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Delegative Democracy – a scalable voting model

137 points by bdr 12y ago

higherpurpose 12y ago
I think this is pretty much the German Pirate Party's "Liquid Democracy" internal voting model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiquidFeedback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiquidFeedback
- bdr 12y ago
  Yep, that's one of the examples Wikipedia gives. I'd be curious to hear about how it's worked in practice.
- luke-stanley 12y ago
  My friend has been working on Mesh Democracy with Retroshare - a trust graph and social graph with cryptographic credentials are handy. http://www.chozabu.net/blog/?p=94 http://www.chozabu.net/blog/?p=94 There is discussion on Reddit.
mladenkovacevic 12y ago
Does anyone know of any software products that use this model at their core?
- bglusman 12y ago
  I contributed to a Rails app a few years ago through RMU that was trying to get Spain to use this model... https://github.com/PartidoDeInternet/AgoraOnRails https://github.com/PartidoDeInternet/AgoraOnRails and http://agoraonrails.com/ http://agoraonrails.com/
  - mladenkovacevic 12y ago
    So much work has already been done on this and here I thought I was alone and breaking some new ground. I have lots of reading material for tonight it seems.
- mooneater 12y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Party#DemocracyOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Party#DemocracyOS looks similar
  - mladenkovacevic 12y ago
    It's so funny, I just saw some TED talk on that yesterday. I came across it because for the past couple of months I've been thinking and writing down some thoughts on building an application that applied "Delegative Democracy" towards the goal of allowing large groups of people to make important decisions. I didn't realize there was even a term for this concept until this blog post.
- patcon 12y ago
  I believe agora voting platform does this: https://agoravoting.com/ https://agoravoting.com/ They're focusing on getting the cryptographic underpinnings going correctly, whixh is awesome. They are also extremely interested in decentralizing the system via blockchain tech, which is a really good sign. I try to follow their mailing lists, but unfortunately much of it is still in Spanish.
- jhrobert 12y ago
  Kudocracy: https://github.com/virteal/kudocracy https://github.com/virteal/kudocracy - Alpha. I will present it at https://juliareda.eu/2014/09/invitation-1st-european-liquid-democracy-meetup/ https://juliareda.eu/2014/09/invitation-1st-european-liquid-...
  - mladenkovacevic 12y ago
    Will there be video of the event online? I won't be able to manage a trip but would hate to miss it.
    - c3o 12y ago
      We will be recording the software implementation presentations, but probably not the more informal workshops on the second day.
- c3o 12y ago
  In addition to those mentioned already: * http://liquidfeedback.org http://liquidfeedback.org (used by Pirate Parties in several countries as well as the M5S movement in Italy) * https://adhocracy.de https://adhocracy.de * https://www.loomio.org https://www.loomio.org A related US-based project is https://makeyourlaws.org https://makeyourlaws.org
bmmayer1 12y ago
In this model, what would stop a politician from paying voters to delegate their votes to his supporters and thus directly buying the election?
- TylerJay 12y ago
  That was my first thought too, but as long as your actual votes are somehow kept private, there's no more risk of vote-buying than in a representative democracy, is there?
- ps4fanboy 12y ago
  Wouldnt you have to buy at least 50% of the votes sounds expensive
  - breischl 12y ago
    Not unless you were trying to pass something so wildly unpopular that literally everyone would've voted against it otherwise. Most issues have at least a few people voting for each side, so you just need to add enough to get tip it in your favor. Sometimes just 20k votes would do it - that much would've probably swung the Colorado gubernatorial election this week.
  - tomaskafka 12y ago
    Significantly less, and experience from my country shows that it is unfortunately a profitable business model. Basically, by buying national media for dimes (as there is crisis of print), you can get enough power to direct sums of money two orders of magnitude larger. Buy newspapers and TVs for hundreds of millions, control tens of billions...
- mooneater 12y ago
  There is a tension between needing to know who has votes, and needing to hide who an individual voted for. A technical solution might help. Andrew describes one. I think modern cryptography may have better solutions for this problem.
- mladenkovacevic 12y ago
mooneater 12y ago
I think Delegative Democracy has lots of promise, and if done right may the the ideal form. But it is very much still pervertable, and the devil is in the details as always. It would be nice to see a thorough analysis of the ways DD can fail, and mitigations. Andrew hinted as some (including privacy and coercion) but most discussions are this are light on critique. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy
webXL 12y ago
This sounds like it will create a marketplace for votes. But I might be OK with that, as long as bureaucracies can't buy themselves more power, which happens from time to time with the current system via campaign contributions. Besides, people already vote with their dollars in the private sector, which should be the first place to attempt to solve problems.
humanrebar 12y ago
Isn't this basically the way the electoral college works, at least on paper? Wouldn't it be subject to the same limitations of the electoral college, that future laws could restrict how delegates vote based on popular election results, etc.?
- hga 12y ago
