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Google Votes: A Liquid Democracy Experiment on a Corporate Social Network

158 points by sinak 11y ago

Zigurd 11y ago
My town has a town meeting form of direct democracy. But, in practice, participation is low. It's long and tedious. Liquid democracy seems like a great way to be represented, perhaps by the like-minded person who draws the short straw.
eximius 11y ago
Interesting. A huge issue with implementing this practically on a large scale is identity authentication. Without a modern, digital government, we can't hope to implement anything nearly this nice. We need an Estonia-like PKI for the US. Taxes, forms, passports, voting... everything would be so much simpler. (edit: besides teaching people how to use it, that is.)
- laander 11y ago
  The Danish government has introduced a local version of this concept called NemID (i.e. Easy ID). It's essentially a universal online identity that government departments and businesses alike can implement. It's currently not used for public voting yet due to security concerns, but that's most likely a matter of time.
- theatgrex 11y ago
  To me the Id issue isn't the biggest hurdle at all. My government (Canada ) already has a way of verifying my information when I want to access my tax return or something like that. It mails me an access code to the address that they have on file for me and that plus the pass word i enter at account creation gives me access to the system
- patcon 11y ago
  Not that it solves the whole problem, but imho there are some interesting discussions in the issue queues: https://github.com/MrChrisJ/World-Citizenship https://github.com/MrChrisJ/World-Citizenship
- jrochkind1 11y ago
  There are plenty of places to experiment with this system before you get to actual state government. Internal to corporations or organizations or voluntary associations, the latter of which especially have votes all the time (and/or might even more with a good infrastructure for it).
  - mistermann 11y ago
    I can envision a lot of people in corporate middle management having a bit of a problem with the very idea of democratic decision making. An extremely large part of the allure of those positions is power and controlling which information filters up the management chain.
    - crdoconnor 11y ago
      This is why it will never be implemented on any meaningful scale in any corporate environment. At least, not without the backing of a strong union.
      - qznc 11y ago
        There is plenty of room for "meaningless" democracy in corporate environment. Vote on lunchroom menu for example.
  - Sven7 11y ago
    Good point and it is quite interesting. I am wondering about the effect it might have on standards bodies. Is it even possible to implement it there?
  - NoGravitas 11y ago
    Neighborhoods and municipalities would be another good target. You could use it to implement [libertarian municipalism][0] (which has nothing to do with US-style right-libertarianism). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_municipalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_municipalism
- Zigurd 11y ago
  It would be difficult to maintain a MITM attack over more than a brief term, with proxy-holders discussing their votes and communicating with people in their social graph.
striking 11y ago
I don't think this would work in a country. In my opinion, democracy only makes sense when the state of the entire set of decisions can be held by every voter's mind. Food is a pretty easy decision. Taxes and wages and so on and so forth have proved to be quite difficult for many people. Republics work well because they break up the required duties among the people, so the amount of work required to vote is decreased. This allows them to have their own work outside of decision-making, even when decision-making is a lot of work. Great way to pick food, though.
- theatgrex 11y ago
  That is why this system has vote delegation. You can delegate an issue to someone else ...and then they in turn can delegate it to someone who knows more than them
  - striking 11y ago
    So what if I, the biggest fan of Ice-T ever, decided to delegate all of my votes (on taxes, on wages, on anything ever) to Ice-T? People would gain power just by being popular. Not in the sense of "popular democracy", more like "pop music". And then, just like today, we have figureheads that battle it out based on our elected opinions. So what's the point? It removes the friction in voting by using the web, but that opens up the whole identity thing where computers can pretend to be people or people pretend to be other people and hackers and ads and so on and so forth. Democracy generally works well the way it works now. Eventually something happens that pisses off the public, and they fight back. Otherwise, the politicians are stuck making the choice between "crap" and "crappier". And the world works pretty well.
    - theatgrex 11y ago
      yeah but now you are switching your argument from won't work because people cant hold all the issues in their mind to wont work because people will decide to delegate their votes to idiots ??? And hackers. If you believe that generally democracy works pretty well now then I agree that it isn't a good alternative. If you don't believe that then it is an interesting alternative. that attempts to solve some of the problems that modern democracy doesn't. Like people who think differently about different topics and want their differing opinions to matter.
theatgrex 11y ago
I've thought about a structure like this for a long time. And I independently came up with most of the same ideas as they did. One additional thing I've also thought would be cool would be to have the implementation of a liquid democracy system itself under control by this same system. So you could use it to vote on pull requests and bug fixes and other things like that. I think this step would be necessary for real government because the code that was responsible for this system would in effect be part of the laws of the country.
- patcon 11y ago
  Might be of interest to you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
  - theatgrex 11y ago
    yeah exactly what I've though about... a nomic code base :)
- NoGravitas 11y ago
