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A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

• mc32 8y ago
  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.
  • alipang 8y ago
    This seems to be the obvious problem. If I only care about X, and you only about Y, we could vote individually (100 tokens -> 10 votes for X, 100 tokens -> 10 votes for Y), or we could collude and make that vote (2 * 50 tokens -> 2 * 7 votes X, 2 * 50 tokens -> 2 * 7 votes Y).
    • gyaniv 8y ago
      I don't see the problem with that, because it would require me to convince you to vote for Y although you want X. And in addition, seeing as this is an anonymous (I'm assuming) vote, then I could lie to you and vote my way (to get more votes for Y), but then if everyone will do it, the colluding wouldn't work, so we need to be able to trust each other and work together, which is exactly what we in the end, for people to work together and not against each other.
      • ulucs 8y ago
        Coordinated groups have voting power of sqrt(total money)*sqrt(number of individuals), uncoordinated ones have sqrt(money). If you are for some cause, you should just find like-minded individuals and pool your total money. They have very limited incentive for keeping the money for themselves because they also agree with you on the issue. Then the other side should also coordinate tightly in this manner, and now you have a new problem: polarization.
        • Jolter 8y ago
          Money?
          • mlillie 8y ago
            100 'dollars' to spend
        • anigbrowl 8y ago
          Yeah but you're assuming people naturally line up in two camps. It's possible that you've been inadvertently trained to think this way if you inhabit a duopolistic society.
      • luckylion 8y ago
        > I don't see the problem with that, because it would require me to convince you to vote for Y although you want X. X and Y need not be alternatives for the same problem, X might be about financial deregulation and Y about privacy deregulation.
        • Redoubts 8y ago
          Sounds like how party coalitions work in the US.
      • btown 8y ago
        “Your religion, your salvation, requires that you allocate tokens as your local Party Organizer assigns. Only then can we combat the godless agenda the elites have shamelessly created this quadratic system to perpetuate. Do not let them bait you from deviating from our coordinated plan to stop them.” Anonymous voting doesn’t help when independent thought itself is trained away from an early age.
    • lazzlazzlazz 8y ago
      This is just persuading your compatriots to vote, which is normal and part of democracy. That's not "collusion" (an increasingly vacuous word these days). There's nothing wrong with persuading people.
  • logfromblammo 8y ago
    The voting method breaks down entirely when you consider strategic voting by groups, and multiple-repetitions game strategies. 100 players would form a voting cartel, and each member would spread their votes out among all the members' favorite issues. Reneging on the cartel's rules means that the entire cartel retaliates on the next vote. So each party has exactly 100 issues in their platform, and no individual voter can do anything to stop them.
    • memory_grep 8y ago
      You're assuming votes are public, which is not usually the case. If there's no way to check someone else's vote, there's no way to enforce a voting block.
      • logfromblammo 8y ago
        If the votes aren't public enough to see the ballots, how do you know if a voting district cast the correct number of votes for the number of ballots cast? How do you know if the number of quadratic votes match the sum of sqrts of the individual votes? How do you check to see if anyone's cheating? If you can see the ballots, you can filter for the ones that match the cartel platform, and count to 100. There may be a voting coordination strategy to find out who cheated. Maybe instead of 100 members, you have 99, and each member votes 2 for a different issue.
        • lopmotr 8y ago
          If there are enough candidates, you can encode a unique ID in the pattern of your individual votes to prove who you are to somebody reading anonymous ballot papers. I've heard this is possible in Australia with a huge list of candidates and multiple votes.
      • jgowdy 8y ago
        Legislative votes aren't typically public?
    • dfischer 8y ago
  • empath75 8y ago
    > So people who vote in isolation have less influence than people who organize and vote as a bloc. I think that’s a feature not a bug. It would encourage people to propose plan or candidates that are acceptable to a wider part of the electorate.
    • munk-a 8y ago
      The US is already feeling the pain of bloc voting though - the two party system has managed to heavily entrench itself - we need to look at voting systems that may experimentation free or cheap. I'd much rather see IRV gain traction to remove the spoiler effect and disincentivise negative campaigning.
      • philwelch 8y ago
        IRV does a poor job of that.
  • bduerst 8y ago
    Increased cooperation across groups is the benefit - i.e. the opposite of zealotry and partisanship.
