Looks like this would favor highly coordinated groups to have outsized influence over poorly coordinated groups.
So people who vote in isolation have less influence than people who organize and vote as a bloc.
I think it also means that places where one party predominates would require the minority party to be highly coordinated in order to have any chance with one single silver “bullet” whereas the dominant party can expend multiple “bullets” to counter.
I always hate the framing as “polarized”. There’s tons of things Democrats and Republicans agree on.
Military spending goes up every year. Save for Dodd-Frank, deregulation has been common across presidencies for 30 years along with corporate tax cuts...
The establishment gets things done, they really do, it’s just not things that help everyday people. I’m not sure how this would help that.
I find this kind of thinking dangerous, because it falls into the "they're just 2 sides of the same coin" mindset. Not to mention, it is also false. The DoD budget for 2019 is below the budget for 2008, and much lower as a percentage of total expenditures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
Yes, there are things the parties agree on, but that minimizes the huge, material differences between their platforms, e.g.:
- appropriate levels of taxation, and especially types of taxation (e.g. capital gains, inheritance taxes, etc.)
- mix of spending on social programs
- the huge gap on social issues, such as abortion, gay rights, gun control, etc.
"They're just the same, they don't care about the little guy, etc." are tactics the Russian trolls used to convince people not to vote.
Almost all voting systems in use today will allow a plurality of political actors, and hence most democracies have more than two parties represented in parliament. That is, except "first past the post" which is the system in the UK and US. It inevitably and systemically always devolves into a de facto two-party system.
I'm sure you can see how this is a problem?
Granted, quadratic voting specifically was probably not designed with parliamentary elections in mind. There are other systems in use that are designed to be fair and result in decent representation of voters.
The problem is that while 'everyday people' no doubt have ideas which would improve everyone's lives, there is also very large to majority support for capital punishment and complete shutdown of immigration.
Basically they disagree on how to treat their fellow citizens.
Democrats are against outright hostility and blatant marginalization of certain classes.
But both have largely been ok with everyone being exploited by feudal trade economics, bombing other nations to satisfy global political norms, and swindling developing nations out of their resources, while emotionally coddling elites.
It means something to not be outright hostile to the truly marginalized, but the Dems have not exactly been labors friend. And most people are laborers. They’ve failed the majority plenty.
The greeks had two institutions we could use: ostracism and lottery.
We should be able to vote on those we want out of politics and the most voted would have to seat it out.
And a small portion of representatives should be chosen by lottery. Maybe 5% or 10%. These representatives, obviously, would not have to answer to their sponsors.
Actually, why not choose all representatives by lottery?
I don't think representatives need to have any particular competencies beyond being representative of the interests of the population. Hired staff can take care of things that require particular abilities.
I reckon that a wholly random set of representatives would act like a direct democracy where every voter is free to fully focus on the issues, is allowed an entire staff to help them, and can consult and coordinate effectively with other voters. I think that could work pretty well.
> The greeks had two institutions we could use: ostracism and lottery
To expand on the former, if a majority of Athenians voted to hold an ostracism vote, two months later, the person with the most votes (potentially over a minimum) was banished from the city for 10 years [1].
One can imagine a gentler modern version. Every ballot must have an ostracism line. Every candidate on that ballot must appear on this line. If a simple majority of voters choose the same person, a second one-line election is held in 2 months. If a simple majority of voters, two months later, vote again to ostracize, the candidate is barred from appearing on that jurisdiction's ballots for 8 years.
So if a majority of New Yorkers say Richard Nixon is ostracized, he is simply unable to appear on New York ballots for 8 years. Given the ballot will contain all manner of candidates running for many different offices, this makes it sufficiently difficult to ostracism while providing an incentive against polarization.
Those were always pretty interesting ideas to me, and I always used to wonder why the Founders did not replicate those facets of the Athenian Republic? It would solve a lot of our problems today.