  Liquid democracy is just computer-assisted delegate democracy. And delegate democracy has been around since the Paris Commune.
  - theatgrex 11y ago
    Oh I didn't know that ...I guess that is what you get when you think about things without studying them first. Those ideas are probably latent in lots of things I've read which is why I picked up on them so easily
jjb123 11y ago
So is there an application that Google uses internally for this that others could check out? Wasn't sure if it was through Google+ or if it was a 20% project built independently/outside of Google+.
- shardt 11y ago
  Google Votes is a 20% project that myself and several other Googlers run. Currently, the app is only available internal to Google and we haven't open sourced it. The paper is (obviously) public as well as two Tech Talks on YouTube. http://goo.gl/KLBxv0 http://goo.gl/KLBxv0 http://goo.gl/7yRSP1 http://goo.gl/7yRSP1 Steve Hardt
Scaevolus 11y ago
It's an interesting system, but it doesn't look like delegation is used very often: "Of the total vote count across all issues, 3.6% were delegated votes. This is a small percentage but is significant considering effectively all users were new to the concept of delegated voting."
- jfim 11y ago
  From the paper: "Issues with category "food" have the highest number of votes cast, over 73,000, and the largest number of issues, at 150." If you think about it, food is probably the most personal and least likely thing you'd delegate, as you have your own preferences and it doesn't require expertise in the subject. If it were for more serious things in which expertise is required, it's more likely people would delegate votes; for example, if there was a vote on the California drought using this system, I'd probably delegate my vote to a hydrologist, as they know more about the subject than I can reasonably gather.
  - gwern 11y ago
    But on the flip side, if food voting is driving it and explains why delegation is a rounding error over multiple years of use, then their 'successful' experience is of little import for people who are interested in whether it would be good for voting on things more serious than burgers.
- dusklight 11y ago
  It just needs to be tested on more complex decisions, possibly in a larger network. Most people don't feel the need to delegate choosing what kind of food they like to eat. Now if google starts using this system to decide what kind of phone they are going to make next, things will get interesting.
- BryantD 11y ago
  The paper also doesn't talk about whether or not the initial assumptions were true. E.g.: "The ability to delegate voting power allows liquid democracy to scale to large groups as well as representative democracy does. People who have others delegating to them are much like representatives in representative democracy systems, becoming specialists for group decisions and voting with greater power. For example in Figure 2, many people delegate directly or indirectly to person H, making H a powerful delegate. Liquid democracy systems tend to be meritocracies. As a person becomes more of an expert on issues facing the group, more people trust and delegate to them. The increased voting power can incentivize them to further increase their expertise and effectiveness. The opposite effect occurs when the delegate becomes less effective. This feedback process gives accountability and curbs abuses of power. "The ability to change delegations at any time eliminates many election-related distractions and distortions. There is no election-cycle and delegates must continuously prove their worth. And, they can do so in incremental manner, instead of wasting time and energy on all-or-nothing elections." So OK. Did people actually take back their delegations? How often did people override and vote directly? Did the optimism work out in practice?
askvictor 11y ago
I wonder if there also needs some incentives for getting involved in the process. A lot of democracy is pretty boring, and you'd want those who we delegate the boring bits to have considered things well, and that takes time. A quick approach would be that you need to make a small payment to your delegate for each vote, but that would have its own effects (e.g. people casting random votes as they don't want to pay someone). So perhaps a voucher system - every vote you make (delegated or direct) gives you a voucher. If there are n votes in a year, then for every voucher you have greater than n, you can claim a certain amount of payment.
- striking 11y ago
  This would be pretty cool, as it would guarantee some sort of basic income for people who bother to vote, regardless of their socioeconomic standing. (Except for felons. They mostly can't vote.)
- patcon 11y ago
  My impression is that this would almost sort itself out in the wash, right? If I'm holding a dozen votes from friends, I'm kinda like a super-citizen with 12 votes, and so I take that job more seriously because trust has been placed in me -- no payment required. If someone is holding a thousand votes and dedicating more time, I feel people would start creating grassroots tools to get them compensated for spending more time understanding their issues. And so on and so forth, right up to the groups holding millions, who maybe start their own PACs or whatever the equivalent is. But maybe I'm optimistic :)
patcon 11y ago
In case anyone is interested, a group in spain has been building an open source, cryptography-based liquid democracy tool for the past few years: - Enterprise site: https://www.agoravoting.com https://www.agoravoting.com - Community site: seems down (likely because they're refocusing on enterprise in order to survive after a few years of spinning wheels as an open source project) - Source code: https://github.com/agoravoting https://github.com/agoravoting Unfortunately, their dev discussions have been in spanish and it's been challenging to follow as intently as I'd like :(
- qznc 11y ago
  There is also Adhocracy, which is even Open Source. https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy/ https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy/ Voting, like crypto, is an area where I consider Open Source a strict requirement.
abalone 11y ago