  • iambateman 8y ago
    All voting systems benefit highly coordinated groups.
  • hotpockets 8y ago
    There are some additional assumptions you need. First that people are transparent. Second, that they are honest. Third that they are consistent. So, while voting in isolation has a cost — wasted votes — so does coordinated voting — misinformed votes. The wasted votes problem will never make you miss your favorite, but the misinformed vote problem could be catastrophic.
  • godelski 8y ago
    This is democracy though. The idea of a majority having more power than a minority is, as another user puts it "a feature, not a bug". If your goal is to best represent your population, then you want a system that counts people's opinions equally, regardless of what group/s they belong to. The problem here isn't the voting system so much as the structure. The way to "better represent" minority groups is to have different weightings to those groups. But then that's difficult because you have to specify which groups are more equal than others. Clearly we like racial minorities and don't like minority groups like white nationalists (at least as a public), but most lines aren't this easy to differentiate. The goal of voting systems like this is not so much to tackle this majority vs minority problem but rather to reduce tribalism. In a first past the post voting style your optimal strategy is not to pick the thing you like the most, but to rather pick the thing that you think is most likely to win and more closely aligns to your beliefs. These voting systems are more about finding common beliefs. For example, republicans and democrats agree on many issues. These systems are about anti-polarization, not about weighted representation.
    • mc32 8y ago
      What comes to mind to me is highly organized is, for example, a NIMBY crowd; a pro crowd is not as tightly coordinated, they get trounced, even if in polling the pros are in majority.
      • gvhst 8y ago
        How do you define coordinated? Let's say you define coordinated as a group who on average spends a greater % of their voting budget on an issue than the other side. You also have a situation where the minority is coordinated and the majority is disorganized. In this situation, each individual in the majority would have to allocate a smaller percentage of their budget to an issue than an individual in a minority in order to have the same amount of influence on an issue. This is because. 1) You are spreading the vote credit cost across a larger population 2) Because of quadratic voting, if you hold the total number of a group's voting credits put towards an issue constant as you add additional people to a group, the impact that a group has on a particular issue grows. Because of these two factors, the majority can be quite a bit more disorganized than the minority and still control the issue.
  • gvhst 8y ago
    Here is some back of the envelope math that I did: Assume you have two groups who are each 100% focused on a cause which the other group has no opinion of. n = people in each group b = individual vote budget Each Group Votes Independently: n * sqrt(b) votes If a group colludes s.t. group A gives (1/2)b votes to group B's issue and vice versa you get: 2 * n * sqrt((1/2)b)) votes which simplifies into Sqrt(2) * n * sqrt(b). Yet coordinating between these two groups becomes more difficult and costly, growing somewhere between n (perfect coordination) and n^2 (total decentralization). Thus, regardless of how you coordinate it will always be more expensive than the influence you gain which grows at sqrt(). Even in this simple assumption collusion becomes a negative value decision.
• dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  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.
  • SubiculumCode 8y ago
    The more that politics become local the more this all goes away. States need to be at the foreront again
    • ereyes01 8y ago
      I'd go further and argue that city-states make the most sense in today's world, with a federal government to arbitrate resources and defense. US state boundaries are quite arbitrary with respect to how actual communities are organized on the map.
      • SubiculumCode 8y ago
        But you have an option to move to a new state that fits your beliefs. Much harder to do when it is a Federal system with a single law for all thr lands.
    • 8y ago
• gyaniv 8y ago
  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.
• chapium 8y ago
  "Success" seems to be defined unclearly here. "Held and election and got a result" seems to be the only outcome. "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?
  • elliekelly 8y ago
    > Can it scale up? A long while ago when I was in college we attempted to implement a less complicated version of this system for allocating budgets to student organizations and it was nothing short of a shit show. I'm not confident in the voting public's ability to understand the process.
• crazygringo 8y ago
  It's clever, but it doesn't solve the problem. 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.
  • yourbandsucks 8y ago
    Additionally, it's got almost nothing to do with ideas anymore. It's about tribes. If you're in tribe A, your media tells you tribe B are literally devils. There's no understanding a devil, or compromise with one. If they say something that sounds reasonable? It's probably a trick. Hannity or Maddow will explain why tonight.
    • bilbo0s 8y ago
      >Hannity or Maddow will explain why tonight... There is something very sad, yet true, about that statement.
