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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
1. Is this site a joke? 2. Is this site anti-American? 3. What are the goals of the Leader of the Free World project? 4. Who is behind the Leader of the Free World project? 5. Who has paid the Leader of the Free World project? 6. How were the presidential candidates chosen? 7. What does it mean that a candidate's answers are "simulated"? 8. When will the votes be counted? 9. What are the matrix methods and how do they work? 10. Why are the m-methods superior to other voting methods? 11. What is the political implication if one method is better than the other? 12. You have advertised this site by promising "a 16% better world". How do you explain that? 13. I have been campaigning for IRV. Now you say m-methods are better. What should I do? 14. Are m-methods already in use somewhere? 15. How does the Candidate Matcher rank the candidates? 16. What is a Self-Organising map? 17. How do I know that no-one can know how I voted? 18. How can I be sure that my vote was counted right? 19. How does your system prevent a person from voting more than once? 20. Why don't you use one vote per one email technology, wouldn't that be a simple way to prevent the double voting? 21. How does your system prevent a person from using software to submit millions of votes? 22. How can I be sure that you have not added extra votes? 23. Aren't you afraid that the Federal Election Comission shuts your site down? 24. Who is Tim Stryker? 1. Is this site a joke? What ?! Are you asking if the democratic election of the president of the United States of America is a joke ?? Actually, we are quite serious. 2. Is this site anti-American? On the contrary, this site wishes only the advancement of the USA. The USA has generously spread its best knowledge of democracy to the world. In turn, the rest of world wants to communicate the latest knowledge on democratic procedures, to allow the USA to build, reform and refine its democracy making it even stronger than it is today. Without the steadfast example of the USA, through 200 years of turbulent history, democracy could never have spread throughout the world to the degree that it has. We want to repay that debt. 3. What are the goals of the Leader of the Free World project? The Leader of the Free World project has three thematic dimensions: We aim to raise public awareness on each thematic dimension. For democratic global governance we are not offering ready answers. Just links to people and organisations that are developing the ideas. In the case of voting systems, the question is clearer. We propose that every political body in the world should start to use some of the new breed of voting methods called matrix methods. (Also known as Condorcet methods.) While there are numerous possibilities to use information technology to improve democracy, the possible threats of electronic voting must be acknowledged and investigated one by one with a view to eliminating, or neutralising them. In quantitative terms, the Leader of the Free World project has set the goal of becoming the largest internet election to date. An additional goal is that before the end of 2004, one organisation from each continent in the world, be it the parliament of a major country or the student association of a small high-school, will have decided to adopt one of the m-methods as their official voting procedure. 4. Who is behind the Leader of the Free World project? This site was developed by a group of people who consider themselves world citizens. Mostly Europeans and Americans, but we have received help from other continents too. LFW project team links to the names, pictures and a brief description of the LFW project team. 5. Who has paid the Leader of the Free World project? The costs of the site, and the LFW project, are mostly defrayed by the same people who volunteered to build the site and the service. Additional monetary support has come from our friends. 6. How were the presidential candidates chosen? First we identified the three premium independent candidate listing sites. They were: www.vote-smart.org, www.politics1.com and www.presidentelect.org. Within these sites there were 222 candidates categorised as "running" or a "possible runner" up to the 1.1.2004. After that we contacted the candidates and asked them to fill out the 10 questions of the Candidate Matcher. All in all, 52 persons answered the questionnaire and thus signed themselves in. The last day to register responses to the candidate matcher questions was 14.8.2004. Finally, we additionally included 13 candidates that had been defined as "major candidates" by the media. 