One potential problem with this in the public sector is that when you have a lot more representatives (potentially anyone), much less scrutiny is given to any one of them. I've seen this in ranked-choice systems. Most people still end up picking the candidate that spends the most money (gets the most exposure), only with even less information about them because the money and coverage is spread more thinly. And I'm not sure that immediate recall power is really an effective defense. Even in representative systems with transparency, few people make the effort to study issues and track voting records. And who would you delegate to instead? Someone you know even less about, probably. A "grand election event" with primaries has the benefit of winnowing and focusing attention on a small set of candidates. Unfortunately that also tends to be those with the most money to spend.
- x5n1 11y ago
  > And who would you delegate to instead? Someone you know even less about, probably. AI. Get AI to sift through all the data, summarize it, and then select a set of best qualified candidates in the world. This same AI would also have global surveillance. People are often crazy and politicians are often idiots.
  - DiabloD3 11y ago
    x5n1's comment is getting downvoted, but I'm not even entirely sure he's wrong. We're building AI-type applications to help people run large companies and other difficult problems that throwing more people at just doesn't help (because, usually, its organizing people that is the difficult part; and when its not, its organizing data to help people organize themselves). Having some sort of large scale AI infra to help the government manage stuff to well integrate local, state, and federal into a cohesive unit with well defined boundaries and task ownership between the layers and departments would massively fix the US government. And before someone says "no duh, our founding fathers said this", they never looked at it from the point of view of someone from our era that deals with large scale application design (because, well, it didn't exist yet). I mean, what would go a long way is manufacturing a programming language to write laws in, so we could lint and compile time warn/error laws. That would be a good place to start.
deleted 11y ago
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aaronharnly 11y ago
(This should be marked [PDF]; although it has Content-disposition: inline, it downloads as a file in some browsers.)
jfager 11y ago
I'm a big fan of this general idea but taken to the limit of being able to delegate all issue votes to any person goes too far, and I'd prefer a system that elected representatives who accrue a threshold number of votes. There are a few reasons for this, but I'll just talk about one here, privacy. Privacy is addressed in the paper but I think the real issues with it are just glossed over. "You get to see how your delegate votes" is great and should absolutely be true, but there are two other sorts of privacy that matter: privacy from the electoral system itself, and privacy from closely related people. In very Googley fashion, this paper seems to take for granted that of course you'd trust the system itself with the knowledge of your votes and delegates, and that its privacy-respecting duty is fulfilled by simply not broadcasting that knowledge to the unauthorized public. But that's a terrible way to run a government that at least partially relies on a secret ballot as a means of expressing dissent and effecting change in the government itself, for hopefully obvious reasons. The other form of privacy that matters is on a much smaller scale. A delegate who can exercise the votes of an arbitrarily small number of people is also capable of ensuring they are exercising the votes of a specific set of people. An abusive husband/father/wife/mother/boss/etc can know simply from the count of votes they hold whether their victims are following through on their command, and via transitive delegation they can pool that power with collaborators.
- cbsmith 11y ago
  There's all kinds of math on techniques for being able to audit the vote without exposing individual voting behaviour. It is possible to prove to yourself that your vote was counted without exposing what your vote was to others, and also providing assurances that the result represents the aggregate of everyone's "votes". I don't think there is much about the important aspects of this design that require there be massive privacy issues. There are some variants around "honest verifiers" that work even more simply. Most of the homomorphic encryption excitement stems from some of the more sophisticated variants of that approach.
  - jfager 11y ago
    Do you have any pointers to papers describing how vote auditing techniques extend to liquid democracy? The Google paper doesn't even acknowledge the problem, much less describe a solution, and most of the other papers I've read on the topic are either extremely handwavy on the technical details of privacy or make the same assumption as Google, that its good enough to hide votes from the participants but 'the system' still knows.
fEVboot 11y ago
liquid, because it removes the one thing that matters: contextual foresight. this is also the most expensive component, especially when weighing future production. 'liquid voting' is only useful when trying to find the greatest, fastest consumption.
sytelus 11y ago
Current implementation of democratic systems is result of the fact that process for voting had been expensive in pre-Internet era. One of the major thing Internet does is to make process of voting dirt cheap. One no longer has to setup physical voting booths, deploy thousands of election officials, physically tally votes and so on. This means we can give direct democracy a real chance. Why should we let senators or presidents make all of the decisions for us for years? Why not just vote for every issue directly? Why shouldn't anyone on Internet be able to propose a law and have it voted by people in the country directly? This can change everything... ...or so I thought. There are several problem with direct democracy: (1) Most people are not expert at things like foreign policy, economics and so on. (2) Many people can be heavily influenced to vote either way by creating powerful PR campaigns. (3) Most people have no time or capacity to digest tons of dense information to get the background. (4) Some information needed to make decision must remain classified. This paper actually proposes a viable option here that works around many of the above issues. Instead of delegating all decisions for next 4 years to one person, we delegate case-by-cases and for arbitrary time length. This allows, for example, for a real economist to be elected to make a economy decision or nuclear scientist to be elected for Iran deal like decisions and so on. It might work. The bottom line is that we can get rid of arcane pre-Internet political system of senators, congressman and presidents.
