@Jack-Waugh It sounds like you simply described a random voting system with the 32 bit hex thing. Not sure what you're after here. I don't think your vote can be sincere when the voter doesn't know how to do anything other than put a random number down.

Regardless, I'm saying no one is going to accept a voting method with randomness in it as you describe, even with your more reasonable options. It is a non-starter.

That said, I think several "reasonable" methods are hard to say what a sincere vote is, Approval being the most obvious one. But a ranked method it is pretty straightforward to determine what a sincere vote is.

@Jack-Waugh It sounds like you simply described a random voting system with the 32 bit hex thing. Not sure what you're after here. I don't think your vote can be sincere when the voter doesn't know how to do anything other than put a random number down.

Regardless, I'm saying no one is going to accept a voting method with randomness in it as you describe, even with your more reasonable options. It is a non-starter.

That said, I think several "reasonable" methods are hard to say what a sincere vote is, Approval being the most obvious one. But a ranked method it is pretty straightforward to determine what a sincere vote is.

Introducing randomness into an election is a bad idea on so many levels. For instance, what if you have a recount? But just the general idea of it will be, and should be, offensive to many. This is not the same as picking a jury, obviously. (a jury is supposed to be random)

I'm sure voters can wrap their heads around the idea of a system that doesn't punish honest/sincere voting. Some will still try to vote strategically for a while, but those voters will essentially average out and not cause a lot of harm. The main point is that a system that favors honest voting.

I suspect the reason people only scored a subset of the candidates (in STAR elections, I guess) is that they didn't know anything about the ones they didn't give a score to. That's exactly what I'd do... just give them all an implicit zero. Even though I fully understand the idea of supporting multiple candidates.

@Jack-Waugh
So it is installed? Do I just do this?

https://codepen.io/karmatics/pen/eYJxXge

(apparently not.... are you sure it is running?)

@Jack-Waugh Nobody needs to build a plug in, it already exists. You just need to install it. https://www.npmjs.com/package/nodebb-plugin-codepen

@Marylander Codepens aren't running arbitrary JS on the actual site, they are running it in an iframe that is embedded into the site and can't communicate with the JS runtime within the site.

If they allowed people to, for instance, steal your login credentials (e.g.. read your document.cookie and then post it to a random URL), Codepen would have never even considered making them run embedded in forums. I can assure you they carefully considered the security implications and architected it in a way that prevents such things..

@Sass Agree that anything with randomness is bad. Can't speak to people's incentives to vote though. Having some degree of randomness doesn't necessarily make their vote "matter" less, at least not from a game theoretical point of view. Still I think anything with true randomness would never fly in any real world political election.

Kind of similar to what I was doing in Codepen, for instance here:

https://codepen.io/karmatics/pen/eYJxXge

Mine looked like this (when there is only one of a particular vote combination, there is no number and colon on the left needed):

134: a[5] b[4] c[2] d[1] e[0] f[0]
64: a[5] b[4] c[3] d[1] e[0] f[0]
94: a[3] b[5] c[4] d[1] e[0] f[0]
70: a[2] b[2] c[5] d[2] e[0] f[0]
63: a[0] b[0] c[0] d[3] e[4] f[5]
55: a[0] b[0] c[1] d[3] e[5] f[4]
55: a[0] b[1] c[2] d[3] e[5] f[3]
48: a[0] b[0] c[1] d[3] e[5] f[5]
30: a[1] b[0] c[0] d[3] e[3] f[5]
30: a[0] b[1] c[2] d[5] e[5] f[4]

You can see I have a parser and all that.

This one worked with the format of data from an actual election in Maine, which is an ugly and bulky csv format:

https://codepen.io/karmatics/pen/eYJxoMa

I was doing this when I was hoping that Codepen embedding would be added to this forum, not sure if that is in the works. But I think if it was, having a standard format would gain a lot of traction here.