7. What does it mean that a candidate's answers are "simulated"? For those major candidates, whose answers we didn't have, we made educated guesses on how they would have answered the candidate matcher's questions. We did a thorough research on the political views of the candidates whose answers had to be simulated. The simulation of the front-runners was done independently by two groups and the final result was elicited as the average of the two. 8. When will the votes be counted? The votes will be counted on November the 2nd, 6pm Hawaii time, right after the polling stations close. The results will be published on this site. 9. What are the matrix methods and how do they work? Matrix voting is the ideal method for every single-choice situation, that is a situation where a collective voting body is to to elect only one of the alternatives / candidates. Matrix methods use complete preferential information about voter preferences. By giving a ranking order of candidates, each voter indicates a preference - or indifference - between each two candidates. By utilizing this information, a collective preference is counted between each two candidates. A majority preference for X against Y means more votes show a preference for X against Y than for Y against X. Candidate X is the winner of the election if no candidate has a majority preference against X (in rare cases, there may be two or more such winners). If there is no such winner, each possible subset of at least three candidates is formed. Then a majority test is used against each subset. If at least one non-member has a majority preference against at least one member of a subset, then this subset is eliminated. The largest of surviving subsets goes to the PCM (Procedure for Conflicting Majorities). The phenomenom of conflicting majorities (majority paradox) is a news for many readers, so here is an explanation. A majority preference of course cannot conflict with itseself, but it can conflict with some other majority preference. It is possible for X to be preferred by majority to Y, when Y, at the same time, is preferred by a majority to Z, and Z is preferred by a majority to X. Impossible? Not at all. For example, let's have 45 voters who prefer X to Y and Y to Z, 30 who prefer Y to Z and Z to X, and 25 who prefer Z to X and X to Y - and there it is, conflicting majorities. Each voter is a member of one or two majorities and a member of two or one minorities. Conflicting majorities are no obstacle to achieve really majoritarian voting methods. It is possible to completely define a few ways to solve the problem of conflicting majorities, and since any such solving procedure can be used, there is more than one possible matrix voting method. Each of them has a perfect majority guarantee property, which you cannot find from non-matrix methods (unless some complicated method is functionally identical to some matrix method). Majority guarantee property: if a majority preference exists against X, then X cannot be elected, unless there are at least two other majority preferences which together conflict with the former mentioned majority. Of the PCM's completely tested so far, BeatPath method (Schulze method) survives best from the test of the rationality criteria (at least until the day some new method is proved to be better). That's why it is our choice. Mathematical description of the Schulze method: If there is a candidate A such that a majority of the voters strictly prefers candidate A to every other candidate then candidate A is the winner. Otherwise: d[X,Y] is the number of voters who strictly prefer candidate X to candidate Y. If there is a candidate A such that d[A,B] > d[B,A] for every other candidate B then candidate A is the winner. Otherwise: A "path from candidate A to candidate B of strength N" is an ordered set of candidates C(1),...,C(n) with: 1. C(1) is identical to A. 2. C(n) is identical to B. 3. For i=1 to (n-1): d[C(i),C(i+1)]-d[C(i+1),C(i)] > 0. 4. For i=1 to (n-1): d[C(i),C(i+1)] >= N. If there is a path from candidate A to candidate B of strength N and there is no path from candidate B to candidate A of strength N, then we say: "Candidate A disqualifies candidate B". The winner is that candidate who is not disqualified by any other candidate. 10. Why are the m-methods superior to other voting methods? The best way to compare voting methods is through a rationality criteria, that serves as a test bench for the voting systems. While the reasoning why a voting system does or does not hold a criteria and what that means might be quite abstract, it still offers an easy way to have a quick look at how well a voting system performs comparing to others.
11. What is the political implication if one method is better than the other? In classical voting systems the voter can face a paradox. If the voter votes according to his or her true preferences, the outcome can be worse than if he or she did not vote. The individual is forced to make a choice. Not between the issues or the candidates, but a choice whether to follow his or her heart - their true preferences - or his or her reason - the tactical calculations as to what kind of voting would have the best chances of effecting the desired outcome. It is clear that when the core of the decision system - the voting method - systematically forces the heart and the mind against each other, the result is apathy, ignorance and suffering. There are millions of ways of that this can happen, but we must not allow ourselves to be distracted by these "symptoms". The root cause or the "disease" does not promote itself, like politicians do. It lurks out of sight and it has to be found and dragged out into the light if we are to rebuild national democracies, and build a truly fair global democratic system. It is only in the matrix, where the perfect spectrum of the individual's choices, hopes and fears, can be directly transmitted into the decision structure that governs us all. There are no distractions, no speculation and no artificial limits to the expression of one's unbounded free will. In the matrix, we will all be equal. 