- wnevets 11y ago
  >Current implementation of democratic systems is result of the fact that process for voting had been expensive in pre-Internet era. One of the major thing Internet does is to make process of voting dirt cheap. One no longer has to setup physical voting booths, deploy thousands of election officials, physically tally votes and so on. This means we can give direct democracy a real chance. Why should we let senators or presidents make all of the decisions for us for years? Why not just vote for every issue directly? Why shouldn't anyone on Internet be able to propose a law and have it voted by people in the country directly? This can change everything... Cost of physically tally votes isn't the reason the US is a representative democracy. The mob is inherently irrational, stupid and over reactive, which is why the founders settled on representatives. Case-by-cases voting also doesn't solve this problem, even with the internet.
tunesmith 11y ago
"Although many ranked voting methods exist, the Arrow Impossibility Theorem proves no single one can be ideal (Arrow 1963)." That's not actually what Arrow's theorem proves. It just proves that a voting system cannot simultaneously meet four criteria. It doesn't prove that those four criteria should be required though. Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives is particularly problematic. Kudos to them for respecting the Condorcet Criterion though.
idlewords 11y ago
The showdown between Liquid Democracy and Holacracy is going to be breathtaking
dredmorbius 11y ago
Numerous questions. How does delegative democracy: ● Prove that delegates are a valid delegate of one or more other parties? ● Show that delegates voted a specific way? These are non-secret ballots. What happens in regimes for, as the saying goes, "votes have consequences"? ● Show that an individual's vote is going to a specified delegate and no others? ● Avoid selling of votes. ● Avoid creation of straw accounts or identities? ● Assure some minimum level of competence among electors. ● Provide accountability for voting actions? Elected representatives (theoretically at least) risk loss of office. Edit: and one more: How does this address issues with bundled votes. E.g., actual legislatures don't vote individually on topics but deal with bundled issues, with riders and insertions on bills. The process is as much about architecting how things are voted on as who votes how.
learnstats2 11y ago
One important but less discussed aspect of democracy is how the issues to be voting on are decided. By deciding what to vote on, I decide in which directions society is allowed to change, and in which it is not. In the paper, there is a successful vegan delegate who collects 14 proxy votes on food-related issues. I'm not sure how this delegate would vote on the examples, such as burger of the month, and flavors of frozen yoghurt.
titfn 11y ago
Liquid democracy doesn't appear to protect against the "Tyranny of the majority" [1], just like direct democracy. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
- qznc 11y ago
  Isn't that an orthogonal problem? Liquid democracy does not change the number of votes nor does it define how to make the decision (majority rule or whatever).
  - titfn 11y ago
    if you plan to use this system instead of democracy, I think that it is very relevant...
kriro 11y ago
I am fighting a pretty big inner struggle over these issues... On paper LD seems like a very good concept at least it seems superior to the current form of representatives. I'm not 100% convinced complete direct democracy on all issues isn't superior to LD. Wisdom of the crowds would suggest you don't have to be an expert on everything, the point about classified votes is a good one (of course one could argue these shouldn't exist but that's another debate). ...however LD also requires a technical solution which seems far easier to game and manipulate than old school ballots. Strong crypto + LD seems like the way to go but you'd need a key for each citizen and loss of keys will happen and need to be mitigated.
qwtel 11y ago
I just want to throw in the concept of "voter apathy". In my opinion it's why all voting systems, liquid or not, are doomed to fail (or at least be very inefficient). Even delegating one's vote to a relevant expert would require some research, for which there is no good reason in such a system. (there might be social pressure to delegate one's vote the "right" expert though, somebody who appears competent on a superficial level (i.e. talking a lot), but who's voting history might not reflect that competence)
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Why? I think, delegating one's vote to a known expert would actually be a problem, not a solution. Just delegate it to a friend you trust, that knows more about some stuff than you do. He then may use your vote directly or delegate it further to someone he trusts. What I fear in liquid democracy system is PR efforts that will be done to market "experts".
JulianMorrison 11y ago
I can see two downsides to this. Neither a show stopper, but they ought to be considered. 1) Bloc voting will be encouraged because delegation itself is unavoidably visible to the recipient even if only in delegate count. This could be exploited by abusers to take control of their victim/partner's vote, cults to hand everything to the guru, and so on. 2) A feature of representative democracy that's reviled and relied upon in equal measure is the ability of leaders, once elected, to take controversial decisions, or to stick by earlier promises, creating stability. If the power leaders exercise can change in real time, who could ever reach a decision eg: close the border in an epidemic?

