oddark

You could have had any username you wanted. Why'd you go with spez?

Thanks for the answer! For the first part, I was mainly wondering what someone with your knowledge and experience thought on the issue, but not having an opinion is perfectly understandable. Election fraud is definitely a more important issue and I appreciate that your hands are too full to worry about the theoretical stuff.

The second question was meant to be theoretical. I'm in no way suggesting that electronic systems are preferable. Automation is a great feature, but transparency is far more important to me. Let me rephrase the question: If some theoretical voting system was required to be implemented electronically, what measures could be taken to minimize fraud, maximize transparency etc.?

Maybe that's a little off-topic, but I thought it was an interesting thought experiment.

Wait... so Big Bird isn't real?

First of all, I want to thank you for everything you're doing. It's something I would love to be a part of, but I'm not sure where I would start. Anyway, I wanted to ask a similar question (sorry this is so late).

To me, there are two big problems with American election systems. The first is the implementation side, where things like electronic voting make election fraud too easy. The second is they theory side with our first-past-the-post system which does a much poorer job than many other systems of reflecting voters' preferences, and according to Duverger's law tends toward two-parties over time. Range voting has a lot of nice properties (e.g. it doesn't suffer from Arrow's impossibility theorem!) and I would love to see it implemented. However, the obvious problem that you've already pointed out is that counting becomes much harder and electronic counting is obviously a bad idea. First-past-the-post works because it's so simple. I could see approval voting as an acceptable compromise. I guess my question is, from your perspective, what do you think of our voting system (on the "interface" rather than the implementation side)?

And another question I just thought of (sorry): If you had to implement a voting system to be as automated as possible (i.e., voting and counting electronically), how would you design it to minimize the possibility of fraud?