4 ms·

>> Not to be snippy here but, whoever wrote the Bible clearly lived in an era before Fox News and conservative talk radio. They are anything but afraid. > The

>> Not to be snippy here but, whoever wrote the Bible clearly lived in an era before Fox News and conservative talk radio. They are anything but afraid. > The point is that trying to control what others may say, see or hear is suspicious. That's what the whole paragraph is about. It would likely hurt your cause. I'm assuming what you're being coy about here is that the current election system hides voters' votes from them? Great, please see our entire discussion about why this is a super hard problem to solve and why it's not worth solving. >> Democrats and non-partisan organizations spend millions of dollars trying this, and it definitely isn't keeping up. Other problems that require millions of dollars to fix are thought to be crises, and I think we should start thinking of misinformation in general as a crisis. > If you can't win that way, your chances are slim no matter what you do. Btw, you can change a few words and get what Papists probably thought when people began reading the Bible: "The Inquisition spends millions to root out heresy, and it definitely isn't keeping up. Other problems that require millions to fix are thought to be crises, and I think we should start thinking of heresy in general as a crisis." This is dismissive and contributes nothing. There are core differences between the Inquisition (?) and sending texts to people telling them when and where they can vote. Your argument distills to "truth wins out" and I'm saying there's lots of good evidence to the contrary. >> Your other counter arguments are essentially: compulsory voting doesn't fix everything. Fortunately for me, that's not my claim. > Hiding indifference and possible demand for fresh ideas is detrimental. People don't get involved in new political movements if it seems that almost everybody is content to vote the status quo. And that's what it would seems like: you need to fill ballot anyway so you try to at least pick the least evil. >> Here are the Democracy Index scores of the countries they list (I've omitted 3 micro-states and 3 cities): > Wikipedia has a criticism section on Democracy Index... I think you're trying to reason through this from your understanding and first principles, but a lot of things in life are non-intuitive, especially to non-experts. What usually happens in compulsory voting is that voters just scratch their ballots, the incidence of that is super low in Australia, it's a non-issue. You keep trying to make a link between totalitarianism and compulsory voting, but where's your evidence? Some irrelevant moralizing about the lesser evil and that Wikipedia has a criticism section on the Democracy Index (are you seriously taking issue with like, Australia being a democracy)? Is that even compulsory voting's fault (see where I said I agree compulsory voting doesn't fix everything)? >> If you believe there are organizations out there that would pay for votes, why don't you believe there are organizations that would pay people to do this? > I expect that making a fool of oneself publicly and taking the risk of the conspiracy being exposed, would cost a lot more than a vote. You should read about Lee Atwater, and while you're doing it, remember all that was 20 years ago or more, and not even state of the art today. >> So someone exploiting this system would have to -- > I have been thinking that [pay for vote schemes] would pay the voter after reporting voting by the token they gave and can verify. Why wouldn't every voter just do this? I'd love to get paid for the votes I was going to make anyway. This is essentially compulsory voting but with carrots rather than sticks. >> The reason people don't do it isn't because it's unverifiable, it's because it's impossible to keep secret at the scale where it would matter, and you go to jail if you try. > That reminds me of something I read from a detective: the difficulty of concealing a conspiracy increases as more people get involved. In that case vote buying isn't a problem at all. Yes! We agree! Well, OK to be clear it can still be a problem in real small elections, but whatever. > <token stuff> Honestly I'm not super interested in the mechanics of the token system. I'm pretty convinced it's unworkably complicated; now we're talking about bitmaps and writing it down and blah blah blah. But I'm also convinced I can't convince you of this, so yeah. > <ballot confidentiality vs. ballot secrecy> Let me rehash our entire discussion, hopefully succinctly but probably not. 1. Without a list of valid voters, you can't protect against ballot box stuffing. States build such lists through voter registration. To prevent ballot box stuffing, a ballot secrecy system can link with the voter registration system, but that moots ballot secrecy because it links a ballot to an identity. You get to pick: ballot secrecy or no ballot box stuffing. 2. By not linking to a list of valid voters, ballot secrecy systems enable ballot box stuffing. This is bad, like democracy destroying bad. 3. A solution often floated is "well what if they're only a little linked", i.e. through a token or whatever indirection. 