158 points by sinak 11y ago

My town has a town meeting form of direct democracy. But, in practice, participation is low. It's long and tedious. Liquid democracy seems like a great way to be represented, perhaps by the like-minded person who draws the short straw.

eximius 11y ago

Interesting. A huge issue with implementing this practically on a large scale is identity authentication. Without a modern, digital government, we can't hope to implement anything nearly this nice. We need an Estonia-like PKI for the US. Taxes, forms, passports, voting... everything would be so much simpler. (edit: besides teaching people how to use it, that is.)

laander 11y ago
The Danish government has introduced a local version of this concept called NemID (i.e. Easy ID). It's essentially a universal online identity that government departments and businesses alike can implement. It's currently not used for public voting yet due to security concerns, but that's most likely a matter of time.
theatgrex 11y ago
To me the Id issue isn't the biggest hurdle at all. My government (Canada ) already has a way of verifying my information when I want to access my tax return or something like that. It mails me an access code to the address that they have on file for me and that plus the pass word i enter at account creation gives me access to the system
patcon 11y ago
Not that it solves the whole problem, but imho there are some interesting discussions in the issue queues: https://github.com/MrChrisJ/World-Citizenship https://github.com/MrChrisJ/World-Citizenship
jrochkind1 11y ago
There are plenty of places to experiment with this system before you get to actual state government. Internal to corporations or organizations or voluntary associations, the latter of which especially have votes all the time (and/or might even more with a good infrastructure for it).
- mistermann 11y ago
  I can envision a lot of people in corporate middle management having a bit of a problem with the very idea of democratic decision making. An extremely large part of the allure of those positions is power and controlling which information filters up the management chain.
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    This is why it will never be implemented on any meaningful scale in any corporate environment. At least, not without the backing of a strong union.
    - qznc 11y ago
      There is plenty of room for "meaningless" democracy in corporate environment. Vote on lunchroom menu for example.
- Sven7 11y ago
  Good point and it is quite interesting. I am wondering about the effect it might have on standards bodies. Is it even possible to implement it there?
- NoGravitas 11y ago
  Neighborhoods and municipalities would be another good target. You could use it to implement [libertarian municipalism][0] (which has nothing to do with US-style right-libertarianism). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_municipalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_municipalism
Zigurd 11y ago
It would be difficult to maintain a MITM attack over more than a brief term, with proxy-holders discussing their votes and communicating with people in their social graph.

striking 11y ago

I don't think this would work in a country. In my opinion, democracy only makes sense when the state of the entire set of decisions can be held by every voter's mind. Food is a pretty easy decision. Taxes and wages and so on and so forth have proved to be quite difficult for many people. Republics work well because they break up the required duties among the people, so the amount of work required to vote is decreased. This allows them to have their own work outside of decision-making, even when decision-making is a lot of work. Great way to pick food, though.

theatgrex 11y ago
That is why this system has vote delegation. You can delegate an issue to someone else ...and then they in turn can delegate it to someone who knows more than them
- striking 11y ago
  So what if I, the biggest fan of Ice-T ever, decided to delegate all of my votes (on taxes, on wages, on anything ever) to Ice-T? People would gain power just by being popular. Not in the sense of "popular democracy", more like "pop music". And then, just like today, we have figureheads that battle it out based on our elected opinions. So what's the point? It removes the friction in voting by using the web, but that opens up the whole identity thing where computers can pretend to be people or people pretend to be other people and hackers and ads and so on and so forth. Democracy generally works well the way it works now. Eventually something happens that pisses off the public, and they fight back. Otherwise, the politicians are stuck making the choice between "crap" and "crappier". And the world works pretty well.
  - theatgrex 11y ago
    yeah but now you are switching your argument from won't work because people cant hold all the issues in their mind to wont work because people will decide to delegate their votes to idiots ??? And hackers. If you believe that generally democracy works pretty well now then I agree that it isn't a good alternative. If you don't believe that then it is an interesting alternative. that attempts to solve some of the problems that modern democracy doesn't. Like people who think differently about different topics and want their differing opinions to matter.

theatgrex 11y ago

I've thought about a structure like this for a long time. And I independently came up with most of the same ideas as they did. One additional thing I've also thought would be cool would be to have the implementation of a liquid democracy system itself under control by this same system. So you could use it to vote on pull requests and bug fixes and other things like that. I think this step would be necessary for real government because the code that was responsible for this system would in effect be part of the laws of the country.

