Truth and Probability—Ironies in the Evolution of Social Choice Theory

Social choice theory explores the ways in which individual preferences or choices translate into group choices. One of the most devastating discoveries of social choice theory is sometimes known as the voting paradox, brought back to modem consciousness by economist, Kenneth Arrow, in his famous work entitled Social Choice and Individual Values. Roughly stated, the paradox is that voting in situations involving more than a simple, binary choice will not always reveal the true decision of a decision-making body. The motivation for this Article is to understand how and why, having discovered the voting paradox in 1785, Condorcet actually became a more ardent believer in democratic decision making in later writings until his unfortunate death in 1794. More importantly, this Article examines Condorcet\u27s discovery of the voting paradox in the larger context of his life\u27s work to determine what solutions to the paradox he might have seen that modem social choice theorists and the legal literature have not fully explored. Part II of this Article briefly describes the history and implications of social choice theory and the famous voting paradox. Part III first offers a general picture of Condorcet\u27s life and work. It then explores the connections between the philosophies of Condorcet, Rousseau and the more modem civic republican traditions. Part IV takes a closer look at Condorcet\u27s original decision-making theory. Part V uncovers many civic republican themes within the context of the larger body of Condorcet\u27s work and uses these themes to explore what his work might contribute to the modem discourse

The White Knight: A Study of C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)

In "The White Knight," the story of C. L. Dodgson ("Lewis Carroll") is re-told. The original biography by Stuart Dodgson Collingwood was wrritten in the lifetime of many people whose feelings had to be considered and information vital to an understanding of Dodgson as a man was deliberately suppressed. His relations with Alice Liddell and with the Liddell family were passed over in silence when they could not be represented as idyllic. Proof is now offered that Dodgson's love for the child Alice Liddell did not end with her childhood but affected his entire life. Alice was more than the heroine of the "Adventures," more than the child to whom they were originally told. She acted on Dodgson as a powerful stimulus and catalyst, fusing in her service all his powers and rewarding him with a smile. At her feet he laid his mathematics, his imagination, wit and adult interest in the intellectual battles which raged in and about Oxford during the years in which "Alice" and "Through the Looking-glass" were composed. Robbed of her by disparity in age, the long-drawn-out hostility of the Dean and Mrs. Liddell and Alice's preference for a younger man, he slowly disintegrated, aged prematurely and died without fulfilling the promise of his earlier work. The development of Dudgson's ideas from "Rectory Umbrella" days, through "Alice" to "Through the Looking-glass" is traced in detail. It is shown that "Alice" in part and "Through the Looking-glass" as a whole can be appreciated by children only as "Gulliver's Travels" is appreciated. In "The Hunting of the Snark" wit struggles, and in the long run triumphs over feelings akin to despair, while in "Sylvie and Bruno" genius has given way to mere ingenuity and creation to thinly disguised autobiography. The analytical parts are claimed as new and original, but new biographical material will also be found, concerning Dodgson and the Liddells. Much of this has been supplied by Miss P. Menella Dodgson who, with her sisters, now has the surviving volumes of Dodgson's unpublished diary. During a correspondence which has extended over several years no request by the present writer has ever been refused. As a result, the picture has been transformed and much that in Collingwood appears casual and chatty acquires new significance in the light of this information

Reserved Seats: A Study of the Decline of a Convention in the Church of England

This thesis explores the controversy about privileged seating in the Church of England during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The institutionalisation of the pew system implied some unease. Early protests are noticed, then the strictures of three bishops and the reactions of five priests in the first half of the nineteenth century are considered. The Report on the Census argued that less than half the seats in parish churches were really free, and that such discrimination alienated the poor. But a House of Lords’ Committee learned that numerous poor worshippers liked to pay for their accommodation. Nevertheless, it hoped the system would disappear. The revival of Convocations enabled Church leaders corporately to debate the issue. York denounced the system, but Canterbury, though worried, reached no firm decision. In the 1860 s some critics combined to form an Association leading to discussion in a forum where clergy and laity voiced strong opposition. After much initial success, the Association's recourse to legislation probably retarded its advance. The Lords set up another Committee which produced valuable statistics of churches now free, but 'appropriation' in most of the others) without comment. The fortunes of the Association in the 20th century are tracked to its dissolution in 1929, and the influence of World War I is observed. When the government of the Church is reformed, the Association mounts its final assault through the new National Assembly. A committee is appointed which deplores the system, believes it to be in terminal decline, and proposes only that it be left to die. It lingers vestigially until the mid-century. The thesis concludes that though the freeing of pews did not draw.the working classes in, the struggle was worthwhile