4. But here you get to pick two things: they're linked very weakly and you can't verify the total, or they're linked very strongly and you create a vote retaliation problem. It might seem like there's a middle ground or a grey area here, but it's actually a binary: either you can prove a vote in the big bag of votes belongs to a person or you can't. 5. OK so you pick "linked very strongly", dismissing concerns about voter intimidation and vote retaliation with "well only the voter knows their token". This isn't actually the problem! The problem is there's a database that proves a vote in the big bag of votes belongs to a person. The token is irrelevant, because one of the things you're worried about here is voting again the current county judge or whatever. >> to suppress the votes of people who vote Democrat (way) more likely than not. > That's either based on (unreliable) polling data, or actual votes of those the intimidators failed to turn away. Those that they managed to intimidate could have voted differently. Polls are done on either side of intimidation (and misinformation) campaigns because people want to know if their spend worked and what messages were most effective, so there's a lot of ceteris paribus happening. But re: unreliability, yeah welcome to measuring sentiment, which is also what elections are. There's always unreliability, there's always a gap between the measurement and reality, etc. etc. etc. I'm not saying we shouldn't try and close the gap, I'm saying the way we do that is probably compulsory voting and enforcement of voting laws (and easy things like early voting, same day registration, making Election Day a holiday, etc.). ~~~ We're way to the right in the comment layout, so I'll end my part with this. It's clear you have strong feelings and a reasonable mental framework of how you think this stuff should work. That's cool! Voting is cool haha. I encourage you to pursue this stuff if you are in fact passionate about it. To that end, here's my advice: - Go into this with the assumption that you're probably wrong, but you want to know exactly how - Given that you're probably wrong, don't make it the cornerstone of anything important - Have serious people red team it - Start reading the literature on elections and voting - Underestimate the social aspect of your system at your peril; people will always, always surprise you - There is no system that can withstand a fearful or ignorant bureaucracy

TheMonarchist 5y ago
(I have been busy lately, and postponed this answer, as you also wrote that you end your part. You may consider any questions rhetorical.) > > The point is that trying to control what others may say, see or hear is suspicious. That's what the whole paragraph is about. It would likely hurt your cause. > I'm assuming what you're being coy about here is that the current election system hides voters' votes from them? I meant it as related to fighting misinformation in general. Here's the context where it was used: "Yea, so unwilling they are to communicate the Scriptures to the people’s understanding in any sort, that they are not ashamed to confess that we forced them to translate it into English against their wills. This seemeth to argue a bad cause, or a bad conscience, or both. Sure we are, that it is not he that hath good gold, that is afraid to bring it to the touchstone, but he that hath the counterfeit; neither is it the true man that shunneth the light, but the malefactor, lest his deeds should be reproved; neither is it the plaindealing merchant that is unwilling to have the weights, or the meteyard, brought in place, but he that useth deceit." Papists tried to protect people from what they deemed heresy (ie. misinformation) by withholding the Bible from them and punishing whomever they apprehended of those spreading it, but that way they lost whatever credibility they still had. Of course they were wrong anyway, but I don't recall any historical cases where the users of similar tactics would have turned out to be right. However I do believe that the ability to see that your own vote was counted would help trust the election result. That's basically the aim of my scheme. > > If you can't win that way, your chances are slim no matter what you do. Btw, you can change a few words and get what Papists probably thought when people began reading the Bible: "The Inquisition spends millions to root out heresy, and it definitely isn't keeping up. Other problems that require millions to fix are thought to be crises, and I think we should start thinking of heresy in general as a crisis." > This is dismissive and contributes nothing. There are core differences between the Inquisition (?) and sending texts to people telling them when and where they can vote. I just wanted to point out how similar your description is to what it must have looked like to Papists in the 17th century. > Your argument distills to "truth wins out" and I'm saying there's lots of good evidence to the contrary. I do believe that truth must prevail in the end; there are no eternal lies. Truth resurfaces like a cork from the flood of lies. Nevertheless, "there is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition." Blaise Pascal. It seems to be a law of nature. > I think you're trying to reason through this from your understanding and first principles, but a lot of things in life are non-intuitive, especially to non-experts. Life already feels too short to learn all that I would like to, so I aim for general instead of specific knowledge. In practice I learn new things when I need to, or when they are irresistibly interesting. > What usually happens in compulsory voting is that voters just scratch their ballots, the incidence of that is super low in Australia, it's a non-issue. That's just what I said would happen. People scratch ballots when they don't want to support anyone and are afraid to NOT appear at the polling station. Otherwise they wouldn't bother to come or would try to at least minimise evil. > You keep trying to make a link between totalitarianism and compulsory voting Compulsory voting is totalitarian; everybody votes. > (are you seriously taking issue with like, Australia being a democracy)? Haven't there been mass protests for months? They find need to crowd the streets during a pandemic? Anyway this is digressing, for the state of democracy in Australia is mainly about the accuracy of Democracy Index, that you brought up to support compulsory voting, and "testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs." Dijkstra. For that I find good arguments more convicting than experimental