patcon 11y ago
Might be of interest to you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
- theatgrex 11y ago
  yeah exactly what I've though about... a nomic code base :)
NoGravitas 11y ago
Liquid democracy is just computer-assisted delegate democracy. And delegate democracy has been around since the Paris Commune.
- theatgrex 11y ago
  Oh I didn't know that ...I guess that is what you get when you think about things without studying them first. Those ideas are probably latent in lots of things I've read which is why I picked up on them so easily

jjb123 11y ago

So is there an application that Google uses internally for this that others could check out? Wasn't sure if it was through Google+ or if it was a 20% project built independently/outside of Google+.

shardt 11y ago
Google Votes is a 20% project that myself and several other Googlers run. Currently, the app is only available internal to Google and we haven't open sourced it. The paper is (obviously) public as well as two Tech Talks on YouTube. http://goo.gl/KLBxv0 http://goo.gl/KLBxv0 http://goo.gl/7yRSP1 http://goo.gl/7yRSP1 Steve Hardt

Scaevolus 11y ago

It's an interesting system, but it doesn't look like delegation is used very often: "Of the total vote count across all issues, 3.6% were delegated votes. This is a small percentage but is significant considering effectively all users were new to the concept of delegated voting."

jfim 11y ago
From the paper: "Issues with category "food" have the highest number of votes cast, over 73,000, and the largest number of issues, at 150." If you think about it, food is probably the most personal and least likely thing you'd delegate, as you have your own preferences and it doesn't require expertise in the subject. If it were for more serious things in which expertise is required, it's more likely people would delegate votes; for example, if there was a vote on the California drought using this system, I'd probably delegate my vote to a hydrologist, as they know more about the subject than I can reasonably gather.
- gwern 11y ago
  But on the flip side, if food voting is driving it and explains why delegation is a rounding error over multiple years of use, then their 'successful' experience is of little import for people who are interested in whether it would be good for voting on things more serious than burgers.
dusklight 11y ago
It just needs to be tested on more complex decisions, possibly in a larger network. Most people don't feel the need to delegate choosing what kind of food they like to eat. Now if google starts using this system to decide what kind of phone they are going to make next, things will get interesting.
BryantD 11y ago
The paper also doesn't talk about whether or not the initial assumptions were true. E.g.: "The ability to delegate voting power allows liquid democracy to scale to large groups as well as representative democracy does. People who have others delegating to them are much like representatives in representative democracy systems, becoming specialists for group decisions and voting with greater power. For example in Figure 2, many people delegate directly or indirectly to person H, making H a powerful delegate. Liquid democracy systems tend to be meritocracies. As a person becomes more of an expert on issues facing the group, more people trust and delegate to them. The increased voting power can incentivize them to further increase their expertise and effectiveness. The opposite effect occurs when the delegate becomes less effective. This feedback process gives accountability and curbs abuses of power. "The ability to change delegations at any time eliminates many election-related distractions and distortions. There is no election-cycle and delegates must continuously prove their worth. And, they can do so in incremental manner, instead of wasting time and energy on all-or-nothing elections." So OK. Did people actually take back their delegations? How often did people override and vote directly? Did the optimism work out in practice?

askvictor 11y ago

I wonder if there also needs some incentives for getting involved in the process. A lot of democracy is pretty boring, and you'd want those who we delegate the boring bits to have considered things well, and that takes time. A quick approach would be that you need to make a small payment to your delegate for each vote, but that would have its own effects (e.g. people casting random votes as they don't want to pay someone). So perhaps a voucher system - every vote you make (delegated or direct) gives you a voucher. If there are n votes in a year, then for every voucher you have greater than n, you can claim a certain amount of payment.

striking 11y ago
This would be pretty cool, as it would guarantee some sort of basic income for people who bother to vote, regardless of their socioeconomic standing. (Except for felons. They mostly can't vote.)
patcon 11y ago
My impression is that this would almost sort itself out in the wash, right? If I'm holding a dozen votes from friends, I'm kinda like a super-citizen with 12 votes, and so I take that job more seriously because trust has been placed in me -- no payment required. If someone is holding a thousand votes and dedicating more time, I feel people would start creating grassroots tools to get them compensated for spending more time understanding their issues. And so on and so forth, right up to the groups holding millions, who maybe start their own PACs or whatever the equivalent is. But maybe I'm optimistic :)

patcon 11y ago

In case anyone is interested, a group in spain has been building an open source, cryptography-based liquid democracy tool for the past few years: - Enterprise site: https://www.agoravoting.com https://www.agoravoting.com - Community site: seems down (likely because they're refocusing on enterprise in order to survive after a few years of spinning wheels as an open source project) - Source code: https://github.com/agoravoting https://github.com/agoravoting Unfortunately, their dev discussions have been in spanish and it's been challenging to follow as intently as I'd like :(

qznc 11y ago
There is also Adhocracy, which is even Open Source. https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy/ https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy/ Voting, like crypto, is an area where I consider Open Source a strict requirement.