Imagine Google or Facebook hiring 5% of their developers by lottery. Take all applicants, no questions asked, pick randomly.
I can't fathom why people think "managing a country" requires less skills than managing servers. The consequences of hiring someone unqualified is certainly not less severe.
Assuming I'm understanding it correctly, wouldn't the first one be a huge disincentive for the passing of politically/socially unpopular policies that are beneficial in the long-term?
This would be an interesting strategy to apply towards measuring how an open source community feels about difficult tradeoffs in design where there is no clear winner among many proposals, such as the recent survey meant to measure how people feel about the various async/await syntax proposals in Rust.
I don't know about this particular issue, but in general there's something to be said for beneficent dictatorship. My hypothesis is that sometimes the choosing of individual parts that are measurably better on their own, when combined produce something that is less than if the parts weren't optimally chosen but were cogently chosen to meet a particular ideology or end.
The basic form of quadratic voting, with actual money, also makes trying to protect yourself and your rights against hostile voting blocks expensive. Are you black? Muslim? Transgender? The majority votes to screw you over in some way, and you spend to vote harder against them and so manage to stop them. And then you've spent quite a bit of money, which gets redistributed to all voters (ie, everyone in your group sees little of it back)...and then they vote again to do the same damn thing you opposed before, and now you're fucked.
Isn't this just baked into any form of representative government or democracy? It doesn't seem like voting is the issue as much as how you proportionally represent your society.
The problem is that any minority group will always have less voting power than the majority group (if their interests are disjoint and no other coalitions are formed).
This assumes the majority would focus their energy on a narrow set of issues. Unless you have studies to back up that assumption, I would not believe it.
And if the majority actually did feel so strongly about a narrow set of issues, then it should be very expensive for a minority to counter that.
>>The purpose...is to determine “whether the intense preferences of the minority outweigh the weak preferences of the majority”>>
Given this, apparently the problem is that strong minority preferences are being snuffed out by majority preferences? Of course, this is the inherent flaw in democracy.
In the US we have two guards against that - the first is the Electoral College and the second is the Constitution. The former ensures that even the least populated states have at least a minimum (as opposed to effectively none) effect on the outcome and the second ensures that the government can't be used for something evil just because a majority has voted to to use it for that purpose.
So if there's a "zealotry" problem as the title implies, why can't these tools be used to manage it? What is wrong with them such that we need this new, additional layer?
There's another guard against it, which is the ability for congressional representatives to negotiate deals. They are not obligated to do whatever 50.01% of the population prefers on an issue by issue basis, but rather to do what they think will win elections. Issues that people care about more are more important for winning elections, so politicians can compromise on broadly-supported issues people care little about in order to work on niche issues with intense support.
In practice, this looks like things like pork-barrel infrastructure spending and farm subsidies. These sorts of things are pretty unpopular with most people, but they keep getting passed, and the above is why.
>Given this, apparently the problem is that strong minority preferences are being snuffed out by majority preferences? Of course, this is the inherent flaw in democracy.
That's not the problem Quadratic Voting tries to solve at all. The increased cost of additional votes actually reduces the voting power of certain minority groups, such as one-issue voters. The system tries to fix the opposite - a strong minority preference winning a vote where it is not the first choice of the majority.
In the US where the parties cling to stupid and outdated viewpoints and agendas in order to differentiate themselves from the other party. Legislators have to vote with the party if they don't want to find the party funding an opponent in the next election cycle. This is an improvement insofar as it allows legislators to nominally vote with the party while voting more strongly in favor of things they actually care about.
This would probably work well in two party states because it would allow lawmakers to vote as weakly as possible for stupid things just to say they're towing the party line while not actually voting strongly for them. In single party states this is probably a bad thing because it gives the people who ran as the other party just to get their name on the ticket to only weakly vote the way their platform says they should be voting.
