I would like to see the ideas of dithering applied to voting systems.
Ie. Imagine a country with hundreds of elected officials, each of which represents a town or city. Each official is part of a party.
A dithering-like system could be used during the vote so that the country as a whole is fairly represented, and most towns also are represented by who the majority of their population wants.
It would work by, during an election, whenever a candidate is chosen for a location, any votes for other parties get transferred to neighbouring towns and cities. That is done repeatedly until every towns seat is filled, and nearly every voters vote has an impact (if not in their local town, then it gets to help a candidate of the same party nearbyish)
It's extremely common in Europe, and there are a lot of different precise methods for it. But the point is exactly what you're describing -- every vote has an impact.
I've always been baffled that not only has the idea never taken off in the US, virtually nobody except political scientists seems to be even aware of it.
This is what (for example) congress and congressional districts are supposed to help with, but gerrymandering prevents it from working as intended. I’m kinda guessing that adding a dithering algorithm might only change the gerrymandering without fixing the problem, but I’m certainly curious as to what that might look like and whether there are ways to prevent gerrymandering, with or without vote dithering. I’m guessing it would be extremely difficult to get anything with randomness in it passed as law.
First we need to get “one person, one vote” to be the actual goal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote). In the US, the electoral college was specifically designed to not have one person, one vote as the primary goal, and we haven’t been able to change it yet. For presidential elections, we don’t really need dithering so much as simple majority winner, plus run-off vote counting.
Maybe run-off voting already is a type of vote dithering?
Some dithering algorithms are deterministic, not all of them. The simplest & most basic dithering you can do is random, and that works quite well when targeting 8 bits per channel.
The reason I bought it up is because deterministic dithering can definitely be gamed by gerrymandering, so if you want to avoid that you might need to introduce randomness, but then you will have an even harder time getting people to buy in than with a deterministic algorithm.
Ie. Imagine a country with hundreds of elected officials, each of which represents a town or city. Each official is part of a party.
A dithering-like system could be used during the vote so that the country as a whole is fairly represented, and most towns also are represented by who the majority of their population wants.
It would work by, during an election, whenever a candidate is chosen for a location, any votes for other parties get transferred to neighbouring towns and cities. That is done repeatedly until every towns seat is filled, and nearly every voters vote has an impact (if not in their local town, then it gets to help a candidate of the same party nearbyish)