I believe there was a lawsuit where someone alleged that the draft lottery was unfair, because the slips with names on them were not being mixed thoroughly enough; and the judge replied, “To whom is it unfair?”
Not that I don’t think there can be legitimate problems with the degree of randomness. Just that in the absence of legitimate problems, people still might have problems with it that aren’t legitimate.
The risk I’m worried about isn’t insufficient randomness (I think this is what’s alleged in the lottery story). I’m worried that the hat-picker could collude with one of the candidates to increase their chance of winning.
This is sort-of a “the AI is smarter than you” situation where I don’t know exactly how they’d do it, but I imagine if you gave Penn & Teller a hat, a pen, and a stack of paper, they could convincingly select the same “random” piece of paper over and over again. And even if they couldn’t actually do it, if some voters are convinced that they did, then your election still has a legitimacy problem.
The paper’s in a hat discussion made me think back to this from Probability is in the Mind:
Not that I don’t think there can be legitimate problems with the degree of randomness. Just that in the absence of legitimate problems, people still might have problems with it that aren’t legitimate.
The risk I’m worried about isn’t insufficient randomness (I think this is what’s alleged in the lottery story). I’m worried that the hat-picker could collude with one of the candidates to increase their chance of winning.
This is sort-of a “the AI is smarter than you” situation where I don’t know exactly how they’d do it, but I imagine if you gave Penn & Teller a hat, a pen, and a stack of paper, they could convincingly select the same “random” piece of paper over and over again. And even if they couldn’t actually do it, if some voters are convinced that they did, then your election still has a legitimacy problem.