If this system were used outside of the legislature (i.e. to actually elect legislator) it would probably be a total shitshow because as other commenters have mentioned it rewards coordination which basically just favors the status quo. If there's anything we need it's less status quo in general elections.
So yeah, this might work in a legislature but I don't see it working well to elect the actual politicians themselves.
Because the problem isn't with strong preferences -- it's with extreme preferences.
If there were 7 versions of a bill (A,B,C,D,E,F,G) ranging from ultra-conservative (a "A") to ultra-liberal (a "G"), in a polarized community people could still be spending the minimum 1 point each on the A's or G's and none on B-F.
The problem with politics today isn't that people are single-issue voters (because they generally aren't -- it's not a problem that needs to be solved)... it's that the natural evolution of the two-party system has forced us into choices that are more polarized than ever before in the history of the US -- in a two-party election, we're often only given options A and G, or maybe B and F, but rarely C through E.
Since the link to the paper, at the end of the article, is subtly broken (at least for me), here are the links to the abstract and directly to the PDF:
Bob can convince Alice to spend half her tokens on proposition B but then betray her and spend all his tokens on B, resulting in 17 votes for B and only 7 for A.
When voting is anonymous there is no way to detect if voters keep their pledge or not, so this should deter them from voting in any other way than in their own interest.
Collusion is a secret cooperation or deceitful agreement in order to deceive others. The plan you suggest is not deceiving anybody. It represents an political agreement and cooperation.
Alice and Bob are making a good deal. Well working democracy should involve maximum amount of deliberation and deal making. It's a good thing. If you want more of that kind of deal making votes should be visible though (quadratic voting between representatives in parliament might work the way you suggest).
I think what would stop it from being effective is that an opposing team could do the same, so they’d have to guard against that. It’s just not a silver bullet I mean.
This actually looks like it could be applied very effectively to open source communities on a single project when setting priorities for future feature development. For example, you have 20 features in the backlog and you're going into a two month sprint in which you can only focus on 3. Might be an interesting way to open up voting to everyone. On larger projects this would be useful even if it's only the developers working on it that are voting.
If I were a politcal group with lots of members up for reelction, I would be sure to flood the ballot with things the other side wants to vote against so they'd have to spread out their tokens whereas my group could clump them on a single issue/candidate.
I have had so many discussions with people about finding better ways to vote and hold elections.
It's nice to hear when there's a new approach that is actually being used, even if it was only in a small community, although I would be interested in seeing something like this used in large scales elections.
This is just deciding the order of business - not voting in the sense a civilian understands it.
The other way this can be done in parliamentary systems is to have a lay member body sort through and produce a draft order of business.
This body also decides which motions are in order which are duplicates and which need to be composited (ie a merge in tech speak) and also works out any conseqensionals (eg if Motion A passes then Motions G X and Y fall)
Yes the usual situation we're familiar with is picking a candidate in an election (which is what millions of Brits were doing yesterday) but it's the same for all these decisions. The key ingredients are more than two options (if there are only exactly two options we can solve this nicely and if there's only one option it's trivial) and wanting to incorporate preferences from many different people (ie let's not have a dictator or use sortition)
Neutral arbiters (your "lay member body") are very expensive because they can be captured so you need to defend against that, and even when they aren't captured you'll have to put up with accusations that they /were/ by sore losers who didn't get what they wanted from the neutral arbiter. For a sovereign government you can't impose the neutral arbiter on them, so they'll have to agree to suffer it, and such agreement is necessarily conditional. You can do it (that's how the Speaker of the House of Commons in the UK works) but it's fragile and I wouldn't advise it.
What if we took this idea, applied it to wealth instead of votes, and called it something like "progressive marginal tax rates"? Seems like it would be a more effective way to fight zealotry than to attack the democratic principle of all people getting the same amount of votes.
Every voter has the same number of tokens, so it is fair.
The quadratic progression is per candidate (or issue or whatever object is being voted on).
