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It always felt to me like this was vulnerable to collusion - if Alice and Bob team up and have disjoint interests they share votes. So in elections P and Q inst

by nmca 5y ago

It always felt to me like this was vulnerable to collusion - if Alice and Bob team up and have disjoint interests they share votes. So in elections P and Q instead of Alice spending 100 points on P (and Bob zero, as he doesn't care) then Alice can spend 25 and Bob 25. In Q, visa versa. It's a huge advantage to do so, no?

wolfram74 5y ago
I see this brought up, but I always wonder if that's more of a feature than a bug? Coming up with a systematic way of encouraging meeting with people that think and prioritize differently than yourself? Put that way it seems like a win. Alternatively, yes, a voting system is a means for expressing individual preferences, but it only exists in the context of groups of people trying to resolve coordination problems. The "defect" you've described shows that it strongly favors groups of people that can coordinate, avoiding the double-defect outcome in prisoner's dilemmas. Sounds like it /should/ be rewarded to some degree.
algo646464 5y ago
Also, bribing voters is a thing. It would be far cheaper to pay 2X to buy X votes where each of the bribed voters keep half the money and buy a vote with other half.
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  > bribing voters is a thing Is it though?
  - divan 5y ago
    Yes, in post-soviet countries it's pretty common to bribe large number of people from elderly and poor population with food or alcohol. It's literally trucks with food or vodka and name of the party/politian that head to the semi-forgotten villages, where some decent amount of electorate lives. Needless to say those people had grown up in Soviet Union and have zero trust in elections or democracy, so they happy to vote for whoever bribes them more.
    - ReaLNero 5y ago
      Post-Soviet countryman here! In my country, elections are fair. If you ask people on the street -- they will say they believe in democracy. Which is reasonable since the concept of voting is easy to understand. Offering free food for in exchange for votes is still a thing though, since voters know that everyone on the ballot is a corrupt sack of shit. They're going to end up equally fucked either way -- might as well pick up some free food along with it.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    Depending on the location, oh yes it is. In the recent Serbian elections there were photos of "gift baskets" from a party if you voted for them ( of course they can't know for sure if the election is properly held, but afaik it isn't).
  - zivkovicp 5y ago
    Yes, very much so. Probably not so much in the US and most western democracies, but yes.
  - washadjeffmad 5y ago
    At the very least tacitly. Voting blocs do exist. One issue in the US is how certain communities organize to stack members in districts until they can affect elections, then bribe and extort politicians for concessions, to stop them from expanding into other districts, or to vote a certain way. It's an incredible racket because it's also the system "working as intended".
  - contravariant 5y ago
    It is when it scales well enough. Most voting system get around it by ensuring you need to bribe an impractical number of voters.
timdaub 5y ago
Not sure I understand. Non colluding: - Alice spends 100 on P - Bob spends 100 on Q Colluding - Alice spends 75 on P and 25 on Q for Bob - Bob spends 75 on P and 25 on Q Like this?
- derbOac 5y ago
  I think what's confusing is credits vs votes. It's more expensive in credits for Alice to cast the first N votes than to cast the next N. However, for Bob those "next N" are his first N. So 2N votes costs fewer credits if Alice and Bob each cast N than if Alice casts 2N. Also, Bob might end up with "leftover" credits he can't allocate to issues he cares about. So those credits might go unused in some sense.
- bo1024 5y ago
  Yes. In your first scenario P and Q get 10 votes each. In your second they get sqrt(75) + sqrt(25) = 13 point something.
lovemenot 5y ago
One objective of voting systems is to prevent vote-selling. Usually by preventing a voter from bringing evidence of their vote out of the booth. There is no reason to presume a quadratic voting system should differ in this regard. For Eve to maximize her impact she could pretend to collude with Bob on the issue that they both care about, but with opposing positions. Eve's false bargain would allow Bob to spend less on this issue than his interests would otherwise dictate. Eve wins by false collusion. This dark pattern would become apparent to voters and thus unverifiable collusion would soon be distrusted amongst the electorate.
- amelius 5y ago
  > One objective of voting systems is to prevent vote-selling. Yes. Do we have a full list of requirements for voting systems?
  - williamkuszmaul 5y ago
    It turns out that if you write down on the list of requirements that you would want from a voting system in order for it to be fair, the no deterministic voting system is fair. This is known as Arrow's theorem (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theo...). Interestingly Arrow's theorem doesn't apply to randomized voting systems. In particular, the system of picking a random voter to decide the election satisfies (probabilistically) every standard notion of fairness.
    - freemint 5y ago
      I think that would covered under non-dictatorship but I see the appeal.
  - atoav 5y ago
    I don't have a list, but one that is especially important when thinking about digital voting systems: a voting system has to produce agreeable consent Part of this agreeable consent is of course the goal to achieve a result that represents the intentions of those voting. But another part is that the way in which this result was achieved is transparent to all. You could then still be the sore loser, and pretend the vote was manipulated, when in fact it wasn't, but e.g. with paper ballots it would be very hard to insert fake votes or supress/manipulate real ones. As soon as digital machines enter the game this becomes very hard to proof to the layperson. And think about it this way: the person you have to proof it to might be unwilling to understand because they lost the election. Points that come to my mind: - anonymity (nobody should be able to find out how one individual voted) - ability to produce agreeable consent (achieved through transparency of the process and observers from all parties involved) - produces fair results - values correctness over speed (better slow and correct than fast and incorrect) - values traceability over speed (better slow and traceable than fast and untraceable) - discourages vote selling (anonymity is one way to achieve this) - availability (voting should be as easy as possible, otherwise hurdles will be used to control voting behaviour) - transparent information (there should be transparent information on what the vote is about and what the choices mean)
nabla9 5y ago
If they had disjoint interest in the issues, they would do the same without collusion.
williamkuszmaul 5y ago
Another example of this would be if there are three candidates X,Y,Z. Suppose Alice strongly prefers X and Bob strongly prefers Y. Rather than each of Alice and Bob allocating 100 points to their preferred candidate, they can each allocate 50 points to X and 50 points to Y. The net effect is that they have multiplied each of their voting power by sqrt(2). I don't like any voting system that incentivizes group collusion. A much fairer system would be some form of random ballot: everyone gets to allocate some number of votes, and then a random vote gets picked to select the winner. This type of system is especially good for situations where there are many winners (eg the Congress), since it allows for even small parties (eg the Green party) to get proportionate representation.
clippablematt 5y ago
clr.fund is a good demo of how this sort of thing can be used in online distributed communities to distribute funding across public goods and implements maci (minimal anti collusion infra) https://github.com/clrfund/monorepo https://github.com/clrfund/monorepo

