6 ms·

I accept that this is a superior voting system to one-person-one-vote. However, for it to succeed, it should not merely be superior, it should also appear super

by igitur 9y ago

I accept that this is a superior voting system to one-person-one-vote. However, for it to succeed, it should not merely be superior, it should also appear superior. The trust the voters put into the system is paramount. And for that to be true, the vast majority of the voters have to understand exactly how it works. Unfortunately, and, yes, I'm a cynic, I don't believe we are close to having a voter base that is capable of understanding, and hence accepting an outcome of such a voting system. Disclaimer: I'm not a US citizen.

ZenoArrow 9y ago
How is this a superior voting system? It just seems to be a way for those with more money to have more influence in the voting process. We've got enough problems with money in politics as it is, we don't need any more of them.
- IanDrake 9y ago
  It's quadratic, do some quick math on how expensive it is to buy a victory. It's actually more cost effective to buy people's votes the usual way.
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    It's not necessary for a single wealthy individual to be able to buy a victory by themselves for the results to be skewed towards the will of the wealthy. If 1000 votes cost £1 million, and 100 wealthy individuals all decide to spend that much in an election, that's 100,000 votes when these individuals would only usually have 100 votes. That's going to have an impact, especially on local elections. As for it being more cost effective to buy votes the usual way, the "usual" way relies on voter fraud and massive advertising campaigns, one of which is illegal, and the other is very expensive and the voting decisions are not guaranteed. On the other hand, quadratic voting would be legal and guaranteed.
    - IanDrake 9y ago
      By the usual way, I was referring to large advertising campaigns that I'm sure yield more votes per dollar than a quadratic voting system. One of the things you're missing is that people who can afford to buy that many votes for a single issue are very rare and could easily be out voted by a small organized group that buys multiple votes, but with a lower power multiple. Assuming all votes cost $1, then 1,000 votes costs 1mil. That could easily be nullified by 100 voters buying 10 votes. Consider also that the money would be rebated equally. So you might spend $100 and get back $250 and win the vote.
      - ZenoArrow 9y ago
        > "Assuming all votes cost $1, then 1,000 votes costs 1mil. That could easily be nullified by 100 voters buying 10 votes." Do you not see the problem with that? With the situation you describe, it takes the coordination of 100 individuals to nullify the actions of 1 wealthy voter. Do you not see how much easier it is for the wealthy voter?
        Rangi42 9y ago
        If merely 100 less-wealthy voters out of the whole population couldn't coordinate to buy a few extra votes—and they wouldn't even have to explicitly communicate, it would just take 100 people who individually hear about the issue and decide to vote more—then how important can the issue really have been to them? I believe this is what is meant by "the collective decision rapidly approximates efficiency as the number of voters increases".
        ZenoArrow 9y ago
        That's missing the point I was making. I'm attempting to highlight the difference in effort that is required. Do you accept that the rich voter makes less effort in the hypothetical 1 vs. 100 voter situation?
        troupe 9y ago
  - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    The point is that Americans (me included) are going to put very little trust in a system which allows you to literally buy votes. Everyone should have the same amount of votes no matter the wealth and I don't see myself compromising on that issue.
    - barrkel 9y ago
      The system where you buy votes is the current system, mind. Somewhat true for elections of political representatives, but even more true for things like Senate Committees - these require party membership fees that get paid, which come via donations from lobbyists. Not party political, both sides do it: http://www.definingthemachine.com/party_dues.html http://www.definingthemachine.com/party_dues.html
    - acjohnson55 9y ago
      But do you feel any better about the idea of being compensated for not getting your preference?
      - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
        Not really. It seems sort of like selling some of my political power to the wealthy.
- ACow_Adonis 9y ago
  Your post is actually extremely important and spells out one of the primary weaknesses of such a system. As long as the budget obtained for the vote does not have an opportunity cost with the rest of a person's wealth/budget (and I can't think of any practical way to make that happen in reality), what the voting system will in effect create is increased voting power by the wealthy, as they suffer comparatively less marginal loss from expending their entire voting budget goals towards their agenda, irrespective of their strength of belief: the downside comes from their lack of any real real-world budgetary pain. Unless one can come up with a way to inflict the same budgetary pain on each individual for each vote-expenditure, I don't really see how you would argue for its implementation/superiority in practice (against the other forms of voting out there I mean, not necessarily contrasted just against first past the post...). Though this all depends on what one means by "optimal voting" or "efficient", since I don't believe there can be an objective definition of such.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - papaf 9y ago
    As I understood it, "buy" does not have to be money. It could be hashing ability as in Bitcoin or maybe everyone gets X voting credits every few years which they "buy" votes in local and national elections. I could be wrong, but I prefer the possibilities of such a system not directly involving money. The distribution of wealth is so imbalanced that I cannot see buying votes to have any kind of positive impact.
    - ultrafilter 9y ago
      Yes. Perhaps the voting currency should be hours, not dollars. Make the first vote free. But N-1 more votes costs you N^2-1 hours from your "registered community service" account maintained by the government. No overdrafts allowed: the hours must be credited before they can be debited.
  - amelius 9y ago
    Otoh, if money already buys politics today, this system could be not worse than what we have now.
- quickben 9y ago
  It's not, anybody can write a bullshit paper today. There is a reason this hard won democracy exist and why we dealt away with lesser systems where less people are in power. The author of the papern should go visit North Korea or Saudin Arabia and perhaps live there if he thinks the majority is tyranising him with their voting rights.
  - LolWolf 9y ago
