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Comment by tomjen3 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it is a good idea at all. If the political power boiled down to picking paper over scissors, the loosing side may very well ascribed no legitimacy to the outcome. That is almost certainly going to end far worse than actually counting all the votes (i am looking at you, supreme court).

The same problem happens with your exam example. Why is it fair that someone less competent than you got in? A better solution would be to let everyone over the cut off point in.

I can't disagree with your example of the stock market, so long as the trades were still executed with a few seconds.

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If some guy gets into medicine because their parents did their homework, drilled them in SAT techniques, and hired a firm to fabricate a good admissions letter, are they really more competent than a kid who did their own homework, got a high SAT score because of their IQ and good study habits, and wrote an honest admissions letter?

Do people think our current politicians are legitimate? I'd rather see them be more willing to say what they think, and act with conviction than get a guy who is 0.1% more popular.

Yeah, it's a strawman. Will randomization discourage people from playing the game dishonestly? Or will people panic, and play the game harder, and give up on the honest component of what they are doing? I don't really know.

It would just be recognizing the jitter that exists inherently in the system. You will always get a different number when counting the votes, so you can end up with a "50% voted for both" situation.

Why is flipping a coin worse than pretending the next count will be more correct? You kind of contradict your own point by implying the supreme court didn't supply legitimacy to the election. Nobody can blame a quarter for being stiffed with neocons on the heads side.

The trouble is that getting people to recognize that is really hard, and just changing how the system works probably won't do it. If you want to politically antagonize nearly any American with a strong political affiliation, regardless of what that affiliation is, just tell them that the margin of error in the 2000 presidential elections was far larger than the difference in votes, and therefore both candidates were about equally legitimate winners.

The losing side will always find some reason to claim the outcome is illegitimate and if you don't get in you will always be able to find someone you think you are better than.

What might make sense would be a combination. Have some barrier to entrance to limit the people to choose from, but then select randomly from the remaining candidates. For example, to be considered for an elected position, you first have to receive %x of the vote, or maybe only select from the top 3. This way you help to ensure that the person being elected is representing some of the population, but hopefully eliminating some of the games.

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