  Indeed, our system was originally a "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" sort, where if you didn't know him, you'd likely know someone who'd vouch for a House candidate or Elector (who was vouching for the President); the Senate back then was elected by state legislatures to protect their interests. It had obvious scaling problems, and the total number of districts was fixed at 435 in 1910 ... yeah, in the period where the GooGoos (Good Government) types were smashing most everything in sight about our system, like Senate elections. They sure improved things :-(.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    "the Senate back then was elected by state legislatures" I actually think this change was a large part of what led to consolidation of power at the federal level. If a citizen wanting X is deciding between Senate candidate A promising X, and B not promising X, why wouldn't they just pick candidate A? If a legislator is trying to decide between A and B, why wouldn't they just do X and keep the credit?
chton 12y ago
How would this work with a case like foreign policy? Since everybody needs to able to participate, all the information related to a matter at hand needs to be made public. This is not always a good idea, especially when relating to diplomacy with other nations that don't follow this model, or to military intervention. It would essentially become impossible to hide anything from your enemies.
- m0th87 12y ago
  You could defer decisions involving sensitive information to the top N delegates (i.e. those with the most voting power.) They'd be a sort of ad-hoc congress. You may face problems with those delegates still leaking sensitive information, but then again, Congressional staff is already notorious for doing that both willfully and accidentally.
  - chton 12y ago
    That would default back to a representative democracy then, since if my opinion differs from the top N, I have no way to influence the decision.
    - patcon 12y ago
      Not necessarily. The composition of this "congress" might vary depending on the topic under discussion. The group trusted on "trade with china" might differ from that trusted on "military action in Syria". And entry is derived from trust networks theoretically involving all people, not some electoral process where only career politicians are realistically candidates.
      - chton 12y ago
        But it does mean I can't decide to delegate it to my friend who knows a lot about the trade situation with China. All the power would become consolidated in a few people again, and giving your vote to anybody else would be a waste of it unless they pass it on to one of those. Sure, the group could be different for each issue, but in practice it won't be. You'll need to campaign long and hard to be in that top N, and try to get a lot of people to trust you. That leads right back to career politicians and popularity contests.
m0th87 12y ago
It's almost-pagerank applied to democracy
- jhrobert 12y ago
  It could. Look for Eigendemocracy
jiggy2011 12y ago
One of the biggest issues with this system would be that a rich company or individual could buy large blocks of votes on a particular issue. Another might be that a delegate could present a popular set of views in public for the purposes of gaining a large number of delegate votes but then they could privately vote for their real beliefs which might be much more fringe, or perhaps they might change their mind close to the election.
- adam77 12y ago
  1. could make vote enticements illegal? 2. make any aggregate votes with greater than block size x (e.g. 100) public?
  - jiggy2011 12y ago
    1. Maybe, but that could prove difficult in practice. 2. The ballot is no longer secret and subject to the problems of bribery etc.
    - dllthomas 12y ago
      Regarding 1, if you're directly attempting to intimidate/coerce/bribe enough people that it will make a difference, that's a lot of chances for something to go wrong.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Pretty much how representative government works. Also the Electoral College. At some point you have to trust people.
  - jiggy2011 12y ago
    AFAIK electoral college delegates are selected by secret ballot so they can't directly buy votes. A similar system could be adopted in theory, but you might want to know whether you are casting 1 vote or 1000. For example what happens if 10% of the vote is delegated to one person who doesn't turn out to vote?
astigsen 12y ago
Sortition[0] (selection of decision makers by lottery to get a group that is representative the population as whole) seems to me to be a much more interesting model. That was how the original Athenian democracy worked, and there has been several proposals to do this in a modern version. I can recommend reading this proposal: http://www.context.org/iclib/ic11/calnbach/ http://www.context.org/iclib/ic11/calnbach/ The clear benefit of this approach is that it would be a much simpler and more transparent process, with far less opportunity for the emergence of career politicians and corruption. People would also feel that they were far closer to the democratic process, when they were represented by others just like themselves, and the actual decision makers may be enticed to make better decisions when they are ordinary people that will have to live with the result of their choices afterwards. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
- chton 12y ago
  The big problem with Sortition is that the voters are necessarily uninformed. It means you need to teach your randomly selected group a huge amount of background information, even before explaining the specifics of the case. It falls into the same trap as a trial-by-jury: if you need to educate people to make a decision, you're putting the power in the hands of the teachers instead of the people.
  - notahacker 12y ago
    And asking a random group of people to select a problem from an infinite set of issues that might be addressed and then draft a majority-approved solution (which is what representative democratic governments actually do) is asking a lot more from them than simply based only on what you have been provided in a controlled environment, are you completely certain that $RandomStranger is guilty? Whilst theoretically not having any inclination towards achieving a particular outcome is a distinct advantage in the latter situation, I can't see how that's the case when it comes to actually governing.
  - mercurial 12y ago