Vers des modes de scrutin moins manipulables

We study coalitional manipulation of voting systems: can a subset of voters, by voting strategically, elect a candidate they all prefer to the candidate who would have won if all voters had voted truthfully? From a theoretical point of view, we develop a formalism which makes it possible to study all voting systems, whether the ballots are orders of preference on the candidates (ordinal systems), ratings or approval values (cardinal systems), or even more general objects. We show that for almost all classical voting systems, their manipulability can be strictly reduced by adding a preliminary test aiming to elect the Condorcet winner if there is one. For the other voting systems, we define the generalized Condorcification which leads to similar results. Then we define the notion of decomposable culture, an assumption of which the probabilistic independence of voters is a special case. Under this assumption, we prove that, for each voting system, there exists a voting system which is ordinal, shares certain properties with the original voting system, and is at most as manipulable. Thus, the search for a voting system of minimal manipulability (in a class of reasonable systems) can be restricted to those which are ordinal and satisfy the Condorcet criterion. In order to allow everyone to examine these phenomena in practice, we present SVVAMP, a Python package of our own dedicated to the study of voting systems and their manipulability. Then we use it to compare the coalitional manipulability of various voting systems in several types of cultures, i.e. probabilistic models that generate populations of voters equipped with random preferences. We then complete the analysis with elections from real experiments. Finally, we determine the voting systems with minimal manipulability for very low values of the number of voters and of the number of candidates, and we compare them with the classical voting systems of the literature. In general, we establish that Borda's method, Range voting, and Approval voting are particularly manipulable. Conversely, we show the excellent resistance to manipulation of the system called IRV, also known as STV, and of its variant Condorcet-IRV.Nous étudions la manipulation par coalition des modes de scrutin: est-ce qu'un sous-ensemble des électeurs, en votant de façon stratégique, peut faire élire un candidat qu'ils préfèrent tous au candidat qui aurait été vainqueur si tous les électeurs avaient voté sincèrement? D'un point de vue théorique, nous développons un formalisme qui permet d'étudier tous les modes de scrutin, que les bulletins soient des ordres de préférences sur les candidats (systèmes ordinaux), des notes ou des valeurs d'approbation (systèmes cardinaux) ou des objets encore plus généraux. Nous montrons que pour la quasi-totalité des modes de scrutin classiques, on peut réduire strictement leur manipulabilité en ajoutant un test préliminaire visant à élire le vainqueur de Condorcet s'il en existe un. Pour les autres modes de scrutin, nous définissons la condorcification généralisée qui permet d'obtenir des résultats similaires. Puis nous définissons la notion de culture décomposable, une hypothèse dont l'indépendance probabiliste des électeurs est un cas particulier. Sous cette hypothèse, nous prouvons que, pour tout mode de scrutin, il existe un mode de scrutin qui est ordinal, qui partage certaines propriétés avec le mode de scrutin original et qui est au plus aussi manipulable. Ainsi, la recherche d'un mode de scrutin de manipulabilité minimale (dans une classe de systèmes raisonnables) peut être restreinte à ceux qui sont ordinaux et vérifient le critère de Condorcet. Afin de permettre à tous d'examiner ces phénomènes en pratique, nous présentons SVVAMP, un package Python de notre cru dédié à l'étude des modes de scrutin et de leur manipulabilité. Puis nous l'utilisons pour comparer la manipulabilité par coalition de divers modes de scrutin dans plusieurs types de cultures, c'est-à-dire des modèles probabilistes permettant de générer des populations d'électeurs munis de préférences aléatoires. Nous complétons ensuite l'analyse avec des élections issues d'expériences réelles. Enfin, nous déterminons les modes de scrutin de manipulabilité minimale pour de très faibles valeurs du nombre d'électeurs et du nombre de candidats et nous les comparons avec les modes de scrutin classiques. De manière générale, nous établissons que la méthode de Borda, le vote par notation et le vote par assentiment sont particulièrement manipulables. À l'inverse, nous montrons l'excellente résistance à la manipulation du système appelé VTI, également connu par son acronyme anglophone STV ou IRV, et de sa variante Condorcet-VTI