abalone 11y ago

One potential problem with this in the public sector is that when you have a lot more representatives (potentially anyone), much less scrutiny is given to any one of them. I've seen this in ranked-choice systems. Most people still end up picking the candidate that spends the most money (gets the most exposure), only with even less information about them because the money and coverage is spread more thinly. And I'm not sure that immediate recall power is really an effective defense. Even in representative systems with transparency, few people make the effort to study issues and track voting records. And who would you delegate to instead? Someone you know even less about, probably. A "grand election event" with primaries has the benefit of winnowing and focusing attention on a small set of candidates. Unfortunately that also tends to be those with the most money to spend.

x5n1 11y ago
> And who would you delegate to instead? Someone you know even less about, probably. AI. Get AI to sift through all the data, summarize it, and then select a set of best qualified candidates in the world. This same AI would also have global surveillance. People are often crazy and politicians are often idiots.
- DiabloD3 11y ago
  x5n1's comment is getting downvoted, but I'm not even entirely sure he's wrong. We're building AI-type applications to help people run large companies and other difficult problems that throwing more people at just doesn't help (because, usually, its organizing people that is the difficult part; and when its not, its organizing data to help people organize themselves). Having some sort of large scale AI infra to help the government manage stuff to well integrate local, state, and federal into a cohesive unit with well defined boundaries and task ownership between the layers and departments would massively fix the US government. And before someone says "no duh, our founding fathers said this", they never looked at it from the point of view of someone from our era that deals with large scale application design (because, well, it didn't exist yet). I mean, what would go a long way is manufacturing a programming language to write laws in, so we could lint and compile time warn/error laws. That would be a good place to start.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

aaronharnly 11y ago

(This should be marked [PDF]; although it has Content-disposition: inline, it downloads as a file in some browsers.)

jfager 11y ago

I'm a big fan of this general idea but taken to the limit of being able to delegate all issue votes to any person goes too far, and I'd prefer a system that elected representatives who accrue a threshold number of votes. There are a few reasons for this, but I'll just talk about one here, privacy. Privacy is addressed in the paper but I think the real issues with it are just glossed over. "You get to see how your delegate votes" is great and should absolutely be true, but there are two other sorts of privacy that matter: privacy from the electoral system itself, and privacy from closely related people. In very Googley fashion, this paper seems to take for granted that of course you'd trust the system itself with the knowledge of your votes and delegates, and that its privacy-respecting duty is fulfilled by simply not broadcasting that knowledge to the unauthorized public. But that's a terrible way to run a government that at least partially relies on a secret ballot as a means of expressing dissent and effecting change in the government itself, for hopefully obvious reasons. The other form of privacy that matters is on a much smaller scale. A delegate who can exercise the votes of an arbitrarily small number of people is also capable of ensuring they are exercising the votes of a specific set of people. An abusive husband/father/wife/mother/boss/etc can know simply from the count of votes they hold whether their victims are following through on their command, and via transitive delegation they can pool that power with collaborators.

cbsmith 11y ago
There's all kinds of math on techniques for being able to audit the vote without exposing individual voting behaviour. It is possible to prove to yourself that your vote was counted without exposing what your vote was to others, and also providing assurances that the result represents the aggregate of everyone's "votes". I don't think there is much about the important aspects of this design that require there be massive privacy issues. There are some variants around "honest verifiers" that work even more simply. Most of the homomorphic encryption excitement stems from some of the more sophisticated variants of that approach.
- jfager 11y ago
  Do you have any pointers to papers describing how vote auditing techniques extend to liquid democracy? The Google paper doesn't even acknowledge the problem, much less describe a solution, and most of the other papers I've read on the topic are either extremely handwavy on the technical details of privacy or make the same assumption as Google, that its good enough to hide votes from the participants but 'the system' still knows.

fEVboot 11y ago

liquid, because it removes the one thing that matters: contextual foresight. this is also the most expensive component, especially when weighing future production. 'liquid voting' is only useful when trying to find the greatest, fastest consumption.

sytelus 11y ago

Current implementation of democratic systems is result of the fact that process for voting had been expensive in pre-Internet era. One of the major thing Internet does is to make process of voting dirt cheap. One no longer has to setup physical voting booths, deploy thousands of election officials, physically tally votes and so on. This means we can give direct democracy a real chance. Why should we let senators or presidents make all of the decisions for us for years? Why not just vote for every issue directly? Why shouldn't anyone on Internet be able to propose a law and have it voted by people in the country directly? This can change everything... ...or so I thought. There are several problem with direct democracy: (1) Most people are not expert at things like foreign policy, economics and so on. (2) Many people can be heavily influenced to vote either way by creating powerful PR campaigns. (3) Most people have no time or capacity to digest tons of dense information to get the background. (4) Some information needed to make decision must remain classified. This paper actually proposes a viable option here that works around many of the above issues. Instead of delegating all decisions for next 4 years to one person, we delegate case-by-cases and for arbitrary time length. This allows, for example, for a real economist to be elected to make a economy decision or nuclear scientist to be elected for Iran deal like decisions and so on. It might work. The bottom line is that we can get rid of arcane pre-Internet political system of senators, congressman and presidents.