      • yourbandsucks 8y ago
        Downvoted pretty heavily, though. Guess it's a threatening message :)
  • youdontknowtho 8y ago
    There are literally millions of single issue voters who vote for conservatives because of abortion in the US. Literally millions of people.
    • 8y ago
• inflatableDodo 8y ago
  Sounds like approval voting only with limited votes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
• netcan 8y ago
  Say I have a party/club/whatever. We're going to handle all sorts of decisions by voting and/or similar means. Is there an app we can use that'll handle voting, and do a good job?
  • tokai 8y ago
    doodle.com
• cabalamat 8y ago
  Let's say Alice only cares about proposition A. And Bob only cares about B. 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?
  • lhopki01 8y ago
    Oh no lawmakers actually cooperating to achieve their goals. What a tragedy!
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • kitsy 8y ago
      But does not support "across the aisle" cooperation, which is where the concern is.
    • ben509 8y ago
      It usually does result in tragedy, though. It's just reported as "bad luck."
  • asimpletune 8y ago
    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.
  • Muximize 8y ago
    Because it is a Prisoner's Dilemma. 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.
• gnomewascool 8y ago
  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: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID3092895_code1186331.pdf?abstractid=2003531&mirid=1&type=2 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID3092895_cod... Doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2003531 https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2003531
• youdontknowtho 8y ago
  "intense preferences of the minority" are enshrined in the constitution. The senate, the electoral college, and the states themselves are designed to protect the minority of property onwers. It's designed to slow progress. Read Madison. Also, I'm sure Bloomberg writers LOVE attempts to replace Democracy with some weird economic neo-market model. Coins...get a grip, man. EDIT: Sorry. "Tokens". Whatever.
  • heraclius 8y ago
    I quite understand that there is a tendency to marketise decision-making in an unhelpful fashion, but I’m not entirely sure how this scheme is too much of a problem, beyond using the word “tokens”. Could you elaborate as to the specific problems of this scheme as opposed to those of general attempts to marketise? And “quadratic voting” may have uses beyond the areas governed by the US constitution. Even within those areas, there are minorities other than property owners. Blacks, for example, do not seem to have been very successful as a minority in preventing the various things that the state does to them that are plausibly unhelpful (though the quantification thereof may well be intractable). The particular use case here, however, seems to be to make the specific institutions you describe more effective, as opposed to relying on their being pitted against each other to make things work. I think that it is more desirable to have a single institution that works well, where possible (which it generally isn’t) than multiple institutions that operate against each other in an attempt to avoid pitfalls, because one generally falls into more pitfalls in the process, even if the balance of advantage lies with the latter case.
    • youdontknowtho 7y ago
      I'm not sure how to put this in a way that won't sound offensive. Please cut me some slack in that regard, because I'm honestly not trying to be offensive. I think your description of this is naive in a very serious way. Here the "marketing" is a big part of the point. Proposing solutions to democratic problems with something derived from economics provides theoretical cover to people who are seeking to undermine democracy in service of capital. The idea that democracy needs to be "more effective" because of some structural issue, not with society but with democracy itself, is incredibly dangerous. EDIT: I'm rambling, but I think that the article was a type of propaganda. I was also trying to point out that the constitution enshrines some very extreme positions for at least one minority that actually benefits from things like what are described by this article. I don't take it's claims seriously because I believe that it actually exists to present aspects of capitalism as superior to democracy.
• ajmurmann 8y ago
  It's unclear to me if this addresses the spoiler effect which I see as the single, biggest issue in US elections right now.
  • jakamau 8y ago
    1. End "winner-take-all" allocations of electoral votes 2. Any party that gains the minimum population/electoral vote (Wyoming puts that at ~200k) in any state is guaranteed at least one electoral vote in that state 3. All remaining electoral votes are allocated proportionally based on general election votes 4. If no majority winner exists, the party with the least number of electoral votes casts their vote to other party/ies and this repeats until a winner obtains 270. Wouldn't this remove the spoiler effect, function within the current voting system, and off-set any perceived difficulty in rank voting to the actual parties?
  • ameister14 8y ago
    Ranked choice voting is superior for that purpose. Maine is trying it and it's worked well so far.
• naasking 8y ago
  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.
• C1sc0cat 8y ago
  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)
  • tialaramex 8y ago
    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.
