild and crazy proposal in the original question... I'm wondering if negative votes would also work to increase the effective power of the minor parties. If the major party candidates attracted lots of negative votes, then their net totals might be so small that a minor party could sneak in and capture the election?
Perhaps you're some sort of pure mathematician who regards approval voting as elegant, but your link did NOT seem to prove your case. In fact, I would now cite it as evidence against what seems to be your position and in support of my initial reaction. (Or perhaps I wouldn't, but that's one of those Wikipedia problems.) Of course I can't be sure of a negative, but I have read quite a lot of related material, and I suspected this might be some sort of theoretical bauble, the kind of thing a society of mathematicians might like. One thing I noticed about most of the examples was that they are the kind of professional groups that have lots of "elevated" members and relatively weak interpersonal frictions. In that context, this system might produce pleasant results, especially for the losers. (And yet, even within such constraints I noticed that many of the users dropped the approval voting system.)
Right now sort I'm inclined to question [since you seem to dislike the diplomatic "doubt"] your sincerity, but pure mathematicians of my experience rather often leave such an impression. Not intended as a pointed criticism, just a question. I actually regard myself as a pure solutions researcher in an analogous sense of "pure".
Perhaps we would have a friendlier discussion of the mathematical proofs of the single-decision test-and-decide algorithm? The one where you skip n/e before accepting the next candidate that beats all prior candidates, yielding a 1/e probability of picking the best candidate. (I have run that description past several real mathematicians, and the heavier ones have somehow recognized it.) I've read two proofs of the main result, and have devised a direct proof for a secondary result of the probability of skipping the best candidate. However there's yet one more part, and I have no idea how to prove that 1 - 2/e represents the terminal permutations of unlucky orderings (except by subtraction). It might start with 1/e * (n/e - 1) / n for a base and then ((n - (n/e)) choose 2) / 2 as part of the final chunk?
Sorry I wasn't clear, but in that case one of the candidates still has a net positive total, while the second candidate has more negative votes than positive. The reason I think that kind of negative election should still penalize the winner is because there is no easy way to distinguish between a legitimately awful candidate who truly deserved the negative votes and character assassination through aggressive negative campaigning. It's essentially another aspect of risk aversion in that it's easier to increase fear.
Of course the desired outcome is positive campaigns based on the REAL issues, not negative ad hominem campaigns. The simple metric of such a campaign would be that both candidates get positive vote totals. My suggestion is actually biased in that direction because voters would have to take an extra step to make the negative vote, but people tend to accept the default. A voter is really going to have to hate a candidate to want to go to the effort of voting negative. (No, I can't even say if I would have bothered to vote negatively in the 2016 presidential election, though I am certain it was an incredibly negative campaign with an even more incredibly negative outcome.)
Actually I think the only time negative voting could (should?) make a major difference would be in a three-way (or multi-way) race. Imagine that the race is almost evenly divided among three candidates, two of whom are equally okay with you and one that you detest. Your hated candidate might win because the other votes are divided so equally, but if many of the voters who dislike that candidate were able to concentrate their negative votes, they would thus make sure the winner will be one of the other candidates.
However I've actually moved on to an even crazier idea. Are you interested in a votemobile?
https://slashdot.org/comments....
You should read Putin's Kleptocracy to learn about the latest wrinkles (no pun intended) in manipulating paper ballots. I was trying to get the name of the technique that most interested me, but instead found the book Protest in Putin's Russia , where a different version of the same technique is described. Unfortunately, I still couldn't find the amusing name for the technique. Something like caterpillar or daisy chaining.
The way it works is that Putin's henchman goes to vote early. He gets his blank ballot, but he does NOT cast it. He stops in the hallway leading to the ballot boxes, where he marks his ballot for Putin, and waits for the next voter. He asks the next voter if he'd like to make some money (I think the book said about 50 rubles) for his blank ballot. In exchange, he also gets the completed ballot, which he takes down the hall and puts in the box. Lather, rinse, repeat for as many votes as Putin can buy.
Of course there is no secrecy in this, and all of the voters who sold their votes know the election was rigged. Several reasons they don't do anything about it, but I think the main ones are that they know Putin is going to win anyway, so they might as well take the money, too, and if they do make a fuss they know Putin's police are NOT going to do anything about it beyond arresting them for taking the money for their ballot. Actually, it could be worse than that if they make too big a fuss. Making a big fuss about Putin is one way to get whacked in today's Russia.
Hate to remind you, but #PresidentTweety admires Vladimir and wishes he could have so much direct control over the FBI.
Can't understand why you didn't get any of the "funny" mods you were fishing for.
I think I disagree with your comment, but it's obvious that you forgot to include the copyright notice on your sig. Don't you understand the recursive humor of this joke?