    In France, there was a law passed recently, about fighting terrorism. As all "think of the terrorists" laws, it passed without a hitch ("after all, we have to be seen as doing something about these people going to Iraq and Syria, regardless of whether it is effective"). In particular, this law contained provisions letting the executive branch shut down websites without any input from the judicial branch. Reading an article about the debates among the lawmakers made abundantly clear that people who still call the Internet "the new technologies" have absolutely no inkling about how it works and what consequences their votes may have. It is also clear that many of them barely read (or don't read at all) the texts they are voting on. What makes you say that random members of the population, not beholden to particular interest groups or current political parties, would do worse?
baddox 12y ago
I don't get it. Right now, an ostensibly fair and educated person could tweet his or her vote recommendations, and people could choose to vote according to those recommendations. Presumably a lot of voting is already motivated by trusted recommendations (even if it's just party lines).
- notahacker 12y ago
  Agreed. As described, it has the worst aspects of both systems; all the coordination problems of direct democracy, because anyone that feels inclined to vote on any particular issue has the right to do so, and most of the problems with representative democracy because a huge proportion of people will feel inclined to delegate [most of] their voting to well-funded and persuasive people or groups that may or may not be sincere about what they actually represent. If those casting the delegated votes get secret ballots too, you can throw in a new problem: undetectable and potentially indefinite subterfuge...
ljd 12y ago
This is exactly what we are doing over at PlaceAVote.com [0]. We are running 50 congressmen in 2016 on this platform. Often times, it's called Liquid Democracy. [0] http://placeavote.com http://placeavote.com
ams6110 12y ago
Seems completely corruptible by intimidation, bribery... I guess our current system is too, but not as easily. Who writes the legislation? Do we still have representatives for that? What does the Senate do? Seems to require a massive re-write of the constitiution. A non-starter.
- chton 12y ago
  Any system that isn't a very narrow form of representative democracy requires a massive re-write of the constitution. That is not a reason to not consider them. In a delegative democracy, decision making is a lot more fluid than in the current system. You can buy or coerce someone for one specific issue, but the impact of that will be lower than buying a Senator. That makes intimidation and bribery less effective from the onset, and it can be mitigated further depending on the exact implementation. Either way, just like in the current system, there can be checks and balances to reduce the likelihood of it happening.
haberman 12y ago
Right now, the problem of "Representative democracy simply doesn't scale" worries me a whole lot less than "the politicization [and polarization] of absolutely everything": http://www.vox.com/2014/11/1/7136343/gamergate-and-the-politicization-of-absolutely-everything http://www.vox.com/2014/11/1/7136343/gamergate-and-the-polit... I worry that letting people delegate their vote to their favorite outspoken political ideologue would make things even worse, because it would give those people real and direct power. Imagine Rush Limbaugh having the power to vote on behalf of millions of people.
- ahomescu1 12y ago
  > Imagine Rush Limbaugh having the power to vote on behalf of millions of people. If his vote is identical to what they'd vote on their own, what difference does it make?
  - haberman 12y ago
    I think that vesting direct power in him would likely lead to personality-driven polarization, where people who can't stomach him would be inclined to give their vote to whoever sticks it to him most forcefully. Or other sensationalistic and dramatic storylines, amplified by the media.
    - ahomescu1 12y ago
      > I think that vesting direct power in him would likely lead to personality-driven polarization That sounds exactly like the current system. A lot of people voted for/against Obama/Bush for similar reasons.
      - haberman 12y ago
        Sure but Rush Limbaugh is far more extreme and polarizing than Bush. He could never actually win a primary. But under the proposed system you don't need to. There's also not the barrier of having to actually be a politician. Someone could make a YouTube video arguing why everyone else is an idiot and they are the only person you should trust with your vote, and the next day have incredible amounts of political power. For example, if this system were in place right now, how many pro/anti-GamerGate ideologues would overnight go from nothing to having thousands or millions of votes?
mojuba 12y ago
When I read the title my first thought was that it would be a majoritarian system without districts: everyone votes for one candidate from the list and the top N candidates get elected to parliament. This would solve two main problems: * The problem of the majority "choking" the minority in each district in the ordinary majoritarian system * The problem of partisanship tending towards mergers and eventually a dual-party equilibrium in the proportional electoral system I'm pretty sure this idea is not new and even has a name. And I'm wondering what potential drawbacks such a system could have.
jawns 12y ago
I came up with almost exactly this idea several years ago -- I called it augmented representative democracy. I figured that software programmers would immediately latch onto the concept, because they are familiar with the concept of inheritance. You elect a legislator to vote on your behalf, and in many situations that legislator's vote is the same as your own, yet you retain the right to cast your own vote on any given issue. But there are several objections that I could not overcome: 1) In our free, open, representative-style government, each legislator's voting record is a matter of public record, but each individual citizen's voting record is confidential. If we were to switch to augmented representative democracy, the question arises: Do we make each citizen's voting record public or private? Both options come with potential problems. For instance, if all votes are private, we lose out on transparency, and anonymity tends to embolden people to make some pretty nasty choices. (Exhibit A: Any online forum.) But if all votes are public, it could invite retribution that the average citizen is not equipped to handle. 