    • C1sc0cat 8y ago
      They are normally elected and yes it is like the Speaker of the HOC though normally a bit more crunchy that the old softy that's currently in the position.
• marricks 8y ago
  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.
  • Jolter 8y ago
    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.
    • bsdetector 8y ago
      > That is, except "first past the post" which is the system in the UK and US. ... I'm sure you can see how this is a problem? The two longest lasting, largest, most successful democracies of all time - I don't see the problem. The arguments against winner-take-all are mathematically maximizing a collective total happiness score for single elections. But governments are run by people, not math, and I've yet to see anything addressing the psychology of election systems and especially not over time. If instead election systems are scored on how well they do after 250 years or how few world wars they start then winner take all is the only winner.
      • jhasse 8y ago
        Remove "world" from "world wars" and it looks totally different.
      • Jolter 8y ago
        "The two longest lasting, largest, most successful democracies of all time - I don't see the problem." They both have problems with large minorities of voters not being represented in their respective parliaments.
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• burtonator 8y ago
  I fundamentally" believe in democracy and think that the way forward might be to experiment with these at the local level. Either city/state elections or your own political parties. If they REALLY work we would be HIGHLY competitive. For example, instant run-off / ranked choice (or other voting systems) could be used in the Democratic primaries WITHOUT having to convince Republicans. If they really work the Dems will have much better candidates better representing the people and should win more elections.
• duxup 8y ago
  Within a caucus I think this makes sense. I do worry about any wider use though. California has shown with its proposition system that issue voting can get really messy / absurd. A political caucus can maybe recognize that voting to (just an example) dedicate %60 of all revenue to X while understanding that they can't then dedicate ... %60 of all revenue to Y too. The general electorate is not so inclined or consider things past step 1 of governance (or really think about governance at all).
• lghh 8y ago
  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.
  • weberc2 8y ago
    The other party(ies) could do the same, so I don't see how this is any worse than the current system.
• clarkevans 8y ago
  It's nice to see other ways to vote. One of the other newcomers is STAR Voting (https://www.equal.vote/starvoting https://www.equal.vote/starvoting) 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/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/.
  • obelos 8y ago
    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.
• _bxg1 8y ago
  What we need isn't necessarily centrism, but lowered emotions. Emotions are what skew reason and then catch like wildfire. It happens that they tend to push people to the extreme ends of the political spectrum, but that itself isn't really the problem. It's not about sheer distance from the center, it's about voting based on anger and hatefulness and fear. Anti-fascists in Nazi Germany would've been "extreme" relative to the center at the time, but they wouldn't have been "extreme" with regards to how hate-based their stance was. Edit: Or more accurately - since many of them probably did develop hatred for the nazis - the anti-fascists' stance made the most sense when hate and fear are removed from the equation; were a person in that context to consider things stoically, there would've been little motive to side with the fascists. To summarize: fear and anger warp your decision-making. It happens that they lead to polarization, but that's a red herring. What we need is to reduce the inflammation of society (largely thanks to social media), instead of tackling the symptom.
  • heraclius 8y ago
    It’s tempting to think that we can operate politics without emotion. However, it is unclear what the foundations of our political beliefs are if not intuitive reactions of the sort that emotions are as well. For example, most people who oppose torture oppose it because they have an intuition that it is unacceptable and value that intuition. We can construct “objective” methods to derive political claims from other claims, but ultimately they involve a value judgement—politics without value judgement has no way to decide between competing objectives. “Reason” does not provide a coherent morality, as the failure of the Enlightenment project shows; “emotion” is quite capable of justifying a centrist view—I should imagine most have negative emotional reactions to the Leninist and Hitlerite states. I imagine that one reason for the decline of the liberal order is its abandonment of emotional claims and pretence to objectivity as if that were possible. Those who continue to use emotion, to appeal to our intuitions as to what is right, instead of simply referring to empirical concepts whose connexion to such intuitions is severely dulled, appear to have the most success; unfortunately they do not seem to be particularly constructive at the moment. Anger and fear are not entirely unreasonable as emotions go: we fear and are angered by the spectres of poverty and dictatorship, and those are not unreasonable positions to hold. Attacks on morality and value judgements in politics often take the form of, to take an example, Sir Humphrey’s utterances in Yes Minister. Government, in his view, is about order, and the prevention of chaos. Hacker, the minister, suggests that it is about doing good. Why is Sir Humphrey so scared of chaos? His fear thereof is the same sort of fear that drives morality; we might even call it a moral belief. It is not an implausible belief—chaos has its problems. Most of the time what seems “objective” is no longer on demanding a further reason. “Lowered emotions” should not really be the end; a sensible method of dealing with competing emotions is the need of the hour.