wnevets 11y ago
>Current implementation of democratic systems is result of the fact that process for voting had been expensive in pre-Internet era. One of the major thing Internet does is to make process of voting dirt cheap. One no longer has to setup physical voting booths, deploy thousands of election officials, physically tally votes and so on. This means we can give direct democracy a real chance. Why should we let senators or presidents make all of the decisions for us for years? Why not just vote for every issue directly? Why shouldn't anyone on Internet be able to propose a law and have it voted by people in the country directly? This can change everything... Cost of physically tally votes isn't the reason the US is a representative democracy. The mob is inherently irrational, stupid and over reactive, which is why the founders settled on representatives. Case-by-cases voting also doesn't solve this problem, even with the internet.

tunesmith 11y ago

"Although many ranked voting methods exist, the Arrow Impossibility Theorem proves no single one can be ideal (Arrow 1963)." That's not actually what Arrow's theorem proves. It just proves that a voting system cannot simultaneously meet four criteria. It doesn't prove that those four criteria should be required though. Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives is particularly problematic. Kudos to them for respecting the Condorcet Criterion though.

idlewords 11y ago

The showdown between Liquid Democracy and Holacracy is going to be breathtaking

dredmorbius 11y ago

Numerous questions. How does delegative democracy: ● Prove that delegates are a valid delegate of one or more other parties? ● Show that delegates voted a specific way? These are non-secret ballots. What happens in regimes for, as the saying goes, "votes have consequences"? ● Show that an individual's vote is going to a specified delegate and no others? ● Avoid selling of votes. ● Avoid creation of straw accounts or identities? ● Assure some minimum level of competence among electors. ● Provide accountability for voting actions? Elected representatives (theoretically at least) risk loss of office. Edit: and one more: How does this address issues with bundled votes. E.g., actual legislatures don't vote individually on topics but deal with bundled issues, with riders and insertions on bills. The process is as much about architecting how things are voted on as who votes how.

learnstats2 11y ago

One important but less discussed aspect of democracy is how the issues to be voting on are decided. By deciding what to vote on, I decide in which directions society is allowed to change, and in which it is not. In the paper, there is a successful vegan delegate who collects 14 proxy votes on food-related issues. I'm not sure how this delegate would vote on the examples, such as burger of the month, and flavors of frozen yoghurt.

titfn 11y ago

Liquid democracy doesn't appear to protect against the "Tyranny of the majority" [1], just like direct democracy. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

qznc 11y ago
Isn't that an orthogonal problem? Liquid democracy does not change the number of votes nor does it define how to make the decision (majority rule or whatever).
- titfn 11y ago
  if you plan to use this system instead of democracy, I think that it is very relevant...

kriro 11y ago

I am fighting a pretty big inner struggle over these issues... On paper LD seems like a very good concept at least it seems superior to the current form of representatives. I'm not 100% convinced complete direct democracy on all issues isn't superior to LD. Wisdom of the crowds would suggest you don't have to be an expert on everything, the point about classified votes is a good one (of course one could argue these shouldn't exist but that's another debate). ...however LD also requires a technical solution which seems far easier to game and manipulate than old school ballots. Strong crypto + LD seems like the way to go but you'd need a key for each citizen and loss of keys will happen and need to be mitigated.

qwtel 11y ago

I just want to throw in the concept of "voter apathy". In my opinion it's why all voting systems, liquid or not, are doomed to fail (or at least be very inefficient). Even delegating one's vote to a relevant expert would require some research, for which there is no good reason in such a system. (there might be social pressure to delegate one's vote the "right" expert though, somebody who appears competent on a superficial level (i.e. talking a lot), but who's voting history might not reflect that competence)

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Why? I think, delegating one's vote to a known expert would actually be a problem, not a solution. Just delegate it to a friend you trust, that knows more about some stuff than you do. He then may use your vote directly or delegate it further to someone he trusts. What I fear in liquid democracy system is PR efforts that will be done to market "experts".

JulianMorrison 11y ago

I can see two downsides to this. Neither a show stopper, but they ought to be considered. 1) Bloc voting will be encouraged because delegation itself is unavoidably visible to the recipient even if only in delegate count. This could be exploited by abusers to take control of their victim/partner's vote, cults to hand everything to the guru, and so on. 2) A feature of representative democracy that's reviled and relied upon in equal measure is the ability of leaders, once elected, to take controversial decisions, or to stick by earlier promises, creating stability. If the power leaders exercise can change in real time, who could ever reach a decision eg: close the border in an epidemic?