If you have 91 tokens, you can vote once for each of 91 competing choices. Or you can vote 6 times for one option: 1 + 4 + 9 + 16 + 25 + 36 = 91. Or twice each for 22 options, with three tokens left to vote on three more.
Not so much zealotry, as N-way decisions. There's no perfect way to make N-way democratic choices. Yet sometimes you need to make an N-way choice.
Brexit needs something like a ranked-choice vote. As in,
rank these options - a) no deal Brexit b) Theresa May / EU plan c) no Brexit, revoke Article 50 d) Northern Ireland independence, border in Irish sea. None of those can get an absolute majority in Parliament. They've tried and are deadlocked. A ranked-choice referendum would provide a way out.
STAR voting has the added benefit of simplicity and being possible on paper ballots. This quadratic system has neither and would be rife with errors, confusion, and likely fraud when used among people who don't vote for a living.
Does a fixed token count work when the voting is iterated and future bills are not yet known? It seems challenging.
For instance, you could incentivize your opponents to spend their tokens early on things they care about, and reserve your voting block for a later bill. So while it does cost you considerably more to spend your tokens this way, you've already weakened your opposition so that you might be able to pull it off.
By asking the people voting how well they feel they are able to express their interests and how well they think the result expresses the group interest.
In this case it sounds like they’ve got a group who are used to voting together and having outcomes that don’t make it very clear exactly what the group wants, and then after implementing this the group found the results much more expressive.
[+] [-] mc32|6 years ago|reply
So people who vote in isolation have less influence than people who organize and vote as a bloc.
I think it also means that places where one party predominates would require the minority party to be highly coordinated in order to have any chance with one single silver “bullet” whereas the dominant party can expend multiple “bullets” to counter.
[+] [-] marricks|6 years ago|reply
Military spending goes up every year. Save for Dodd-Frank, deregulation has been common across presidencies for 30 years along with corporate tax cuts...
The establishment gets things done, they really do, it’s just not things that help everyday people. I’m not sure how this would help that.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|6 years ago|reply
Yes, there are things the parties agree on, but that minimizes the huge, material differences between their platforms, e.g.:
- appropriate levels of taxation, and especially types of taxation (e.g. capital gains, inheritance taxes, etc.)
- mix of spending on social programs
- the huge gap on social issues, such as abortion, gay rights, gun control, etc.
"They're just the same, they don't care about the little guy, etc." are tactics the Russian trolls used to convince people not to vote.
[+] [-] Jolter|6 years ago|reply
Granted, quadratic voting specifically was probably not designed with parliamentary elections in mind. There are other systems in use that are designed to be fair and result in decent representation of voters.
[+] [-] billfruit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristianc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|6 years ago|reply
I think by any objective measure the US has seen an explosive growth in regulation the last 30 years.
I really wish I had an objective measure around to demonstrate this with...
[+] [-] kro92kfmrzz|6 years ago|reply
Democrats are against outright hostility and blatant marginalization of certain classes.
But both have largely been ok with everyone being exploited by feudal trade economics, bombing other nations to satisfy global political norms, and swindling developing nations out of their resources, while emotionally coddling elites.
It means something to not be outright hostile to the truly marginalized, but the Dems have not exactly been labors friend. And most people are laborers. They’ve failed the majority plenty.
[+] [-] forinti|6 years ago|reply
We should be able to vote on those we want out of politics and the most voted would have to seat it out.
And a small portion of representatives should be chosen by lottery. Maybe 5% or 10%. These representatives, obviously, would not have to answer to their sponsors.
[+] [-] breuleux|6 years ago|reply
I don't think representatives need to have any particular competencies beyond being representative of the interests of the population. Hired staff can take care of things that require particular abilities.
I reckon that a wholly random set of representatives would act like a direct democracy where every voter is free to fully focus on the issues, is allowed an entire staff to help them, and can consult and coordinate effectively with other voters. I think that could work pretty well.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|6 years ago|reply
To expand on the former, if a majority of Athenians voted to hold an ostracism vote, two months later, the person with the most votes (potentially over a minimum) was banished from the city for 10 years [1].