2) It's hard enough to monitor roughly 535 federal legislators, to make sure they're not taking bribes or kickbacks in exchange for their votes on particular pieces of legislation. Could you imagine if you had to instead monitor all 207.6 million eligible voters? True, it also becomes more difficult to influence a significant number of them through nefarious means. (Suppose you need to bribe five senators to tip the scale in your favor on a particular piece of legislation. So you offer them each $1 million. Now suppose every eligible voter got to weigh in. You'd need to bribe more than 10 million of them, assuming they all voted. And a $1 bribe isn't nearly as attractive as a $1 million bribe.) But on bills where the vote is really, really close ... there is really no viable way to keep everybody honest. 3) A legislator's workload is (or should be) a full-time job. It takes a lot of time to read through bills and understand them. It takes even more time to fully consider its broader implications and its potential unintended consequences. As part of that process, you'll likely have to engage in discourse with fellow legislators; evaluate expert testimony; listen to the concerns of constituents, trade groups, lobbyists, and other organizations; and weigh the potential for the law to be challenged as unconstitutional. All of that takes time, and it's unrealistic to expect every eligible voter to assume that responsibility for the purpose of voting on policy directly. 4) In practice, the cases in which this augmented representative democracy would result in a vote different from the legislator's would be relatively few -- and yet there would be a whole lot of extra effort required to support the system. Basically, you would need an issue where the legislator's vote is different than what the people who elected him would expect (and the legislator, if he wants to be re-elected, is only going to do that sparingly), and you would need a substantial turnout of people willing to overrule him. Considering how few people vote in general elections, that's a tall order. 5) When you break it down, augmented representative democracy is really direct democracy, and not true representative democracy. And one objection to direct democracy -- take it for what it's worth -- is that there's a danger of mob-mentality policy decisions. If you look at some historic decisions, at least here in the U.S., the legislature was a bit ahead of the curve, compared with the population at large. So ... I guess the question is ... could direct democracy have derailed or delayed something like the civil rights legislation of the mid-20th century?
jacques_chester 12y ago
Some version of this idea pops up every few months on HN. It's a recurring trope of techno-utopianism. Here's what I said previously. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2936365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2936365 I'd say something approximately as arrogantly today.
- dalek_cannes 12y ago
  Paper is a technology that revolutionized the way we practice politics and law. It didn't lead to a utopia but made the system scalable beyond a tribe or village. Technology is meant to solve problems of scale here, not of human nature.
Lidador 12y ago
How about Qualitative Democracy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5cCyAqCkIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5cCyAqCkIw
revscat 12y ago
This looks like an interesting mechanism for fixing the moderator problem on Reddit. It would take a couple of cycles to get working rules in place, but it looks promising.
azov 12y ago
> Someone with power, like an employer, could pressure people into handing over their votes. This is absolutely what's going to happen if such system is implemented. Appearing to delegate one way, but having their votes counted another way? Seriously? It is way too complicated for an average voter. Even if you implement some sort of plausible deniability scheme (so that aforesaid someone can't just login with your credentials and set it up the way they want) - imagine explaining plausible deniability to a 90-years-old grandma or some uneducated farm worker, or a drug addict... Elections are rigged this way even in countries with supposedly secret votes: bad guys might ask you to prove your vote by, say, snapping a picture of "correctly" filled ballot alongside your ID, but even that is not necessary - enough people will do what someone with power tells them to on a vague threat "if you try to fool us we will find out", or because it's a "patriotic" thing to do, or simply because they are told to and don't know better. Not to mention that a huge number of people just couldn't care less. Half of population simply don't show up at the polls. How many of them will simply sell their right to vote for a token sum of money? The current system is bad in many ways [1], but this proposal is even worse - way too much potential for abuse. [1] Some reasons why - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting
- patcon 12y ago
  You should watch this: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_fraud?language=en http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_frau... There are established ways around the percieved problem, even before you start thinking on cryptographic solutions EDIT: sorry, voting digitally isnt addressed in those links :/
- sreejithr 12y ago
  I couldn't agree more. In certain states in India, the so-called "buying" of votes is pretty rampant. Politicians offer food, alcohol, TV, money, you name it. Whatever is at their disposal is distributed to the community to instigate people to vote for them. And of course, a lot of people are still falling for the "if you try to fool us we will find out" nonsense. The election commission has curbed it to a huge extent. Yet the scale at which such a scam is happening is simply mind boggling. When I see "delegative democracy", all I see are holes.
dllthomas 12y ago
