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Voter fraud and bayesian inference – part 2
We left off the discussion with We want to calculate the proportion of fake ballots in an election based on the results of limited audits. We have seen how the binomial and hypergeometric...
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Voter fraud and bayesian inference – part 3
Here’s part1 and part2. Welcome back. In the previous posts we saw how to do inference using the beta-binomial to get probabilities for the proportion of fake ballots in an election, as well as an...
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Integer encoding of multiple-choice ballots
Secure voting systems supporting privacy through encryption must encode ballot contents into integers before they can be encrypted[1]. This encoding step is mostly trivial. For example, imagine a...
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Integer encoding of multiple-choice ballots (2)
In the last post we saw how simple arithmetic with the right choice of base can encode integer lists for multiple ballot choices in an elegant and compact way. A couple of points were mentioned in the...
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Error handling: return values and exceptions
My colleague edulix started a discussion on the golang list about the merits of go’s error handling. This got me thinking about the problem of error handling in general, and that no language seems to...
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The pairwise-beta model for pairwise voting
In a pairwise vote, voters are asked to repeatedly pick between pairs of options, selecting the one they favor of the two. The procedure then combines all these pairwise choices in order to establish...
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The pairwise-bradleyterry model for pairwise voting
In a previous post we discussed pairwise voting and the pairwise-beta model as a way to obtain a global ranking over candidates using bayesian inference with the beta distribution. In that post we...
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Probability of an election tie
(from http://www.uncommondescent.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/coin-flip.jpg) Sparked by recent events in politics, a lot of debate and controversy has occurred on the Spanish blogosphere around a...
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Reddit-style filtering for e-democracy
(Cross posted from here.) When voting, people select among several options that have been predefined prior to the election. In more open scenarios of citizen participation, people are asked not only to...
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Uncertainty, information and cryptography
(cross posted from here) In this post I’m going to talk about three types of uncertainty, and how the foundations of cryptography can be understood in their terms. Wikpedia says Uncertainty is the...
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