One can imagine a gentler modern version. Every ballot must have an ostracism line. Every candidate on that ballot must appear on this line. If a simple majority of voters choose the same person, a second one-line election is held in 2 months. If a simple majority of voters, two months later, vote again to ostracize, the candidate is barred from appearing on that jurisdiction's ballots for 8 years.
So if a majority of New Yorkers say Richard Nixon is ostracized, he is simply unable to appear on New York ballots for 8 years. Given the ballot will contain all manner of candidates running for many different offices, this makes it sufficiently difficult to ostracism while providing an incentive against polarization.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism
[+] [-] bilbo0s|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yongjik|6 years ago|reply
I can't fathom why people think "managing a country" requires less skills than managing servers. The consequences of hiring someone unqualified is certainly not less severe.
[+] [-] fmahaztra|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pohl|6 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/biw1ic/asyncawait_syn...
https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/bju8di/asyncawait_syn...
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pauldix|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Semiapies|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godelski|6 years ago|reply
The problem is that any minority group will always have less voting power than the majority group (if their interests are disjoint and no other coalitions are formed).
[+] [-] blunte|6 years ago|reply
And if the majority actually did feel so strongly about a narrow set of issues, then it should be very expensive for a minority to counter that.
[+] [-] jorblumesea|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbostleman|6 years ago|reply
Given this, apparently the problem is that strong minority preferences are being snuffed out by majority preferences? Of course, this is the inherent flaw in democracy.
In the US we have two guards against that - the first is the Electoral College and the second is the Constitution. The former ensures that even the least populated states have at least a minimum (as opposed to effectively none) effect on the outcome and the second ensures that the government can't be used for something evil just because a majority has voted to to use it for that purpose.
So if there's a "zealotry" problem as the title implies, why can't these tools be used to manage it? What is wrong with them such that we need this new, additional layer?
[+] [-] ThrustVectoring|6 years ago|reply
In practice, this looks like things like pork-barrel infrastructure spending and farm subsidies. These sorts of things are pretty unpopular with most people, but they keep getting passed, and the above is why.
[+] [-] ivanbakel|6 years ago|reply
That's not the problem Quadratic Voting tries to solve at all. The increased cost of additional votes actually reduces the voting power of certain minority groups, such as one-issue voters. The system tries to fix the opposite - a strong minority preference winning a vote where it is not the first choice of the majority.
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|6 years ago|reply
This would probably work well in two party states because it would allow lawmakers to vote as weakly as possible for stupid things just to say they're towing the party line while not actually voting strongly for them. In single party states this is probably a bad thing because it gives the people who ran as the other party just to get their name on the ticket to only weakly vote the way their platform says they should be voting.
If this system were used outside of the legislature (i.e. to actually elect legislator) it would probably be a total shitshow because as other commenters have mentioned it rewards coordination which basically just favors the status quo. If there's anything we need it's less status quo in general elections.
So yeah, this might work in a legislature but I don't see it working well to elect the actual politicians themselves.
[+] [-] SubiculumCode|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|6 years ago|reply
Because the problem isn't with strong preferences -- it's with extreme preferences.
If there were 7 versions of a bill (A,B,C,D,E,F,G) ranging from ultra-conservative (a "A") to ultra-liberal (a "G"), in a polarized community people could still be spending the minimum 1 point each on the A's or G's and none on B-F.
The problem with politics today isn't that people are single-issue voters (because they generally aren't -- it's not a problem that needs to be solved)... it's that the natural evolution of the two-party system has forced us into choices that are more polarized than ever before in the history of the US -- in a two-party election, we're often only given options A and G, or maybe B and F, but rarely C through E.
[+] [-] gnomewascool|6 years ago|reply
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID3092895_cod...