by nmca 5y ago

wolfram74 5y ago

I see this brought up, but I always wonder if that's more of a feature than a bug? Coming up with a systematic way of encouraging meeting with people that think and prioritize differently than yourself? Put that way it seems like a win. Alternatively, yes, a voting system is a means for expressing individual preferences, but it only exists in the context of groups of people trying to resolve coordination problems. The "defect" you've described shows that it strongly favors groups of people that can coordinate, avoiding the double-defect outcome in prisoner's dilemmas. Sounds like it /should/ be rewarded to some degree.

algo646464 5y ago

Also, bribing voters is a thing. It would be far cheaper to pay 2X to buy X votes where each of the bribed voters keep half the money and buy a vote with other half.

kwhitefoot 5y ago
> bribing voters is a thing Is it though?
- divan 5y ago
  Yes, in post-soviet countries it's pretty common to bribe large number of people from elderly and poor population with food or alcohol. It's literally trucks with food or vodka and name of the party/politian that head to the semi-forgotten villages, where some decent amount of electorate lives. Needless to say those people had grown up in Soviet Union and have zero trust in elections or democracy, so they happy to vote for whoever bribes them more.
  - ReaLNero 5y ago
    Post-Soviet countryman here! In my country, elections are fair. If you ask people on the street -- they will say they believe in democracy. Which is reasonable since the concept of voting is easy to understand. Offering free food for in exchange for votes is still a thing though, since voters know that everyone on the ballot is a corrupt sack of shit. They're going to end up equally fucked either way -- might as well pick up some free food along with it.
- sofixa 5y ago
  Depending on the location, oh yes it is. In the recent Serbian elections there were photos of "gift baskets" from a party if you voted for them ( of course they can't know for sure if the election is properly held, but afaik it isn't).
- zivkovicp 5y ago
  Yes, very much so. Probably not so much in the US and most western democracies, but yes.
- washadjeffmad 5y ago
  At the very least tacitly. Voting blocs do exist. One issue in the US is how certain communities organize to stack members in districts until they can affect elections, then bribe and extort politicians for concessions, to stop them from expanding into other districts, or to vote a certain way. It's an incredible racket because it's also the system "working as intended".
- contravariant 5y ago
  It is when it scales well enough. Most voting system get around it by ensuring you need to bribe an impractical number of voters.