I've been thinking something along the lines of "legislature by jury" might be a better way of tackling propositions. Currently, I'm asked to make decisions about a bunch of issues that I don't know very much about. I can spend a lot of time researching them (and I usually do), or I can not vote (I do often triage a couple), or I can vote no if I don't understand it (or don't understand why the full time legislators can't just do it)... but regardless, it's a lot of time and effort and I imagine my vote is more or less lost in the sea of people who have paid less attention, and so much comes down to how effective the advertising, and I'm not confident that "stronger arguments in the set of arguments that can be understood in 5 minutes by the average voter" is a very good proxy for truth. On the other hand, I do have some faith my my fellow citizen. Ask a group of us to set aside some time, do some research, sit down with some others, and make the best decision we can... and it wouldn't surprise me if we did a better job than either the legislature (not having to constantly think about how X will play with Y in the next election) or the broader mass of voters (having the time to focus on one particular issue, and knowing we have the responsibility of having our voice matter). Oh, and pay us a high rate for our time. It would still be cheaper than running a campaign.
Kinnard 12y ago
I'd love to see something like this explored on a blockchain.
- richmarr 12y ago
  I opened this thread and immediately started scanning through to see who brought up the blockchain. While I agree, it would be interesting, in practice the only country you might be able to convince to adopt it would be Iceland (because they're awesome) and yet, they have probably the least disfunctional democracy in the world so have no need to adopt it. Might be worth exploring for steering open source projects, or prioritising objectives within a company.
  - Kinnard 12y ago
    I think that may accurately describe the field today. But the game board is changing.
Lerc 12y ago
I had long decided that this was what I would focus on if I were going to be someone who did the start-up thing (I'm not. Mental illness is not compatible with doing a start up). Rather Than governmental Democracy. Have a system where people can communicate information and ideas to large non-governmental entities. Run a tree of delegates who feed information based upon its quality up to a higher level. Anyone may listen to anyone and speak to anyone but you can also choose to ignore anyone. You choose delegates for each individual case by picking someone receptive to your comment. People higher up the tree will generally only listen to people they know and trust. This system would provide a useful middle ground to the current situation that people find themselves in when they need to communicate. Their main point of contact are automated systems or de-facto automated humans following processes. To get action on some significant issues, you need to win the publicity lottery and have you case become virally popular to the point where someone who can actually help makes contact. It isn't as ambitious as running a government, but would serve a real need. As an example of the sort of thing where this may help, there have been numerous instances of Obvious Malware on the Google Play store that have managed to acquire a significant number of downloads. When these instances have been noticed and appear on reddit /r/android, they are swiftly removed from the store. I'm sure similar instances have happened where a company has taken the action they needed to take only after the problem has reached the front page of HN. Rather than having to make a big public noise (which only really works for a few), people should have an avenue to get information where it is needed. As a business model I would aim to have companies pay to have their top tiers of the tree managed by full-time staff.
JDDunn9 12y ago
Sampled democracy is a much better solution. Replace Congress with 1,000 randomly sampled citizens. That's the only way to get true representation.
- hliyan 12y ago
  I've thought about this myself. You would probably need a larger sample though. And if the difference is not statistically significant, a full referendum may be called for. The random selection also does away with a lot of lobbying-related problems.
- jeffdavis 12y ago
  I think you need some degree of self-selection. To be a good representative, you need to dive in pretty deep, and it will take a couple years to be useful at all. You also need to have the mindset to draft good legislation -- it's too easy to leave a mess of laws, which the judiciary will need to try to piece together. If you dismiss these concerns, what you'll get are a bunch of people easily manipulated by aides, staffers, lobbyists, etc. And those people certainly are self-selected and ready to work. But the idea to do away with traditional elections isn't so bad. A bunch of people throw their hat into the ring with a fairly low barrier to entry (some number of signatures, say), and you choose randomly among them. It would be difficult to pick a term length, though.
  - JDDunn9 12y ago
    I think self-selection is a huge part of the current problem. People who are drawn to political power, are likely also drawn to military power. I think this contributes to the never-ending war-mongering the U.S. does. Lobbyists, special interest groups, etc. would have no power, since they can't help you win an election. People are most easily manipulated for casual decisions with low value. If they had the responsibility, I think most people would rise to the challenge. If they can't, we need to end juries immediately.
  - bobcostas55 12y ago
    Representatives don't draft legislation. They almost never even read the legislation they vote on. That's what they have staff for.
grondilu 12y ago
Being able to give your vote means you're able to sell it. I'm OK with this, but I'm pretty sure most people aren't.
known 12y ago
"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power"--Abraham Lincoln
known 12y ago
I suggest http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recall_election http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recall_election should be simple/swift/inexpensive.
known 12y ago
Winston Churchill said: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
known 12y ago
We should use http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fmri http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fmri to select best politicians/representatives

