RFC: Publication of results data

[Kade]

The Electoral Commission (EC) is interested in revising the election rules to allow the EC to help voters remediate issues that may prevent them from casting a ballot. The following election referendum is in effect for the June election and PROPOSED to be extended to future elections:

1. Voters' names will not be released.
2. Non-voting citizens' names will not be released, but these citizens will be contacted to inform them that they can and should vote.
3. Any person whose vote was invalidated will be contacted in order to assist in their citizenship process if this is the reason their vote was not counted.
4. The individual votes will be released in disaggregated form so as to avoid the public being able to relate placements to one another.

 

[We The People]

Makes sense to me

 

[Zukchiva]

I like it.

 

[Phoenix]

I totally agree with this.

 

[moe]

I like this!

Edit: After some thought on this, I actually would like to know what disaggregated parts mean, because for example, I think there would be ways to determine how people voted based on if a candidate put themselves as first and were the only ones to do so, etc.

In terms of senate elections, I'm also a little curious as to what other ways of counting ballots there are, and whether they'd lead to other results. I do think that averaging the ratings is the easiest and most straightforward way, but I do wonder if there are possibilities....for strategic voting.

For example, as a candidate, I would be able to see what other candidates I think will do well, and then purposefully rate them lower to tank their ratings. Another method I read online is to only look at people's first choice in the first round, and see if anyone gets a plurality of votes, then you look at the second choice of the people who supported that candidate to determine if anyone wins a plurality to fill the second spot, etc. Obviously this is a little more complicated, but is probably more resistant to "electioneering". Probably not a big issue, but I just wanted to give my two cents!

 

[Josephto]

Did we not do this already??

 

[Asdersland]

I like this!

Edit: After some thought on this, I actually would like to know what disaggregated parts mean, because for example, I think there would be ways to determine how people voted based on if a candidate put themselves as first and were the only ones to do so, etc.

In terms of senate elections, I'm also a little curious as to what other ways of counting ballots there are, and whether they'd lead to other results. I do think that averaging the ratings is the easiest and most straightforward way, but I do wonder if there are possibilities....for strategic voting.

For example, as a candidate, I would be able to see what other candidates I think will do well, and then purposefully rate them lower to tank their ratings. Another method I read online is to only look at people's first choice in the first round, and see if anyone gets a plurality of votes, then you look at the second choice of the people who supported that candidate to determine if anyone wins a plurality to fill the second spot, etc. Obviously this is a little more complicated, but is probably more resistant to "electioneering". Probably not a big issue, but I just wanted to give my two cents!

Moe, I think you may be looking at ways of electioneering instant runoff votes. This is average placement--it works similar to the Borda Count (but is not exactly the same for various reasons)--and is not at all like an instant runoff or single-transferable vote.

Borda Count is inherently not susceptible to most of the typical electioneering methods by design, but Average Placement is further insulated by the requirement that voters rank all candidates. It's really more of a hybrid between Borda and score voting, kind of. There are also some cultural factors that make this system work even better: for example, we don't have political parties.

"Disaggregation" simply means to strip each vote into its component parts. That is to say, instead of releasing the exact votes, in the order they were cast, we'd release the individual placements of candidates. So it would read something like this:

Asd: 1, 1, 2, 3, 3
Kade: 2, 2, 3, 3, 3
Kron: 1, 1, 1, 2, 2

And not like ballots. The idea is to allow the public to observe that the count is correct and give some data without breaching privacy. Plenty of candidates don't rank themselves first for whatever reason, and even then it is expected that someone would rank themselves first.

Did we not do this already??

Yes, but as I mentioned, we've decided to submit this rule for public comment before we adopt it for future elections.

 

[moe]

Moe, I think you may be looking at ways of electioneering instant runoff votes. This is average placement--it works similar to the Borda Count (but is not exactly the same for various reasons)--and is not at all like an instant runoff or single-transferable vote.

Borda Count is inherently not susceptible to most of the typical electioneering methods by design, but Average Placement is further insulated by the requirement that voters rank all candidates. It's really more of a hybrid between Borda and score voting, kind of. There are also some cultural factors that make this system work even better: for example, we don't have political parties.

Interesting! Good to know, I remember I was exploring all the different ways to tally votes and such, but it was a little hard to follow at times

And yeah, that makes sense for disaggregation, so I think this is a good idea.