• localhostdotdev 8y ago
  > An intriguing new tool of democracy just had its first test in the real world of politics, and it passed with flying colors. how can you even measure if a voting system is a success?
  • weberc2 8y ago
    Specifically, how does one measure democracy? I hadn't thought about this before, but I'm intrigued and no good answers are springing to mind.
    • localhostdotdev 8y ago
      there is a democracy index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index there is something similar for voting systems but it isn't as elegant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system...
  • furyofantares 8y ago
    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.
• benj111 8y ago
  The Polarity of Brexit throws up some interesting results, depending on how a possible poll is conducted. Would be interesting to apply this methodology to the problem. Here's a good write-up: https://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2019/04/23/the-crazy-polling-of-soft-brexit https://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2019/04/23/the-c...
• breuleux 8y ago
  Couldn't this sort of incentivize efforts to polarize the public? If I want to get my way on issue X, but I don't care about issue Y, a good strategy for me would be to rouse everyone else about Y so that they waste their tokens on Y and can't oppose me as effectively on X. For example, I could push abortion as the most important issue of all, even though I really don't care either way, and then put all my tokens towards tax cuts for the rich.
• forinti 8y ago
  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.
  • bilbo0s 8y ago
    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.
    • danielvf 8y ago
      In general, the founders thought Greek style democracy was a horrible system of government. Inevitably incompetent, bloody, unjust, rash, and would quickly self destruct. When the French Revolution happened - with chaos, purges, wars, and then an emperor taking over the country - the founders basically said “I told you so”. Here’s an example. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6371 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6371
      • bilbo0s 8y ago
        But the French did not have the Athenian safeguards either.
      • deleted 8y ago
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    • kmonsen 8y ago
      The founders wanted a republic governed by rich landowners. Preferably white and wasp.
    • benmmurphy 8y ago
      Someone who has political aspirations is unlikely to push for a system where the political jobs are allocated by lottery.
• drinane 8y ago
  I first heard this described in a book written by Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl. The book has a lot of other cool reasonably doable ideas. https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-Capitalism-Democracy/dp/0691177503/ https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-Capitalism-...
• pohl 8y ago
  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. https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/biw1ic/asyncawait_syntax_status_update/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/biw1ic/asyncawait_syn... https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/bju8di/asyncawait_syntax_survey_results/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/bju8di/asyncawait_syn...
  • pauldix 8y ago
    Totally agree, that's where my mind went to immediately. Features and/or proposals on design in larger projects.
  • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    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.
• pauldix 8y ago
  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.
  • skybrian 8y ago
    I'm skeptical about why volunteers should work on anything other than whatever they feel like working on? Voting on free labor seems presumptuous.
• magissima 8y ago
  And people complain that ranked-choice voting is too complicated for the average voter...
• c3534l 8y ago
  If the results showed people voting normally, spreading their votes across their options, isn't that a failure? What's the point of switching to quadradic voting when you get the same results as the old system of selecting 15 bills?
• kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  > Quadratic voting “is the one vote pricing rule under which voters who intend only their own gain are led, as if by an invisible hand, to advance the interests of society,” What's so special about n^2? I'd suspect n^phi is optimal.
  • dane-pgp 8y ago
    Why phi?
• jhales 8y ago
  This can be gamed easily by running N-1 clones of any given candidate, where N is the total number of votes allotted.
  • Jolter 8y ago
    For some loose definition of "easily", assuming human candidates.
  • typest 8y ago
    This article doesn’t mention it, but you would need to require anyone introducing a candidate/proposal pay as well, to prevent this situation.
• mindslight 8y ago
  This approach is the direct opposite of what we need societally, which is less of the feeling of "throwing your vote away" from voting a strong preference, as in Instant Runoff. Political division is a symptom, not the root problem. It is being driven by people already being made to cede to the "center", where "center" really means authoritarian warmongering surveillance as pushed by the press. Discouraging "zealotry" is just quashing dissent even harder. Left and Right are merely two different manners of reasoning (inductive versus deductive, open world versus closed world, etc). Reacting against the totalitarianism, people try to escape in whichever direction they tend to think in. Parties then herd them into blaming the "other side" by focusing on the most outlandish of that groups's conclusions, which of course are totally alien.