137 points by bdr 12y ago

I think this is pretty much the German Pirate Party's "Liquid Democracy" internal voting model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiquidFeedback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiquidFeedback

bdr 12y ago
Yep, that's one of the examples Wikipedia gives. I'd be curious to hear about how it's worked in practice.
luke-stanley 12y ago
My friend has been working on Mesh Democracy with Retroshare - a trust graph and social graph with cryptographic credentials are handy. http://www.chozabu.net/blog/?p=94 http://www.chozabu.net/blog/?p=94 There is discussion on Reddit.

mladenkovacevic 12y ago

Does anyone know of any software products that use this model at their core?

bglusman 12y ago
I contributed to a Rails app a few years ago through RMU that was trying to get Spain to use this model... https://github.com/PartidoDeInternet/AgoraOnRails https://github.com/PartidoDeInternet/AgoraOnRails and http://agoraonrails.com/ http://agoraonrails.com/
- mladenkovacevic 12y ago
  So much work has already been done on this and here I thought I was alone and breaking some new ground. I have lots of reading material for tonight it seems.
mooneater 12y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Party#DemocracyOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Party#DemocracyOS looks similar
- mladenkovacevic 12y ago
  It's so funny, I just saw some TED talk on that yesterday. I came across it because for the past couple of months I've been thinking and writing down some thoughts on building an application that applied "Delegative Democracy" towards the goal of allowing large groups of people to make important decisions. I didn't realize there was even a term for this concept until this blog post.
patcon 12y ago
I believe agora voting platform does this: https://agoravoting.com/ https://agoravoting.com/ They're focusing on getting the cryptographic underpinnings going correctly, whixh is awesome. They are also extremely interested in decentralizing the system via blockchain tech, which is a really good sign. I try to follow their mailing lists, but unfortunately much of it is still in Spanish.
jhrobert 12y ago
Kudocracy: https://github.com/virteal/kudocracy https://github.com/virteal/kudocracy - Alpha. I will present it at https://juliareda.eu/2014/09/invitation-1st-european-liquid-democracy-meetup/ https://juliareda.eu/2014/09/invitation-1st-european-liquid-...
- mladenkovacevic 12y ago
  Will there be video of the event online? I won't be able to manage a trip but would hate to miss it.
  - c3o 12y ago
    We will be recording the software implementation presentations, but probably not the more informal workshops on the second day.
c3o 12y ago
In addition to those mentioned already: * http://liquidfeedback.org http://liquidfeedback.org (used by Pirate Parties in several countries as well as the M5S movement in Italy) * https://adhocracy.de https://adhocracy.de * https://www.loomio.org https://www.loomio.org A related US-based project is https://makeyourlaws.org https://makeyourlaws.org

bmmayer1 12y ago

In this model, what would stop a politician from paying voters to delegate their votes to his supporters and thus directly buying the election?

TylerJay 12y ago
That was my first thought too, but as long as your actual votes are somehow kept private, there's no more risk of vote-buying than in a representative democracy, is there?
ps4fanboy 12y ago
Wouldnt you have to buy at least 50% of the votes sounds expensive
- breischl 12y ago
  Not unless you were trying to pass something so wildly unpopular that literally everyone would've voted against it otherwise. Most issues have at least a few people voting for each side, so you just need to add enough to get tip it in your favor. Sometimes just 20k votes would do it - that much would've probably swung the Colorado gubernatorial election this week.
- tomaskafka 12y ago
  Significantly less, and experience from my country shows that it is unfortunately a profitable business model. Basically, by buying national media for dimes (as there is crisis of print), you can get enough power to direct sums of money two orders of magnitude larger. Buy newspapers and TVs for hundreds of millions, control tens of billions...
mooneater 12y ago
There is a tension between needing to know who has votes, and needing to hide who an individual voted for. A technical solution might help. Andrew describes one. I think modern cryptography may have better solutions for this problem.
mladenkovacevic 12y ago

mooneater 12y ago

I think Delegative Democracy has lots of promise, and if done right may the the ideal form. But it is very much still pervertable, and the devil is in the details as always. It would be nice to see a thorough analysis of the ways DD can fail, and mitigations. Andrew hinted as some (including privacy and coercion) but most discussions are this are light on critique. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy

webXL 12y ago

This sounds like it will create a marketplace for votes. But I might be OK with that, as long as bureaucracies can't buy themselves more power, which happens from time to time with the current system via campaign contributions. Besides, people already vote with their dollars in the private sector, which should be the first place to attempt to solve problems.

humanrebar 12y ago

Isn't this basically the way the electoral college works, at least on paper? Wouldn't it be subject to the same limitations of the electoral college, that future laws could restrict how delegates vote based on popular election results, etc.?

