
Kleroterion - valeg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion
======
aidenn0
While Athens was not selecting ballots, but representatives directly, random
ballot voting[1] is related and is one of a very few voting systems in which
strategic voting (voting for other than your preferences in order to get the
desired outcome) is never correct.

There are systems that make strategic voting not correct in most (if not all)
real-world settings, but those are so complicated that IMO strategic voting
would still happen just because people don't understand the system.

I would love to see random ballot voting for electing any sufficeintly large
set of representatives, it's simple and provides proportional representation.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_ballot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_ballot)

~~~
Spellman
Non-determinism isn't great though.

It could be useful to allocate a number of seats, but then deciding who filled
those seats would be a matter of headache (or "trust the party!" goes into
effect and removes direct voting)

~~~
wolfgang42
Determinism can be readily added by means of a simple procedure (the name of
which I have forgotten—hopefully a fellow commenter can chime in here): Along
with their vote, each voter submits a random number between 1 and _N_ , where
_N_ is the number of voters. To select which ballot should decide the vote,
all numbers are publicly revealed and added together, modulo _N_ : the
resulting number selects which ballot should be used. It is not possible for
any individual or group to fix the final number in advance, since even a
single non-cooperating individual can alter the final number in an arbitrary
way.

Obviously this simple form can only be used if _N_ is known in advance, but I
_think_ that if you instead select a sufficiently large maximum (several times
larger than the probable _N_ ) the randomness property should remain.

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simon_weber
I named a project after these!
[https://www.kleroteria.org](https://www.kleroteria.org)

~~~
NKosmatos
Interesting idea/project, never heard of the listserve or anything similar.
Site is clean and fast, nice work ;-) A few questions if I may. How many
people are registered? If someone is selected (randomly), can he/she be
selected again next week? Do you plan to release/make public available all
previous emails?

~~~
simon_weber
Thanks!

There's around 1k members right now. I stole the 10k catchphrase from The
Listserve. Consider it aspirational!

Yes, people can be selected multiple times, but they must submit a post before
they can be selected again.

No, I don't currently plan to release the posts. I might change that at some
point but I'd want authors to opt in -- even though the license allows it
without their consent I doubt everyone understands that.

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HarryHirsch
Look at that! And then look at contemporary hiring. A phone screen, a video
interview, an on-site, another on-site, a take-home exam, psychometric
testing, dowsing, crystal pendulum, and it still doesn't work better than
casting lots.

~~~
trhway
>it still doesn't work better than casting lots.

i don't know about that. Using all these tools you listed the companies have
been able to "hire the best, the top 1% (or 2%)" while casting the lots they
would definitely not be able to do that.

~~~
mdorazio
> the companies have been able to "hire the best, the top 1% (or 2%)"

Citation strongly needed. Having worked with a lot of big companies, I'd say
Top 20% is still generous.

~~~
trhway
1 or 20 doesnt matter - for any N>0 only one company can do "top N", not all
of them who pretend to achieve that, and they wouldn't be able to pretend it
if they used the random approach like the GGP suggested.

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bijection
It's interesting that the people being chosen with a kleroterion and black and
white dice were called 'dikastes', since the mechanic was literally 'die
casting' (as in die rolling, not the manufacturing process).

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spenczar5
This is cool, but why didn't they use 5 chests with tickets on them, drawing
names round-robin from the chests?

~~~
gumby
Probably for technological reasons: they didn't use paper so the tokens had
two problems: 1 - they were non-uniform so could in theory be biased and 2 -
typically the tokens were made of dried clay, so could easily fracture.

For casting votes potshards were typically marked by the voter to indicate
preference, then discarded.