12. You have advertised this site by promising "a 16% better world". How do you explain that? What if all voting decicions all over the world would be made by matrix methods? In every single election case, the balance between satisfaction and dissatisfaction among the participants would be either a) uneffected or b) moved towards more satisfaction. We believe maximization of voter satisfaction would also mean fairer, more rational and effective decicions. For example, how many percentage of internal and external wars, terrorist acts and other violent conflicts and social unrest would be avoided within ten years? How much less crime and corruption, ecological and economical disasters? Just think about it. In the long run, the 16% estimate may even be on the low side. 13. I have been campaigning for Instant Runoff Vote (IRV). Now you say m-methods are better. What should I do? Keep on campaigning for IRV, don't change horses if you are making progress. The scientific question of which voting method is the best when measured by objective criteria is separate from the political and strategic question as to what kind of reform can feasibly be attained for a specific political body. What we are proposing here is the opening of two entirely new spheres for democratic reforms. The first one is the reform of the decision method used inside political bodies. The second is to reform the structure of the popular referendum. For the functioning of a democracy, the voting system used inside the parliament (and other decision-making bodies) probably has even greater effect than the electoral system. It is inside the political body where the voices of the people are to be transferred to actual laws and policies by their representatives. If the political body fails in making decisions by democratic principles, the fine qualities of the electoral system have no value. Democracy, from the people to the actual laws and policies, is as weak as its weakest link. At the moment, every parliament in the world uses a voting system that concentrates the power into the hands of the group leaders, thus silencing the genuine multi faceted voice of the electorate. This may be the biggest flaw in democracy as it is practised today. This flaw could be overcome by simply installing any of the new m-methods in place of the old voting procedures. One of the most important arguments against direct democracy has been that in direct democracy, the alternatives have to be presented within two options. The plurality vote can cause paradoxes where more than two options exist. The voting procedure that parliaments use today, with several voting rounds, would be too slow and costly for popular votes. When you take any of the m-methods and use it for a popular referendum, this problem no longer exists. Note that there are many other aspects of direct democracy that one must take into account when designing a political decision-making system. But from now on, one obstacle against direct democracy has been entirely removed. 14. Are m-methods already in use somewhere? Usually, when an organisation has to define a voting system for its use, it happens that a committee is set to make the choise. Then they search a bit and ask around, finally ending up with the implementation of one of the most commonly used methods within the greater society. People are just starting to awaken for understanding what implications different voting systems have. One of the front-runners is the Debian software developers' community, which uses Beatpath as a general decision-making procedure. (Debian is a GNU/Linux operating system.) 15. How does the Candidate Matcher rank the candidates? The Candidate Matcher, or the "Neuro-Matcher", uses independent component analysis (ICA) to present the multidimensional questionnaire-data. ICA reveals hidden factors underlying the data. An independent component packs together questions that are related. The independent component space, rather than the original question-space, is used to calculate the rank-order of the candidates. Thus several similar questions have as big an effect on the closeness result as a question that is rather independent of the others. The closeness between a voter and a candidate is acquired as the opposite of the distance of their questions projected in the ICA-space. For more information on ICA : » www.cis.hut.fi/projects/compneuro/whatisica.html 16. What is a Self-Organising map? Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is used to visualise the candidates' questionnaire-answers. SOM presents multidimensional data on a 2-dimensional lattice, preserving the mutual distances of the original space. Candidates that answered similarly in the questionnaire appear near to each others on the map, too. In order to equalise the effect of different opinions, SOM is used to visualise the independent component space, not the original question-space. For more information on SOM : » www.cis.hut.fi/research/som-research/som.shtml 17. How do I know that no-one can know how I voted? The voting at the LFW site occurs without email or any kind of personal identification or information that could lead a voter to loose his or her privacy. In most electronic voting systems the voter is left to take the software-builders word as a guarantee for the voter's privacy. There may also be innovative security systems built into the system. However, that fact does not rule out the possibility of purposeful human action to violate the voter's privacy. After all, how a voter can be sure that the software does the things that it is alleged to do? In the end, it is a matter of trust. Here, the point is that you don't have to trust us to trust the LFW voting system's integrity. The data needed to identify you or to trace you simply never gets to the LFW voting system. There is no way to find out who voted how. Note: For 1% of the voters we ask email address to be able to contact the voter wins in the included lottery. We recognise that this is a compromise to the voter's privacy when viewed outside. Here, it is just our word that the email database is not connected to the ballot database. 18. How can I be sure that my vote was counted right? The Leader of the Free World election is based on security-through-publicity approach, that ensures the voter a verifiable audit trail. After the election, all the ballots are publicised with the identification number attached. Every voter can then independently check that his or her ballot was included in the vote. Any person with programming skills can do a recount from the publicised data. In most electronic voting systems any proof that is provided requires both highly abstract reasoning from the voter and an inevitable measure of trust. Here, you can verify your ballot within the complete set of ballots without any in-between apparatus. What you see is what you get. 19. How does your system prevent a person from voting more than once? It does not. Without a complete voter registry, rooted to a trusted source of the voters' identities, that is impossible. The LFW vote is an open suffrage election. 20. Why don't you use one vote per one email technology, wouldn't that be a simple way to prevent the double voting? We take voter integrity seriously. If we stored all the voters' emails, we would have no way of proving to the voters that we could continue to guarantee the secrecy of the ballot. It is our conviction that in any election where voter secrecy is a key principle, it should not simply be based on the word of the operators of the system. We believe that a voter is entitled to have a complete and unassailable proof that no one can see how he or she voted. Where there are no emails, there are no identities to be revealed. Besides, one vote per one email does not actually prevent a person from voting several times, given that anyone can freely open as many e-mail accounts, and under whatever names, as they wish. Finally, for a person who has the rights to create email addresses within a certain server, it would be easy to create a million email addresses. Leading from there, it would be just as simple for that person to write a piece of software by which he or she could vote a million times over. We have employed some methods that will scale down the double voting. To secure of the functioning of that system, the specific structure and methodology of this software will be kept secret until the election is over. In any event, the real problem is not to prevent the general electorate from double voting, but to prevent a single person from voting millions of times. 21. How does your system prevent a person from using software to submit millions of votes? To cast the vote, the voter has to recognise the numbers in the picture. An easy task for a human, but almost impossible to a computer. 22. How can I be sure that you have not added extra votes? You cannot. As much as we have worked to offer the world the best possible combination of voter privacy and integrity, this is a qualification criteria that we have not been able to construct. Suggestions are taken into account for further use. The only conceivable way to offer this kind of qualification would come out of a complete register of eligible voters. That is something that the present open suffrage elections cannot have. 23. Aren't you afraid that the Federal Election Comission shuts your site down? Not at all. While we are aware of the fact that FEC unlawfully pressured the NaderTrader.org to close down at 2000, we are prepared. LFW voting system operates at Sealand, the only geographical entity on Earth that is not connected to international community by a single treaty, yet is connected to the global economy with a high bandwidth. If USA really wants to close us down, it has to use military force to do so. With the case of LFW and Sealand, lawyers are just as useless as they are in Guantanamo base. 24. Who is Tim Stryker? Tim Stryker was a dreamer, a thinker, a patriot, a direct democracy pioneer, a consensus builder, a game designer and a friend. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||