    Wait, this argument makes no sense. It wasn't until 1950 that we had game theory to analyze voting systems directly, and it wasn't really until much later that people looked at more efficient systems. It's not hard to show that the 1-1 voting scheme is pretty useless in that its Nash equilibrium isn't guaranteed to be reflective of the population's general desires. So, fine, while the current form of democracy may have somewhat worked until now, that definitely does not imply that we reached an optimal voting system. If we can make the world a little bit better, why not? (This paper looks interesting, but, of course the devil is in the details of implementation; would I personally want this system? No idea.)
    - quickben 9y ago
      Well, why wouldn't it make sense? People were governed and had different levels of say through the history. Perhaps the most extreme example would be the French Revolution where the aristocracy had more votes per person than the common peasant, and we know whose heads rolled afterwards. The problem isn't game theory. The problem is that power attracts certain personalities that are not altruistic. The current iteration of having say in common decisions is explicitly trying to curb the maniacs from reaching/staying in power. > If we can make the world a little bit better, why not? Sure. But right now, will Trump sing Kumbaya, or is USA regretting the decision? If it was 40-40, imagine him buying 20% of the votes. "Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…" - Churchill
- igitur 9y ago
  One-person-one-vote is a terrible system, with the only advantage of it being simple and easy to understand, which was important when votes could be counted only by hand. CGP Grey has made an excellent and well known video series explaining this, so I don't think I need to debate it much further here. CGP Grey Voting Series: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLej2SlXPEd37YwwEY7mm0WyZ8cfB1TxXa http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLej2SlXPEd37YwwEY7mm0W...
  - andrepd 9y ago
    You didn't answer the question, you just said the current voting system is bad.
    - igitur 9y ago
      Isn't it a bit pedantic to want me to repeat arguments from the original post? OK, here you go: "Weyl and Lalley prove that the collective decision rapidly approximates efficiency as the number of voters increases. By contrast, no extant voting procedure is efficient."
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    Do any of those CGP Grey videos actually address one-person-one-vote? Looking at the titles of the videos they seem to be mostly critiques of how votes are grouped rather than how much voting power a single individual has. For example, criticising the electoral college system in the US has nothing to do with one-person-one-vote, it's a criticism of how the winner is decided.
bfung 9y ago
> I don't believe we are close to having a voter base that is capable of understanding, and hence accepting an outcome of such a voting system. Completely on point. Especially true of the American public. Getting people to migrate to this scheme is a huge problem. Today in America, voting is a right. However, to many, it appears to be a financially free activity as well. Or some may tie it in with "you get to vote if you pay taxes". Regardless, this "pay into a fund in order to vote" won't really go well -- we already pay a fund (taxes), and it's distribution is mishandled / non-optimally allocated / gamed by people in the system.
- amelius 9y ago
  But the poor will (most likely) receive money in this scheme. This can be an incentive for them.
  - bfung 9y ago
    But that's where it all falls down - the poor in america are most likely not to understand why they need to "pay more" to vote when it's already "free"!
ACow_Adonis 9y ago
A possible counter-point may be the existence of the Australian System of voting. Complex, debatably widely misunderstood...yet I'd argue widely accepted. I realise of course, there is a world of difference between pointing out there is a country with a different/more complex voting system, and migrating a country with culture/history of a given voting system to a more complex alternative...
- danieltillett 9y ago
  I love the Australian voting system. It is based on two seeming unrelated, but intertwined rules. 1. Instant runoff voting (preferencing the candidates from 1 to x). 2. Compulsory voting (actually a fine for not visiting the polling station and getting your name crossed off, voting is optional). The two systems together work to keep everyone involved to a certain extent in the political system, a choice in who you can actually vote for, and historically, stable centralist governments. We have over the last decade or so ended up with less stable governments, but this is more a reflection of a convergence to the centre. The differences between the major parties is now so small that changing does not make much difference in policy. The one downside is it does make Australia a rather boring place to live :)
  - lqdc13 9y ago
    Wouldn't it also be a negative? Basically, you cannot have radical societal or cultural changes because you have to get everyone on board ahead of time. In a two party system and optional voting, you can have only a small fraction of the population who particularly want some changes actually get those changes. Also, this strategy can be used to destabilize a system away from local maximum (if we are searching for some better state).
    - danieltillett 9y ago
      Yes if you want radical change it is a negative. Having said this radical change does not have a good history. I think that gradual change that has the support of the majority is the best way to achieve lasting change for the better. A really good current example is same sex marriage. Australia is one of the last western countries to allow this (should be implemented before the end of the year), but it now has the support of 70% of the population. I would rather see change occur that lasts, than a small minority impose their will on the majority and having to deal with the resulting backlash.
ThomPete 9y ago
Well very few understand the the current US system so complexity is hardly an argument.
- akvadrako 9y ago
  Would you trust a voting system you don't understand? More people think they understand the current system then a new more complex one.
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    Thats a different discussion. The claim was the complexity alone was the issue which its clearly not. A much bigger issue is the change itself. Even if we did a simpler system that everybody understood it would be hard to convince people to switch to it.
- Shish2k 9y ago
  It doesn't matter how many people understand it, but how many people think they understand it - from what I've seen, a lot of people think they understand the US system (at least they did, until Trump won with a minority of votes :P )
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    I don't think you have anything that backs up whether most people think they understand the US system. And even if they did they would agree it was complex (which was the claim I was responding to) It's the change that make it hard to implement and it's not just in politics but in most things humans are involved with. We accept what is as the norm because we grew up with it.

