Voter Verification

This website is in line with the beliefs of the Verified Voting Foundation: any election system must be voter-verifiable, to avoid fraud. And promote trust in the system. Without going too much into why this is important and how it has been compromised in the past, we simply discuss the practical means by which CondorcetThe general term for any election method that uses ranked ballots and has, as it's first princple, the Condorcet Criterion: any candidate which beats every other candidate individually must win the election. Any Condorcet method must come along with an ambiguity resolution procedure for cases in which there is no winner by this first criterion. voting can conform to basic verification procedures.

• Well-Published Election Results. The Condorcet MatrixThe typical way of representing the votes of a Condorcet election are in a matrix. For example, the following might be the result of a Condorcet election between three candidates. Each number corresponds to the number of voters who chose the candidate for that row over the candidate for that column. In this case, Bob Jones is the Condorcet winner, John Hennessy second place.

  	John Hennessy	Bob Jones	Tiger Woods
  John Hennessy		27	98
  Bob Jones	73		52
  Tiger Woods	2	48

  is very easy to generate for each particular precinct, thus all citizens and officials can inspect results and check them independently. This is trivial in PluralityThis is the voting system currently used for most American elections. Each voter chooses only one candidate, and the winner is the candidate with the most votes. but a little more complicated in Condorcet.
• Clear and Verifiable Tabulation System The basic Condorcet procedure, along with whatever ambiguity resolution procedure is to be used, must be well published and easy for any citizen to replicate from election data. Again, this is not complicated.
• Paper Trail. All votes must be recorded on a paper ballot which the voter may inspect before surrendering to election officials. This ensures that regardless of the electronic system used, a hand recount is always possible to either verify the integrity of the election system or double-check results
• Random spot-checks. Whether due to malicious intent or simple programming error, it is very possible for the machines used to tally election results to produce erroneous results. Therefore in every election there must be random spot-checks, by hand, of the Condorcet matrix generated to ensure that the system is trustworthy. Among these checks must be at least one of every kind of voting machine used.

So long as all these guidelines are followed, there should be no difficulty in trusting the results of a Condorcet election, as described on this website. The results will be just as trustworthy, and just as verifiable, as any plurality election (and indeed much more trustworthy than most of the elections that occur in the United States today).

A Note on Random Resolution Procedures

In Method Selection we proposed the revolutionary idea of choosing an ambiguity resolution procedure for the election at random, after votes have already been cast. We reiterate again that this is not the method advocated on this site, for issues of voter trust. However, we should mention it here, since it raises concerns of voter verification.

There arises obvious suspicions any time the election procedure is determined after the election: what is to prevent corrupt officials from selecting the procedure that will benefit their candidates? The solution would have to lie in a pseudo-random process, such as the weather, that would be easily verifiable by every American citizen. Other alternatives might be a certain decimal place of a measure on the stock exchange, though admittedly this might also be falsifiable with a great enough conspiracy. The best solution might be a combination of several such measures, so that any citizen can verify all of them and there is no way all of them can be faked.