Doi:
https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2003531
[+] [-] cabalamat|6 years ago|reply
Alice can spend all her 100 tokens on A, and she gets 10 votes on A. Ditto Bob can spend all his 100 tokens on B, and he gets 10 votes on B.
But if each of them spends 50 on A and 50 on B, then A and B both get 2*sqrt(50) ~= 14 votes, so both Alice and Bob win by colluding.
What's to stop them doing this?
[+] [-] Muximize|6 years ago|reply
Bob can convince Alice to spend half her tokens on proposition B but then betray her and spend all his tokens on B, resulting in 17 votes for B and only 7 for A.
When voting is anonymous there is no way to detect if voters keep their pledge or not, so this should deter them from voting in any other way than in their own interest.
[+] [-] lhopki01|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nabla9|6 years ago|reply
Alice and Bob are making a good deal. Well working democracy should involve maximum amount of deliberation and deal making. It's a good thing. If you want more of that kind of deal making votes should be visible though (quadratic voting between representatives in parliament might work the way you suggest).
[+] [-] asimpletune|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pauldix|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lghh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gyaniv|6 years ago|reply
It's nice to hear when there's a new approach that is actually being used, even if it was only in a small community, although I would be interested in seeing something like this used in large scales elections.
[+] [-] C1sc0cat|6 years ago|reply
The other way this can be done in parliamentary systems is to have a lay member body sort through and produce a draft order of business.
This body also decides which motions are in order which are duplicates and which need to be composited (ie a merge in tech speak) and also works out any conseqensionals (eg if Motion A passes then Motions G X and Y fall)
[+] [-] tialaramex|6 years ago|reply
Neutral arbiters (your "lay member body") are very expensive because they can be captured so you need to defend against that, and even when they aren't captured you'll have to put up with accusations that they /were/ by sore losers who didn't get what they wanted from the neutral arbiter. For a sovereign government you can't impose the neutral arbiter on them, so they'll have to agree to suffer it, and such agreement is necessarily conditional. You can do it (that's how the Speaker of the House of Commons in the UK works) but it's fragile and I wouldn't advise it.
[+] [-] dvorak365|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|6 years ago|reply
The quadratic progression is per candidate (or issue or whatever object is being voted on).
If you have 91 tokens, you can vote once for each of 91 competing choices. Or you can vote 6 times for one option: 1 + 4 + 9 + 16 + 25 + 36 = 91. Or twice each for 22 options, with three tokens left to vote on three more.
[+] [-] Animats|6 years ago|reply
Brexit needs something like a ranked-choice vote. As in, rank these options - a) no deal Brexit b) Theresa May / EU plan c) no Brexit, revoke Article 50 d) Northern Ireland independence, border in Irish sea. None of those can get an absolute majority in Parliament. They've tried and are deadlocked. A ranked-choice referendum would provide a way out.
[+] [-] clarkevans|6 years ago|reply
Ka-Ping Yee's analysis showing odd discontinuities in Ranked Choice aka Instant Runoff from 2005 is an interesting read http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/.
[+] [-] obelos|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naasking|6 years ago|reply
For instance, you could incentivize your opponents to spend their tokens early on things they care about, and reserve your voting block for a later bill. So while it does cost you considerably more to spend your tokens this way, you've already weakened your opposition so that you might be able to pull it off.
[+] [-] chapium|6 years ago|reply
"Quadratic voting was invented not by political scientists but by economists and others..."
Not much of a point here, this is clearly within the domain of economics.
It worked with 41 lawmakers, it seems like an interesting voting method for small scale. Can it scale up?
[+] [-] localhostdotdev|6 years ago|reply
how can you even measure if a voting system is a success?
[+] [-] furyofantares|6 years ago|reply
In this case it sounds like they’ve got a group who are used to voting together and having outcomes that don’t make it very clear exactly what the group wants, and then after implementing this the group found the results much more expressive.