data. There are more commendable remedies to issues that compulsory voting is supposed to solve, and what cannot be solved without it isn't worth solving. Should important decisions really be made by people that wouldn't even come if they didn't have to? > Why wouldn't every voter just do this? I'd love to get paid for the votes I was going to make anyway. I don't doubt that, but the incentive would work only as long as payers give the tokens to use; otherwise everyone would try to get paid by looking up a token used to vote their candidate. Punishing those who try with an already cashed token would discourage also those who bring their own token, as they can't know if someone already cashed it. > This is essentially compulsory voting but with carrots rather than sticks. Paying voted candidates support proportional to the number of votes would also be a carrot but only for those that have a candidate they would like to support. It's the closest thing to compulsory voting that I think I could be comfortable with. > OK to be clear [vote buying] can still be a problem in real small elections In very small elections voters usually come to one place, where all ballots go to the same box and are counted under all eyes. The system is completely transparent without linking voters to ballots, but becomes impractical when the number of voters increases. > I'm pretty convinced [the token system] is unworkably complicated How would the added complexity improve the system? I'm not going to add complications just because complexity sells better. > 1. Without a list of valid voters, you can't protect against ballot box stuffing. States build such lists through voter registration. I think this and public records of who voted are the state of the art means to prevent ballot stuffing; the number of ballots should match the number of voters. It however won't protect against tampering with existing ballots, which my scheme aims to prevent. I'm not against them and I think they can be used together with my system. > To prevent ballot box stuffing, a ballot secrecy system can link with the voter registration system, but that moots ballot secrecy because it links a ballot to an identity. You get to pick: ballot secrecy or no ballot box stuffing. > The problem is there's a database that proves a vote in the big bag of votes belongs to a person. I don't believe that linking a ballot to a voter is necessary. It is enough that a voter can recognise his own ballot; he can't prove that it is his own. The only way to prove it would be predicting its first use. Also showing such a prediction afterwards wouldn't prove it, for he could have made myriads of predictions for then available tokens and show the one that happened. > Polls are done on either side of intimidation (and misinformation) campaigns because people want to know if their spend worked and what messages were most effective, so there's a lot of ceteris paribus happening. Even so you know only what voters report. > Go into this with the assumption that you're probably wrong, but you want to know exactly how I will probably make a minimal effort proof of concept to have something concrete that can be critiqued more easily than abstract ideas. > Given that you're probably wrong, don't make it the cornerstone of anything important The usual no warranty clause should discourage serious use at least early on. ~~~ To sum it up, different voting systems make different trade offs. The aftermath of 2020 elections could happen in any country. If my scheme ever gets that far, I think the first country candidates for adopting it would be those, whose current systems are most similar to mine, even those where ballots are publicly available for recounting. Most problems made possible by my system would be already possible with their current system, so they should be well prepared to handle them.

TheMonarchist 5y ago

(I have been busy lately, and postponed this answer, as you also wrote that you end your part. You may consider any questions rhetorical.) > > The point is that trying to control what others may say, see or hear is suspicious. That's what the whole paragraph is about. It would likely hurt your cause. > I'm assuming what you're being coy about here is that the current election system hides voters' votes from them? I meant it as related to fighting misinformation in general. Here's the context where it was used: "Yea, so unwilling they are to communicate the Scriptures to the people’s understanding in any sort, that they are not ashamed to confess that we forced them to translate it into English against their wills. This seemeth to argue a bad cause, or a bad conscience, or both. Sure we are, that it is not he that hath good gold, that is afraid to bring it to the touchstone, but he that hath the counterfeit; neither is it the true man that shunneth the light, but the malefactor, lest his deeds should be reproved; neither is it the plaindealing merchant that is unwilling to have the weights, or the meteyard, brought in place, but he that useth deceit." Papists tried to protect people from what they deemed heresy (ie. misinformation) by withholding the Bible from them and punishing whomever they apprehended of those spreading it, but that way they lost whatever credibility they still had. Of course they were wrong anyway, but I don't recall any historical cases where the users of similar tactics would have turned out to be right. However I do believe that the ability to see that your own vote was counted would help trust the election result. That's basically the aim of my scheme. > > If you can't win that way, your chances are slim no matter what you do. Btw, you can change a few words and get what Papists probably thought when people began reading the Bible: "The Inquisition spends millions to root out heresy, and it definitely isn't keeping up. Other problems that require millions to fix are thought to be crises, and I think we should