• terryschiavo22 8y ago
  The only problem with elections right now is Citizens United. Does anyone honestly believe that the Democratic nominees on the left are all running because they think they can win? Or can we agree that the ability to raise endless money and garner publicity under the guise of an election could be what they're after?
  • bdamm 8y ago
    Is this exclusive to the Democratic candidates? I think this was the case for the Republican candidates of 2018 as well.
    • terryschiavo22 8y ago
      I'm saying this more in regard to the current crop of candidates because it's more obvious and egregious that there are some running for President right now that are doing it for attention and money. Although you're right. This is by no means exclusive to one side of the aisle.
• amiune 8y ago
  I propose something better than any voting method: try to achieve perfect information
• mbostleman 8y ago
  >>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?
  • ThrustVectoring 8y ago
    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.
  • ivanbakel 8y ago
    >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.
    • mbostleman 8y ago
      Ah yes, got it. I missed that, thanks.
• cerealbad 8y ago
  if voting was mandatory in america for all adults you would get more competent people running and third parties carrying elections until the major parties shifted away from extreme positions. you don't need to feed into madness, americans are sane people who want unity and common sense. it's not hard to do, make voting day a public holiday or put in on a weekend, use stamps on peoples hands or use name-residence registries and discount multiple votes. this would make american elections harder to buy, and the dollar doesn't buy you what it used to anyway...
  • screye 8y ago
    3rd parties actively hurt progress towarss their goals by splitting votes between them and the larger party with platforms closer to theirs. The 1st past the vote system, will always end up in a 2 party system. Unless that gets replaced by a ranked choice voting or another decent alternative
• a1369209993 8y ago
  Link is broken; gives fraudulent error message: > We've detected unusual activity from your computer network > To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot. Does anyone have a link to the actual article?
• ouid 8y ago
  This is a huge misrepresentation of this voting system. It makes zealotry possible, not expensive...
• Animats 8y ago
  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.
• whowhatwhy 8y ago
  Isn't this basically the world congress system from Civilization V?
• JulianMorrison 8y ago
  Simple approval voting works. Pick only one outcome? Sure, but you lost the chance to pick others.
• heraclius 8y ago
  Is there any reason that 2 is the best of all possible indices? It sounds, prima facie, reasonable, but it is unclear whether it is the best, what the best is, or even whether it can reasonably be calculated given that people behave irrationally in different ways.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• dvorak365 8y ago
  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.
  • kazinator 8y ago
    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.
    • dvorak365 8y ago
      But tokens aren't votes. A person whose ideology aligns with 100 options has 10x the ability to influence the outcome of the election towards their preferred outcomes than someone whose ideology aligns with only one option.
      • kazinator 8y ago
        You mean, it does what it says on the box?
        • dvorak365 8y ago
          I'm not denying that this is a type of voting system that biases towards certain outcomes. I'm saying that the bias it attempts to accomplish is not desirable as it gives more political power to people with weak opinions than people with strong opinions. I think a good voting system would allow people to express the strength of their feelings on the options, but the system shouldn't reward weak opinions over strong opinions and vice versa. Most traditional cardinal systems accomplish this just fine.
• kazinator 8y ago
  I have a much better, simpler idea: you can't vote for the same candidate twice in the same election, period. Another better algorithm is to have a single ballot with, say, ten blanks on it. You can fill it however you like, possibly with ten duplicates. The blanks are weighted: the top blank carries more weight than the bottom, according to some geometric progression, like: 1> (mapcar (op expt 0.8) (range 0 9)) (1.0 0.8 0.64 0.512 0.4096 0.32768 0.262144 0.2097152 0.16777216 0.134217728) This quadratic concept requires too many tokens. If you actually want people to be able to vote for one candidate half a dozen times, you need to give them 91 tokens. But that then allows people to vote 91 times for different choices. If there aren't anywhere near that many choices, then people have tokens remaining which encourages them to vote for duplicate choices. It's just a mess where people get wrapped up in the token accounting and lose sight of the issues.