by igitur 9y ago

ZenoArrow 9y ago

How is this a superior voting system? It just seems to be a way for those with more money to have more influence in the voting process. We've got enough problems with money in politics as it is, we don't need any more of them.

IanDrake 9y ago
It's quadratic, do some quick math on how expensive it is to buy a victory. It's actually more cost effective to buy people's votes the usual way.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  It's not necessary for a single wealthy individual to be able to buy a victory by themselves for the results to be skewed towards the will of the wealthy. If 1000 votes cost £1 million, and 100 wealthy individuals all decide to spend that much in an election, that's 100,000 votes when these individuals would only usually have 100 votes. That's going to have an impact, especially on local elections. As for it being more cost effective to buy votes the usual way, the "usual" way relies on voter fraud and massive advertising campaigns, one of which is illegal, and the other is very expensive and the voting decisions are not guaranteed. On the other hand, quadratic voting would be legal and guaranteed.
  - IanDrake 9y ago
    By the usual way, I was referring to large advertising campaigns that I'm sure yield more votes per dollar than a quadratic voting system. One of the things you're missing is that people who can afford to buy that many votes for a single issue are very rare and could easily be out voted by a small organized group that buys multiple votes, but with a lower power multiple. Assuming all votes cost $1, then 1,000 votes costs 1mil. That could easily be nullified by 100 voters buying 10 votes. Consider also that the money would be rebated equally. So you might spend $100 and get back $250 and win the vote.
    - ZenoArrow 9y ago
      > "Assuming all votes cost $1, then 1,000 votes costs 1mil. That could easily be nullified by 100 voters buying 10 votes." Do you not see the problem with that? With the situation you describe, it takes the coordination of 100 individuals to nullify the actions of 1 wealthy voter. Do you not see how much easier it is for the wealthy voter?
      - Rangi42 9y ago
        If merely 100 less-wealthy voters out of the whole population couldn't coordinate to buy a few extra votes—and they wouldn't even have to explicitly communicate, it would just take 100 people who individually hear about the issue and decide to vote more—then how important can the issue really have been to them? I believe this is what is meant by "the collective decision rapidly approximates efficiency as the number of voters increases".
        ZenoArrow 9y ago
        That's missing the point I was making. I'm attempting to highlight the difference in effort that is required. Do you accept that the rich voter makes less effort in the hypothetical 1 vs. 100 voter situation?
        troupe 9y ago
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  The point is that Americans (me included) are going to put very little trust in a system which allows you to literally buy votes. Everyone should have the same amount of votes no matter the wealth and I don't see myself compromising on that issue.
  - barrkel 9y ago
    The system where you buy votes is the current system, mind. Somewhat true for elections of political representatives, but even more true for things like Senate Committees - these require party membership fees that get paid, which come via donations from lobbyists. Not party political, both sides do it: http://www.definingthemachine.com/party_dues.html http://www.definingthemachine.com/party_dues.html
  - acjohnson55 9y ago
    But do you feel any better about the idea of being compensated for not getting your preference?
    - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
      Not really. It seems sort of like selling some of my political power to the wealthy.
ACow_Adonis 9y ago
Your post is actually extremely important and spells out one of the primary weaknesses of such a system. As long as the budget obtained for the vote does not have an opportunity cost with the rest of a person's wealth/budget (and I can't think of any practical way to make that happen in reality), what the voting system will in effect create is increased voting power by the wealthy, as they suffer comparatively less marginal loss from expending their entire voting budget goals towards their agenda, irrespective of their strength of belief: the downside comes from their lack of any real real-world budgetary pain. Unless one can come up with a way to inflict the same budgetary pain on each individual for each vote-expenditure, I don't really see how you would argue for its implementation/superiority in practice (against the other forms of voting out there I mean, not necessarily contrasted just against first past the post...). Though this all depends on what one means by "optimal voting" or "efficient", since I don't believe there can be an objective definition of such.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- papaf 9y ago