timdaub 5y ago

Not sure I understand. Non colluding: - Alice spends 100 on P - Bob spends 100 on Q Colluding - Alice spends 75 on P and 25 on Q for Bob - Bob spends 75 on P and 25 on Q Like this?

derbOac 5y ago
I think what's confusing is credits vs votes. It's more expensive in credits for Alice to cast the first N votes than to cast the next N. However, for Bob those "next N" are his first N. So 2N votes costs fewer credits if Alice and Bob each cast N than if Alice casts 2N. Also, Bob might end up with "leftover" credits he can't allocate to issues he cares about. So those credits might go unused in some sense.
bo1024 5y ago
Yes. In your first scenario P and Q get 10 votes each. In your second they get sqrt(75) + sqrt(25) = 13 point something.

lovemenot 5y ago

One objective of voting systems is to prevent vote-selling. Usually by preventing a voter from bringing evidence of their vote out of the booth. There is no reason to presume a quadratic voting system should differ in this regard. For Eve to maximize her impact she could pretend to collude with Bob on the issue that they both care about, but with opposing positions. Eve's false bargain would allow Bob to spend less on this issue than his interests would otherwise dictate. Eve wins by false collusion. This dark pattern would become apparent to voters and thus unverifiable collusion would soon be distrusted amongst the electorate.

amelius 5y ago
> One objective of voting systems is to prevent vote-selling. Yes. Do we have a full list of requirements for voting systems?
- williamkuszmaul 5y ago
  It turns out that if you write down on the list of requirements that you would want from a voting system in order for it to be fair, the no deterministic voting system is fair. This is known as Arrow's theorem (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theo...). Interestingly Arrow's theorem doesn't apply to randomized voting systems. In particular, the system of picking a random voter to decide the election satisfies (probabilistically) every standard notion of fairness.
  - freemint 5y ago
    I think that would covered under non-dictatorship but I see the appeal.
- atoav 5y ago
  I don't have a list, but one that is especially important when thinking about digital voting systems: a voting system has to produce agreeable consent Part of this agreeable consent is of course the goal to achieve a result that represents the intentions of those voting. But another part is that the way in which this result was achieved is transparent to all. You could then still be the sore loser, and pretend the vote was manipulated, when in fact it wasn't, but e.g. with paper ballots it would be very hard to insert fake votes or supress/manipulate real ones. As soon as digital machines enter the game this becomes very hard to proof to the layperson. And think about it this way: the person you have to proof it to might be unwilling to understand because they lost the election. Points that come to my mind: - anonymity (nobody should be able to find out how one individual voted) - ability to produce agreeable consent (achieved through transparency of the process and observers from all parties involved) - produces fair results - values correctness over speed (better slow and correct than fast and incorrect) - values traceability over speed (better slow and traceable than fast and untraceable) - discourages vote selling (anonymity is one way to achieve this) - availability (voting should be as easy as possible, otherwise hurdles will be used to control voting behaviour) - transparent information (there should be transparent information on what the vote is about and what the choices mean)

nabla9 5y ago

If they had disjoint interest in the issues, they would do the same without collusion.

williamkuszmaul 5y ago

Another example of this would be if there are three candidates X,Y,Z. Suppose Alice strongly prefers X and Bob strongly prefers Y. Rather than each of Alice and Bob allocating 100 points to their preferred candidate, they can each allocate 50 points to X and 50 points to Y. The net effect is that they have multiplied each of their voting power by sqrt(2). I don't like any voting system that incentivizes group collusion. A much fairer system would be some form of random ballot: everyone gets to allocate some number of votes, and then a random vote gets picked to select the winner. This type of system is especially good for situations where there are many winners (eg the Congress), since it allows for even small parties (eg the Green party) to get proportionate representation.

clippablematt 5y ago

clr.fund is a good demo of how this sort of thing can be used in online distributed communities to distribute funding across public goods and implements maci (minimal anti collusion infra) https://github.com/clrfund/monorepo https://github.com/clrfund/monorepo