On Dec 27, 2004, at 4:26 PM, Forest Simmons wrote:
As Jobst recently pointed out, non-deterministic methods have not been adequately studied or promoted, considereing their potential contribution to fairness and to strategy free voting.
They may be mathematically fair, but I find them philosophically unsatisfying. What's the point in voting if the result will come down to a random process? (I know, to increase the expected likelihood of my choice winning.) I suppose on the "devil I don't know" argument, a non-deterministic method may at least be semi-immune to electoral malfeasance, except that they'll probably find some way to load the dice and make sure the house always wins.
No, election methods are fundamentally a decision process based on votes, not random processes. In certain other applications, possibly in computer decision making and artificial intelligence, this could be a useful tool.
But the determinists would say that they should be even less equal: A should get one hundred percent of the probability.
Put another way, I can turn any non-deterministic procedure into an approximately deterministic one.
Run the ND system a million times, elect the most probable winner. If you've gone and added non-determinism to some method, we've now wasted a million minus one election calculations.
Brian Olson http://bolson.org/
---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