start thinking of heresy in general as a crisis." > This is dismissive and contributes nothing. There are core differences between the Inquisition (?) and sending texts to people telling them when and where they can vote. I just wanted to point out how similar your description is to what it must have looked like to Papists in the 17th century. > Your argument distills to "truth wins out" and I'm saying there's lots of good evidence to the contrary. I do believe that truth must prevail in the end; there are no eternal lies. Truth resurfaces like a cork from the flood of lies. Nevertheless, "there is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition." Blaise Pascal. It seems to be a law of nature. > I think you're trying to reason through this from your understanding and first principles, but a lot of things in life are non-intuitive, especially to non-experts. Life already feels too short to learn all that I would like to, so I aim for general instead of specific knowledge. In practice I learn new things when I need to, or when they are irresistibly interesting. > What usually happens in compulsory voting is that voters just scratch their ballots, the incidence of that is super low in Australia, it's a non-issue. That's just what I said would happen. People scratch ballots when they don't want to support anyone and are afraid to NOT appear at the polling station. Otherwise they wouldn't bother to come or would try to at least minimise evil. > You keep trying to make a link between totalitarianism and compulsory voting Compulsory voting is totalitarian; everybody votes. > (are you seriously taking issue with like, Australia being a democracy)? Haven't there been mass protests for months? They find need to crowd the streets during a pandemic? Anyway this is digressing, for the state of democracy in Australia is mainly about the accuracy of Democracy Index, that you brought up to support compulsory voting, and "testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs." Dijkstra. For that I find good arguments more convicting than experimental data. There are more commendable remedies to issues that compulsory voting is supposed to solve, and what cannot be solved without it isn't worth solving. Should important decisions really be made by people that wouldn't even come if they didn't have to? > Why wouldn't every voter just do this? I'd love to get paid for the votes I was going to make anyway. I don't doubt that, but the incentive would work only as long as payers give the tokens to use; otherwise everyone would try to get paid by looking up a token used to vote their candidate. Punishing those who try with an already cashed token would discourage also those who bring their own token, as they can't know if someone already cashed it. > This is essentially compulsory voting but with carrots rather than sticks. Paying voted candidates support proportional to the number of votes would also be a carrot but only for those that have a candidate they would like to support. It's the closest thing to compulsory voting that I think I could be comfortable with. > OK to be clear [vote buying] can still be a problem in real small elections In very small elections voters usually come to one place, where all ballots go to the same box and are counted under all eyes. The system is completely transparent without linking voters to ballots, but becomes impractical when the number of voters increases. > I'm pretty convinced [the token system] is unworkably complicated How would the added complexity improve the system? I'm not going to add complications just because complexity sells better. > 1. Without a list of valid voters, you can't protect against ballot box stuffing. States build such lists through voter registration. I think this and public records of who voted are the state of the art means to prevent ballot stuffing; the number of ballots should match the number of voters. It however won't protect against tampering with existing ballots, which my scheme aims to prevent. I'm not against them and I think they can be used together with my system. > To prevent ballot box stuffing, a ballot secrecy system can link with the voter registration system, but that moots ballot secrecy because it links a ballot to an identity. You get to pick: ballot secrecy or no ballot box stuffing. > The problem is there's a database that proves a vote in the big bag of votes belongs to a person. I don't believe that linking a ballot to a voter is necessary. It is enough that a voter can recognise his own ballot; he can't prove that it is his own. The only way to prove it would be predicting its first use. Also showing such a prediction afterwards wouldn't prove it, for he could have made myriads of predictions for then available tokens and show the one that happened. > Polls are done on either side of intimidation (and misinformation) campaigns because people want to know if their spend worked and what messages were most effective, so there's a lot of ceteris paribus happening. Even so you know only what voters report. > Go into this with the assumption that you're probably wrong, but you want to know exactly how I will probably make a minimal effort proof of concept to have something concrete that can be critiqued more easily than abstract ideas. > Given that you're probably wrong, don't make it the cornerstone of anything important The usual no warranty clause should discourage serious use at least early on. ~~~ To sum it up, different voting systems make different trade offs. The aftermath of 2020 elections could happen in any country. If my scheme ever gets that far, I think the first country candidates for adopting it would be those, whose current systems are most similar to mine, even those where ballots are publicly available for recounting. Most problems made possible by my system would be already possible with their current system, so they should be well prepared to handle them.