hga 12y ago
Indeed, our system was originally a "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" sort, where if you didn't know him, you'd likely know someone who'd vouch for a House candidate or Elector (who was vouching for the President); the Senate back then was elected by state legislatures to protect their interests. It had obvious scaling problems, and the total number of districts was fixed at 435 in 1910 ... yeah, in the period where the GooGoos (Good Government) types were smashing most everything in sight about our system, like Senate elections. They sure improved things :-(.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  "the Senate back then was elected by state legislatures" I actually think this change was a large part of what led to consolidation of power at the federal level. If a citizen wanting X is deciding between Senate candidate A promising X, and B not promising X, why wouldn't they just pick candidate A? If a legislator is trying to decide between A and B, why wouldn't they just do X and keep the credit?

chton 12y ago

How would this work with a case like foreign policy? Since everybody needs to able to participate, all the information related to a matter at hand needs to be made public. This is not always a good idea, especially when relating to diplomacy with other nations that don't follow this model, or to military intervention. It would essentially become impossible to hide anything from your enemies.

m0th87 12y ago
You could defer decisions involving sensitive information to the top N delegates (i.e. those with the most voting power.) They'd be a sort of ad-hoc congress. You may face problems with those delegates still leaking sensitive information, but then again, Congressional staff is already notorious for doing that both willfully and accidentally.
- chton 12y ago
  That would default back to a representative democracy then, since if my opinion differs from the top N, I have no way to influence the decision.
  - patcon 12y ago
    Not necessarily. The composition of this "congress" might vary depending on the topic under discussion. The group trusted on "trade with china" might differ from that trusted on "military action in Syria". And entry is derived from trust networks theoretically involving all people, not some electoral process where only career politicians are realistically candidates.
    - chton 12y ago
      But it does mean I can't decide to delegate it to my friend who knows a lot about the trade situation with China. All the power would become consolidated in a few people again, and giving your vote to anybody else would be a waste of it unless they pass it on to one of those. Sure, the group could be different for each issue, but in practice it won't be. You'll need to campaign long and hard to be in that top N, and try to get a lot of people to trust you. That leads right back to career politicians and popularity contests.

m0th87 12y ago

It's almost-pagerank applied to democracy

jhrobert 12y ago
It could. Look for Eigendemocracy

jiggy2011 12y ago

One of the biggest issues with this system would be that a rich company or individual could buy large blocks of votes on a particular issue. Another might be that a delegate could present a popular set of views in public for the purposes of gaining a large number of delegate votes but then they could privately vote for their real beliefs which might be much more fringe, or perhaps they might change their mind close to the election.

adam77 12y ago
1. could make vote enticements illegal? 2. make any aggregate votes with greater than block size x (e.g. 100) public?
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  1. Maybe, but that could prove difficult in practice. 2. The ballot is no longer secret and subject to the problems of bribery etc.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    Regarding 1, if you're directly attempting to intimidate/coerce/bribe enough people that it will make a difference, that's a lot of chances for something to go wrong.
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Pretty much how representative government works. Also the Electoral College. At some point you have to trust people.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  AFAIK electoral college delegates are selected by secret ballot so they can't directly buy votes. A similar system could be adopted in theory, but you might want to know whether you are casting 1 vote or 1000. For example what happens if 10% of the vote is delegated to one person who doesn't turn out to vote?

astigsen 12y ago

Sortition[0] (selection of decision makers by lottery to get a group that is representative the population as whole) seems to me to be a much more interesting model. That was how the original Athenian democracy worked, and there has been several proposals to do this in a modern version. I can recommend reading this proposal: http://www.context.org/iclib/ic11/calnbach/ http://www.context.org/iclib/ic11/calnbach/ The clear benefit of this approach is that it would be a much simpler and more transparent process, with far less opportunity for the emergence of career politicians and corruption. People would also feel that they were far closer to the democratic process, when they were represented by others just like themselves, and the actual decision makers may be enticed to make better decisions when they are ordinary people that will have to live with the result of their choices afterwards. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

chton 12y ago
The big problem with Sortition is that the voters are necessarily uninformed. It means you need to teach your randomly selected group a huge amount of background information, even before explaining the specifics of the case. It falls into the same trap as a trial-by-jury: if you need to educate people to make a decision, you're putting the power in the hands of the teachers instead of the people.
- notahacker 12y ago
  And asking a random group of people to select a problem from an infinite set of issues that might be addressed and then draft a majority-approved solution (which is what representative democratic governments actually do) is asking a lot more from them than simply based only on what you have been provided in a controlled environment, are you completely certain that $RandomStranger is guilty? Whilst theoretically not having any inclination towards achieving a particular outcome is a distinct advantage in the latter situation, I can't see how that's the case when it comes to actually governing.
- mercurial 12y ago
  In France, there was a law passed recently, about fighting terrorism. As all "think of the terrorists" laws, it passed without a hitch ("after all, we have to be seen as doing something about these people going to Iraq and Syria, regardless of whether it is effective"). In particular, this law contained provisions letting the executive branch shut down websites without any input from the judicial branch. Reading an article about the debates among the lawmakers made abundantly clear that people who still call the Internet "the new technologies" have absolutely no inkling about how it works and what consequences their votes may have. It is also clear that many of them barely read (or don't read at all) the texts they are voting on. What makes you say that random members of the population, not beholden to particular interest groups or current political parties, would do worse?