  As I understood it, "buy" does not have to be money. It could be hashing ability as in Bitcoin or maybe everyone gets X voting credits every few years which they "buy" votes in local and national elections. I could be wrong, but I prefer the possibilities of such a system not directly involving money. The distribution of wealth is so imbalanced that I cannot see buying votes to have any kind of positive impact.
  - ultrafilter 9y ago
    Yes. Perhaps the voting currency should be hours, not dollars. Make the first vote free. But N-1 more votes costs you N^2-1 hours from your "registered community service" account maintained by the government. No overdrafts allowed: the hours must be credited before they can be debited.
- amelius 9y ago
  Otoh, if money already buys politics today, this system could be not worse than what we have now.
quickben 9y ago
It's not, anybody can write a bullshit paper today. There is a reason this hard won democracy exist and why we dealt away with lesser systems where less people are in power. The author of the papern should go visit North Korea or Saudin Arabia and perhaps live there if he thinks the majority is tyranising him with their voting rights.
- LolWolf 9y ago
  Wait, this argument makes no sense. It wasn't until 1950 that we had game theory to analyze voting systems directly, and it wasn't really until much later that people looked at more efficient systems. It's not hard to show that the 1-1 voting scheme is pretty useless in that its Nash equilibrium isn't guaranteed to be reflective of the population's general desires. So, fine, while the current form of democracy may have somewhat worked until now, that definitely does not imply that we reached an optimal voting system. If we can make the world a little bit better, why not? (This paper looks interesting, but, of course the devil is in the details of implementation; would I personally want this system? No idea.)
  - quickben 9y ago
    Well, why wouldn't it make sense? People were governed and had different levels of say through the history. Perhaps the most extreme example would be the French Revolution where the aristocracy had more votes per person than the common peasant, and we know whose heads rolled afterwards. The problem isn't game theory. The problem is that power attracts certain personalities that are not altruistic. The current iteration of having say in common decisions is explicitly trying to curb the maniacs from reaching/staying in power. > If we can make the world a little bit better, why not? Sure. But right now, will Trump sing Kumbaya, or is USA regretting the decision? If it was 40-40, imagine him buying 20% of the votes. "Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…" - Churchill
igitur 9y ago
One-person-one-vote is a terrible system, with the only advantage of it being simple and easy to understand, which was important when votes could be counted only by hand. CGP Grey has made an excellent and well known video series explaining this, so I don't think I need to debate it much further here. CGP Grey Voting Series: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLej2SlXPEd37YwwEY7mm0WyZ8cfB1TxXa http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLej2SlXPEd37YwwEY7mm0W...
- andrepd 9y ago
  You didn't answer the question, you just said the current voting system is bad.
  - igitur 9y ago
    Isn't it a bit pedantic to want me to repeat arguments from the original post? OK, here you go: "Weyl and Lalley prove that the collective decision rapidly approximates efficiency as the number of voters increases. By contrast, no extant voting procedure is efficient."
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  Do any of those CGP Grey videos actually address one-person-one-vote? Looking at the titles of the videos they seem to be mostly critiques of how votes are grouped rather than how much voting power a single individual has. For example, criticising the electoral college system in the US has nothing to do with one-person-one-vote, it's a criticism of how the winner is decided.

