[FRIAM] Ranked Choice Voting app

[cody dooderson]

I recently learned that Australia has used ranked choice voting for over
one hundred years, so there is some good real world data on it. It was
implemented by conservatives in the early 20th century, which surprised me.

It was referenced in this talk https://youtu.be/uuXNbKglM5Q on voting
systems, and how wackadoodles can win in plurality voting schemes.

On Mon, May 4, 2020, 8:26 PM Gary Schiltz <gary at naturesvisualarts.com>
wrote:

> Whatever voting technology is chosen, it needs to be open source, both
> software and hardware.
>
> On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 8:52 PM Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Cody,
>>
>> I'm inspired to contribute some thoughts to yours.  I feel that
>> whatever *fix* is imagined for voting, we should be prepared to
>> adopt it for a long time. The process of testing out new voting
>> schemes may take a few administrative cycles and may become
>> vulnerable to manipulation or degradation as the *concrete dries*.
>> I can see value in putting time limits on the experiment and taking
>> measures to protect this experiment from tampering by any given
>> administration. Precedence set by changing something as foundational
>> as voting demands careful thought. If voting systems be allowed to
>> change with fashion there will be vulnerabilities introduced, perhaps
>> similar or worse than the exploitations we are seeing in almost every
>> other aspect of government. To be fair, the present voting scheme already
>> appears corrupt or out-of-spec from my point of view. I do think it is
>> our responsibility to think about this problem.
>>
>> Secondly, I would like to contribute some thoughts on the topic of
>> remote voting. Perhaps rather than solving the app based voting
>> issue perfectly, we could aim at having certainty for validating
>> votes that is better than already exists. It may be the case that
>> under a *phone app* voting system, we still end up with voters in
>> Florida that have been known dead for a decade. If we can assess
>> what the present error bars are then we can have a goal in mind.
>>
>> There are certainly many truly good thoughts on cryptography
>> and as Neal Koblitz has pointed out in a bold non-paper paper
>> <https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1018.pdf>,
>> one of the functions of the NSA is to act as consultants on cryptographic
>> practice. For our entertainment, let's imagine a collaboration between the
>> NSA and some large gaming company, Blizzard perhaps, where the goal is
>> to develop a *critical application* voting app. While I anticipate
>> aggressive
>> objections from some friam readers, there is something worth thinking
>> about.
>> A friend of mine pointed out that when classic World of Warcraft was
>> recently
>> released, Blizzard was prepared to have over 500,000 simultaneous users.
>> These users are not making 15 one-time choices but rather orders of
>> magnitude
>> more choices. These choices are handled fairly consistently, with few
>> dropped
>> packets and with little lag (each of which is demanded by the online
>> gaming
>> community). This suggests to me that there *are *industries, like the
>> gaming industry,
>> that have thought very carefully and for a long time about the problems
>> of large
>> scale concurrent user bases and verification of its user base. Surely the
>> tech is
>> out there, but I am unsure what the next careful steps ought to be.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Jonathan Zingale
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