©2018 by shanen
I wish that Slashdot had some convenient mechanism whereby I could go back and review the newer comments. I'm going to do one more scan for funny and insightful, but the discussion is too large to read all of it in a reasonable amount of time. Right now there are 244 visible comments, and I read the entire visible discussion around 200. Took me a while...
I found many parts of the discussion quite thought provoking and I hope you enjoyed having your thoughts provoked as much as I did. My thanks to the thoughtful contributors (and I wonder why the trolls seem relatively less visible than usual these days (Or perhaps I've merely gotten better at ignoring them?)).
After I digested the comments, my thoughts seem to have branched onto a different track, but since this story is reaching its natural lifespan, I wrote up my newest and craziest idea in a fresh venue. Perhaps you'll be amused?
https://slashdot.org/comments....
I think I have either answered your questions or the answers are obvious, so I am not sure of the basis of your concerns. You might be trolling me, or perhaps the ideas are too complicated and I will be unable to explain them to your satisfaction. Notwithstanding, I'll make a brief attempt:
The QR code is NOT a secret, but a direct translation of what the ballot shows. You can also test it by recalculating the QR code that the ballot is supposed to represent and making sure that it comes out the same. Your second question is even more obvious, in that the paper ballots are there precisely in case there is a recount for a close election. However I do think that even non-contested elections need to have some auditing to make sure that the data is reasonable. The usual approach is random sampling to make sure there are no gross irregularities that could substantially alter the results. Part of my suggestion was intended to help make the routine auditing much quicker and less expensive.
However my thoughts have already diverged in a crazier direction. I seem to lack focus, but perhaps you will be amused by the "ultimate" votemobile solution?
https://slashdot.org/comments....
I mostly think I need to think about your ideas some more to understand the implications. In particular, I didn't mention or yet consider the winner-take-all nature of American politics in connection with the voting system you are describing, especially at the presidential level, where it's hard-coded into the Constitution (and the Amendments). Personally I think coalition government is a better system precisely because it splits things up the way your system seems to. On the surface, it seems like your system is a way for a third party candidate to get meaningful votes without dooming the leading party that is most similar to the third party, but if there is only one winner, then it's hard to visualize any stable situations except for two balanced competitors and one permanent winner.
However my general thoughts on the topic went in a completely different direction... I must be nuts? But perhaps you'll find the votemobile idea amusing?
https://slashdot.org/comments....
No, it's merely that certain levels of stupidity tend to personally offend me. You have adequately answered my question about the troll. I regard this "discussion" as terminated.
Doesn't matter how many time you repeat your lies. The truth value will not change.
Actually this reminds me of one of the strategies that Putin used to win some of his elections. At certain vulnerable voting places, Putin's goons were positioned between the place where the ballot was given to the voter and the place where it was deposited. They would buy the blank ballot and give the voter a ballot that was marked for Putin. Then they marked the blank ballot for Putin and sold it to the next voter in a kind of daisy chain. I forgot the word for it. Something like caterpillar ballots? (Read Putin's Kleptocracy for details.)
This is actually related to the objective of my third proposal. I think the negative votes are better than your quorum approach. My own thought is that if both candidate have positive totals, then the election is regarded as basically a good one. If one candidate goes negative, you know it was a highly negative election, and even if it might have been deserved, the winner should only get a half term. The interesting case is when both candidates go negative, which may have been the result of the presidential election in 2016 if negative voting had been allowed. Do you let the least negative candidate "win" for a short term, or should you just throw out the election and disqualify those candidates from the redo?
I deliberately left them brief. If you have any sincere interest, you have to ask more politely than that. I've actually read a lot of the voting theory stuff, especially around the Byzantine generals' problem.
Why am I wasting time with a troll?
Yeah, a simple search of the fake news. In the REAL world when they investigated the claims of vote fraud, the most partisan investigators the GOP could find just couldn't find the evidence. It's fundamentally impossible to conceal a conspiracy involving lots of people.
Election fraud is quite different. Let's take partisan gerrymandering as an example. The essential trick involves 2 principles: #1: Draw lines so your districts are safe. #2: Waste your opponent's votes are concentrated into the smallest number of sacrificial districts.
I'd give it the funny mod if I ever saw a mod point.
Sounds like a variation of my suggestion of guest voting. If I understand you correctly, the main anti-gerrymandering feature is that highly irregular districts would create more convenient opportunities for traveling voters.
However I think that guest voting accomplishes the same effect, but while still respecting the principle of one-man-one-vote. An electronic ballot could even show the map and let you pick the district you want to vote in, while a paper ballot could just list all the candidates with your district's candidates at the top and the instruction to pick any one. (Might be a long list if the district is highly gerrymandered.)
I didn't mention a more complicated variation. Allow voting in multiple districts, but divide your vote up. Computers are good with fractions, too.