bfung 9y ago

> I don't believe we are close to having a voter base that is capable of understanding, and hence accepting an outcome of such a voting system. Completely on point. Especially true of the American public. Getting people to migrate to this scheme is a huge problem. Today in America, voting is a right. However, to many, it appears to be a financially free activity as well. Or some may tie it in with "you get to vote if you pay taxes". Regardless, this "pay into a fund in order to vote" won't really go well -- we already pay a fund (taxes), and it's distribution is mishandled / non-optimally allocated / gamed by people in the system.

amelius 9y ago
But the poor will (most likely) receive money in this scheme. This can be an incentive for them.
- bfung 9y ago
  But that's where it all falls down - the poor in america are most likely not to understand why they need to "pay more" to vote when it's already "free"!

ACow_Adonis 9y ago

A possible counter-point may be the existence of the Australian System of voting. Complex, debatably widely misunderstood...yet I'd argue widely accepted. I realise of course, there is a world of difference between pointing out there is a country with a different/more complex voting system, and migrating a country with culture/history of a given voting system to a more complex alternative...

danieltillett 9y ago
I love the Australian voting system. It is based on two seeming unrelated, but intertwined rules. 1. Instant runoff voting (preferencing the candidates from 1 to x). 2. Compulsory voting (actually a fine for not visiting the polling station and getting your name crossed off, voting is optional). The two systems together work to keep everyone involved to a certain extent in the political system, a choice in who you can actually vote for, and historically, stable centralist governments. We have over the last decade or so ended up with less stable governments, but this is more a reflection of a convergence to the centre. The differences between the major parties is now so small that changing does not make much difference in policy. The one downside is it does make Australia a rather boring place to live :)
- lqdc13 9y ago
  Wouldn't it also be a negative? Basically, you cannot have radical societal or cultural changes because you have to get everyone on board ahead of time. In a two party system and optional voting, you can have only a small fraction of the population who particularly want some changes actually get those changes. Also, this strategy can be used to destabilize a system away from local maximum (if we are searching for some better state).
  - danieltillett 9y ago
    Yes if you want radical change it is a negative. Having said this radical change does not have a good history. I think that gradual change that has the support of the majority is the best way to achieve lasting change for the better. A really good current example is same sex marriage. Australia is one of the last western countries to allow this (should be implemented before the end of the year), but it now has the support of 70% of the population. I would rather see change occur that lasts, than a small minority impose their will on the majority and having to deal with the resulting backlash.

ThomPete 9y ago

Well very few understand the the current US system so complexity is hardly an argument.

akvadrako 9y ago
Would you trust a voting system you don't understand? More people think they understand the current system then a new more complex one.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  Thats a different discussion. The claim was the complexity alone was the issue which its clearly not. A much bigger issue is the change itself. Even if we did a simpler system that everybody understood it would be hard to convince people to switch to it.
Shish2k 9y ago
It doesn't matter how many people understand it, but how many people think they understand it - from what I've seen, a lot of people think they understand the US system (at least they did, until Trump won with a minority of votes :P )
- ThomPete 9y ago
  I don't think you have anything that backs up whether most people think they understand the US system. And even if they did they would agree it was complex (which was the claim I was responding to) It's the change that make it hard to implement and it's not just in politics but in most things humans are involved with. We accept what is as the norm because we grew up with it.