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Qatar vs Ecuador HIGHLIGHTS – FIFA World Cup 2022: QAT 0-2 ECU – Ecuador sealed all 3 points as they comfortably defeated Qatar in the opening game with a 2-0 lead. A first-half BRACE from skipper Enner Valencia was enough for the South American side to grab the vital. Enner Valencia opened the scoring within 3 minutes. However, after a lengthy VAR check, the goal was ruled out as the hosts survive an early mishap. Valencia then scored from the spot after being fouled inside the box and then with a Towering header made it 2-0 just past the half-hour mark. 

Ecuador eased past World Cup debutants Qatar 2-0 on Sunday with first-half goals from veteran striker Enner Valencia in a one-sided affair that was the first opening game defeat for a host nation in the tournament’s history. Ecuador’s all-time top scorer, nicknamed “Superman” at home, scored an early penalty and added a well-taken 31st-minute header to give the South Americans a commanding first-half lead as the home side froze with the enormity of the occasion.

“Maybe the responsibility and the nerves got the better of us,” Qatar’s Spanish coach Felix Sanchez said.

It could have been even worse for the Qataris in front of a 67,372 crowd at the tent-shaped Al Bayt stadium where they were kicking off the Middle East’s first World Cup. Valencia had a third minute header disallowed for a marginal offside after shaky goalkeeper Saad Alsheeb flapped at the ball

One of the most important rights of American citizens is the franchise—the right to vote. Yet, three things are certain, Death, Taxes, and since 754 BC mistrust in voting systems. The first recorded popular elections of officials to public office, by majority vote, where all citizens were eligible both to vote and to hold public office, date back to the Ephors of Sparta in 754 BC, under the mixed government of the Spartan Constitution. Rummers were it was rigged. 

Even if the current voting system is 100% accurate, it still fails miserably at instilling confidence in the system, by the people who use that system. 

Which is problematic at best, and could be catastrophic, assuming you would consider things like Civil War catastrophic.

Is there a better way? and if so can we legally change the system? 

Originally under the Constitution, only white male citizens over the age of 21 were eligible to vote. This was changed later when Generally, states limited this right to property-owning or tax-paying white males (about 6% of the population). However, some states allowed also Black males to vote, and New Jersey also included unmarried and widowed women, regardless of color.

Voting in America can be changed, and historically has been changed. I argue, the dumpster-fire, we call the voting system needs to change and become more responsive to “We the People” and less responsive to “We the Special Interest Groups”. 

If you feel that the current voting system, is acceptable, then please feel free to comment by all means. I tend the think most Americans today might feel an improvement one rung up from a dumpster fire might be good. 

So what should a voting system do? What are the qualifications? What does Voter experience ((VX) like customer experience (CX)) feel like? Do improvements in VX lead to higher confidence in the system? What does the voting public think a great voting system does? And, is it even feasible? 

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

John F Kennedy

Now my opinion and a dollar will buy half a cup of coffee at Denny’s. So here is what I think today, I might think differently tomorrow, and so might you (massive legal disclaimer imputed). 

A Voting System should : 

1. When any vote caster leaves the voting booth, the vote caster should feel extremely confident that the vote cast was recorded. 
2. The person receiving those votes should understand that the system is working during voting, and the person receiving those votes should get the results at the same time that all voters receive those results. 
3. One Person, One Vote.
4. Instill confidence in the results (avoid civil war)

I grew up in Phoenix Arizona in the 60s, and back then we said the pledge of allegiance every morning, and when we voted those were the rules. They were Goodenough for Barry Goldwater and the county then, they should be good enough for today.

Voting and the Wisdom of the crowd. 

Theoretically, during an election between 2+ candidates, the majority of votes within a group lead to the best candidate. That is the theory. How does the wisdom of the crowd figure into the current system? When votes are culled (rejected) or added (felony) it dilutes the wisdom of the crowd (truth). And, when the voting public has zero confidence that their voice was heard results in the next Tea Party, who was right, or who was wrong will have little consequences. 

Fortunately, these are problems above my pay grade. But as a citizen, I can observe and report, and that is what I intend to do. Because that challenge is one that I am willing to accept, one I am unwilling to postpone, and one which we (as a species) intend to win.

There is a very high-level group who is meeting and chatting about these very things at this very moment. They have the ear of a global community, that may accept a global standard for transparent voting. This would be historic, or it could be tragic. In the coming weeks, I am going to try to Interview some of these patriots, who are working toward better outcomes. I will continue to, to the best of my ability, truthfully (what does mean) report outcomes from this group. This group has a public forum coming up this Friday at 10 am New York.

Please accept my invitation to attend the upcoming Government Blockchain Public Forum. You should consider attending. You should also plan on bringing your two cents with you. This is a free, online public forum.

The Government Blockchain Public Forum – The purpose of this group is to share the use of blockchain in the public sector. It is open to the public and should be used to share lessons learned concerning blockchain use in the public sector. 

This group meets this Friday at 10:00 AM (New York).

https://gbaglobal.org/events/government-blockchain-public-forum-2/?gde=2022-12-02

Big shout out and Thank you to the Goverment Blockchain Association 

https://GBAGlobal.org

Michael Noel CBP

aka Biz Builder Mike

 eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation

For you Voting Geeks with insomnia, I have a nowhere-near-comprehensive list of some of the documentation available. 

Wisdom of the Crowd Voting: Truthful Aggregation of Voter Information and Preferences 

https://jhc.sjtu.edu.cn/~bstao/WisdomOfTheCrowdVoting.pdf

We consider two-alternative elections where voters’ preferences depend on a state variable that is not directly observable. Each voter receives a private signal that is correlated to the state variable. As a special case, our model captures the common scenario where voters can be categorized into three types: those who always prefer one alternative, those who always prefer the other, and those contingent voters whose preferences depend on the state. In this setting, even if every voter is a contingent voter, agents voting according to their private information need not result in the adoption of the universally preferred alternative, because the signals can be systematically biased. We present a mechanism that elicits and aggregates the private signals from the voters and outputs the alternative that is favored by the majority. In particular, voters truthfully reporting their signals forms a strong Bayes-Nash equilibrium (where no coalition of voters can deviate and receive a better outcome)

Effect of Crowd Voting on Participation in Crowdsourcing Contests

While the expert rating is still a dominant approach for selecting winners in contests for creative works, a few crowdsourcing platforms have recently used “crowd voting” for winner selection – that is, let users of the crowdsourcing community publicly vote for contest winners.

https://carlsonschool.umn.edu/sites/carlsonschool.umn.edu/files/2020-07/ChenXuLiu-CrowdVoting.pdf

The advantages of groups over individuals in complex decision-making 

https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/S0219525918500133

The advantages of groups over individuals in complex decision-making have long interested scientists across disciplinary divisions. Averaging over a collection of individual judgments proves a reliable strategy for aggregating information, particularly in diverse groups in which statistically independent beliefs fall on both sides of the truth and contradictory biases are canceled out. Social influence, some have said, narrows variation in individual opinions and undermines this wisdom-of-crowds effect in continuous estimation tasks. Researchers, however, neglected to study the social-influence effects on voting in discrete choice tasks. Using agent-based simulation, we show that under voting — the most widespread social decision rule — social influence contributes to information aggregation and thus strengthens collective judgment. Adding to our knowledge about complex systems comprised of adaptive agents, this finding has important ramifications for the design of collective decision-making in both public administration and private firms.