  • newen 8y ago
    Do you really think some variant of lisp along with the op function is the best way to communicate with a wide audience? For normal people, that code is printing the result of 0.8^i for i=0..9.
    • kazinator 8y ago
      I think that, well, HN comments aren't a good platform for someone looking for a wide audience.
      • newen 8y ago
        And by wide audience, I mean people who don't program in lisp 100% of the time.
• aiyodev 8y ago
  In a real election, couldn’t you just run multiple candidates with identical positions and then have all but one drop out during the runoff?
• dctoedt 8y ago
  Sounds like just a new name for cumulative voting, which has been a thing in closely-held corporations for decades. From a (U.S.) Securities and Exchange Commission Web site: <quote> Cumulative voting is a type of voting system that helps strengthen the ability of minority shareholders to elect a director. This method allows shareholders to cast all of their votes for a single nominee for the board of directors when the company has multiple openings on its board. In contrast, in "regular" or "statutory" voting, shareholders may not give more than one vote per share to any single nominee. For example, if the election is for four directors and you hold 500 shares (with one vote per share), under the regular method you could vote a maximum of 500 shares for each one candidate (giving you 2,000 votes total—500 votes per each of the four candidates). With cumulative voting, you are afforded the 2,000 votes from the start and could choose to vote all 2,000 votes for one candidate, 1,000 each to two candidates, or otherwise divide your votes whichever way you wanted. </quote> https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answers-cumulativevotehtm.html https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answers-cumulativevotehtm.h... (extra paragraphing added) More analysis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_voting
• iambateman 8y ago
  If you’re a developer and you’re into voting, we’re working on building an open source app for Ranked Choice Voting with a nonprofit called FairVote. The old version is at rankit.vote. Angular app, Firebase, couple different voting mechanisms. It’s an attempt to help people understand how alternative voting systems can make the world a better place. Email me if you’re interested in contributing!
• joerickard 8y ago
  The book this is from, Radical Markets[0], provides a unique perspective and is worth a read. It contains some very creative solutions to real problems and helped me to realize how small the box is for current policy debates. [0] https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11222.html https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11222.html
  • typest 8y ago
    Radical markets is fantastic. In light of some comments on this thread, I feel they did not explore enough the potential downsides of the mechanisms they proposed. Nevertheless, I still love the book..
• Semiapies 8y ago
  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.
  • blunte 8y ago
    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.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • godelski 8y ago
    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).
  • jorblumesea 8y ago
    Isn't that the definition of a minority group and the problems with any democracy? And why should the majority bend to the will of a minority?
    • rgoulter 8y ago
      > Why should the majority bend to the will of a minority I'd prefer to read GP's post as a "live and let live", rather than pursuit of domination. That said, there's always the risk of "dominating minority is bad" if my in-group is the minority, and "upholding majority preferences is good" if my in-group the majority. :-)
• glangdale 8y ago
  Seems like a recipe for horse-trading. As an abstraction, say we have a group of 400 fairly development-minded people who are mostly indifferent or OK with projects A, B, C, and D, with the exception that each 25% of this group really likes one of these projects (the classic single-issue voter). Without horse-trading we get them spending their 100 points on their pet issue, getting 10 votes per voter, yielding 1,000 for each. With horse trading, they agree to split their votes with all 4 of the cabal's issues, which means that they can each contribute 25 points to 4 different projects, or 4x5 votes per voter, yielding 2,000 total. So a disciplined party 'bloc' can exert outsized control in this scheme. Of course, the usual problems of maintaining discipline arise, especially with secret ballots where you can't prove that you kept faith with the cabal. Another element of this (and any scheme where people's ability to express preferences is "rationed") would be the issue of what makes it on to the ballot to begin with - there's obviously some real prospects for mischief and vote-splitting. If you have the resources, the idea of creating a lot of moderately trivial proposals to draw away votes from things that you're opposed to might be effective - so if you want to get some huge development through that's opposed by environmentalists, you might attempt to jam the zone with a gazillion minor environmental proposals (all of which look fairly good) to try to suck away voting power from your political opponents.
• rcpt 8y ago
  Get ready for regulatory capture on steroids
• yboris 8y ago
  A really excellent 2-hour podcast on the topic of voting: Politics is so much worse because we use an atrocious 18th century voting system. Aaron Hamlin has a viable plan to fix it. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-reform/ https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-...