Election Integrity FAQS

This is a working topic which will be updated and reorganized based on questions that are received and answers composed. Hopefully, this will save some time and effort. Composed primarily by Ray Lutz and he is open to discussing the conclusions of any of these answers

1. Please explain to me why you think that using the election management system for the lottery is a problem.

It's simply because we can't look into the details of how they are selecting the "random" set. The random selection must be a surprise and unpredictable. If they know the selection in advance, know how the random numbers are selected, etc. then they may be predictable. In San Diego, for example, we had 1522 precincts in the last election. Of those, the random selection chooses 16. So there are 1504 left to manipulate if they can avoid the 16 that are chosen. Flip 10 votes per precinct in 1500 and you have changed 15,000 votes from one candidate to the other. Thus, it is critical that the random selection be understandable and unpredictable by election officials. Standard pseudo-random number generators are not truly random, and can be predicted, even though the numbers look random. Better is to use ten-sided dice. These are cheap, easy to use, and impossible to predict.
Topic revision: r1 - 18 Oct 2016, RaymondLutz
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