Secure multi party computations for electronic voting

Στην παρούσα εργασία, μελετούμε το πρόβλημα της ηλεκτρονικής ψηφοφορίας. Θεωρούμε ότι είναι έκφανση μιας γενικής διαδικασίας αποφάσεων που μπορεί να υλοποιηθεί μέσω υπολογισμών πολλαπλών οντοτήτων, οι οποίοι πρέπει να ικανοποιούν πολλές και αντικρουόμενες απαιτήσεις ασφαλείας. Έτσι μελετούμε σχετικές προσεγγίσεις οι οποίες βασιζονται σε κρυπτογραφικές τεχνικές, όπως τα ομομορφικά κρυπτοσυστήματα, τα δίκτυα μίξης και οι τυφλές υπογραφές. Αναλύουμε πώς προσφέρουν ακεραιότητα και ιδιωτικότητα (μυστικότητα) στην διαδικασία και την σχέση τους με την αποδοτικότητα. Εξετάζουμε τα είδη λειτουργιών κοινωνικής επιλογής που μπορούν να υποστηρίξουν και παρέχουμε δύο υλοποιήσεις. Επιπλέον ασχολούμαστε με την αντιμετώπιση ισχυρότερων αντιπάλων μη παρέχοντας αποδείξεις ψήφου ή προσφέροντας δυνατότητες αντίστασης στον εξαναγκασμό. Με βάση την τελευταία έννοια προτείνουμε μια τροποποίηση σε ένα ευρέως χρησιμοποιούμενο πρωτόκολλο. Τέλος μελετούμε δύο γνωστές υλοποιήσεις συστημάτων ηλεκτρονικής ψηφοφοριας το Helios και το Pret a Voter .In this thesis, we study the problem of electronic voting as a general decision making process that can be implemented using multi party computations, fulfilling strict and often conflicting security requirements. To this end, we review relevant cryptographic techniques and their combinations to form voting protocols. More specifically, we analyze schemes based on homomorphic cryptosystems, mixnets with proofs of shuffles and blind signatures. We analyze how they achieve integrity and privacy in the voting process, while keeping efficiency. We examine the types of social choice functions that can be supported by each protocol. We provide two proof of concept implementations. Moreover, we review ways to thwart stronger adversaries by adding receipt freeness and coercion resistance to voting systems. We build on the latter concept to propose a modification to a well known protocol. Finally, we study two actual e-Voting implementations namely Helios and Pret a Voter

The Victorian Newsletter (Fall 2002)

The Victorian Newsletter is sponsored for the Victorian Group of the Modern Language Association by Western Kentucky University and is published twice annually."Ut Pictura Poesis": The Nineteenth-Century Perspective / Lawrence Starzyk -- Flowers on a Dunghill in The Nether World / Constance Harsh -- Who Is Heathcliff? The Shadow Knows / Marilyn Hume -- Arnold's "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time": "Finally, there is the systematic judgment...the most worthless of all." / Nilli Diengott -- Monkeys, Microcephalus Idiots, and the Barbarous Races of Mankind: Darwin's Dangerous Victorianism / Leila S. May -- Allusion in Robert Browning's "A Death in the Desert" / Robert Inglesfield -- Rossetti's Belated and Disturbed Walk Poems / Ernest Fontana -- Coming in Victorian Newsletter -- Books Received -- Group New