baddox 12y ago

I don't get it. Right now, an ostensibly fair and educated person could tweet his or her vote recommendations, and people could choose to vote according to those recommendations. Presumably a lot of voting is already motivated by trusted recommendations (even if it's just party lines).

notahacker 12y ago
Agreed. As described, it has the worst aspects of both systems; all the coordination problems of direct democracy, because anyone that feels inclined to vote on any particular issue has the right to do so, and most of the problems with representative democracy because a huge proportion of people will feel inclined to delegate [most of] their voting to well-funded and persuasive people or groups that may or may not be sincere about what they actually represent. If those casting the delegated votes get secret ballots too, you can throw in a new problem: undetectable and potentially indefinite subterfuge...

ljd 12y ago

This is exactly what we are doing over at PlaceAVote.com [0]. We are running 50 congressmen in 2016 on this platform. Often times, it's called Liquid Democracy. [0] http://placeavote.com http://placeavote.com

ams6110 12y ago

Seems completely corruptible by intimidation, bribery... I guess our current system is too, but not as easily. Who writes the legislation? Do we still have representatives for that? What does the Senate do? Seems to require a massive re-write of the constitiution. A non-starter.

chton 12y ago
Any system that isn't a very narrow form of representative democracy requires a massive re-write of the constitution. That is not a reason to not consider them. In a delegative democracy, decision making is a lot more fluid than in the current system. You can buy or coerce someone for one specific issue, but the impact of that will be lower than buying a Senator. That makes intimidation and bribery less effective from the onset, and it can be mitigated further depending on the exact implementation. Either way, just like in the current system, there can be checks and balances to reduce the likelihood of it happening.

haberman 12y ago

Right now, the problem of "Representative democracy simply doesn't scale" worries me a whole lot less than "the politicization [and polarization] of absolutely everything": http://www.vox.com/2014/11/1/7136343/gamergate-and-the-politicization-of-absolutely-everything http://www.vox.com/2014/11/1/7136343/gamergate-and-the-polit... I worry that letting people delegate their vote to their favorite outspoken political ideologue would make things even worse, because it would give those people real and direct power. Imagine Rush Limbaugh having the power to vote on behalf of millions of people.

ahomescu1 12y ago
> Imagine Rush Limbaugh having the power to vote on behalf of millions of people. If his vote is identical to what they'd vote on their own, what difference does it make?
- haberman 12y ago
  I think that vesting direct power in him would likely lead to personality-driven polarization, where people who can't stomach him would be inclined to give their vote to whoever sticks it to him most forcefully. Or other sensationalistic and dramatic storylines, amplified by the media.
  - ahomescu1 12y ago
    > I think that vesting direct power in him would likely lead to personality-driven polarization That sounds exactly like the current system. A lot of people voted for/against Obama/Bush for similar reasons.
    - haberman 12y ago
      Sure but Rush Limbaugh is far more extreme and polarizing than Bush. He could never actually win a primary. But under the proposed system you don't need to. There's also not the barrier of having to actually be a politician. Someone could make a YouTube video arguing why everyone else is an idiot and they are the only person you should trust with your vote, and the next day have incredible amounts of political power. For example, if this system were in place right now, how many pro/anti-GamerGate ideologues would overnight go from nothing to having thousands or millions of votes?

mojuba 12y ago

When I read the title my first thought was that it would be a majoritarian system without districts: everyone votes for one candidate from the list and the top N candidates get elected to parliament. This would solve two main problems: * The problem of the majority "choking" the minority in each district in the ordinary majoritarian system * The problem of partisanship tending towards mergers and eventually a dual-party equilibrium in the proportional electoral system I'm pretty sure this idea is not new and even has a name. And I'm wondering what potential drawbacks such a system could have.

jawns 12y ago

I came up with almost exactly this idea several years ago -- I called it augmented representative democracy. I figured that software programmers would immediately latch onto the concept, because they are familiar with the concept of inheritance. You elect a legislator to vote on your behalf, and in many situations that legislator's vote is the same as your own, yet you retain the right to cast your own vote on any given issue. But there are several objections that I could not overcome: 1) In our free, open, representative-style government, each legislator's voting record is a matter of public record, but each individual citizen's voting record is confidential. If we were to switch to augmented representative democracy, the question arises: Do we make each citizen's voting record public or private? Both options come with potential problems. For instance, if all votes are private, we lose out on transparency, and anonymity tends to embolden people to make some pretty nasty choices. (Exhibit A: Any online forum.) But if all votes are public, it could invite retribution that the average citizen is not equipped to handle. 2) It's hard enough to monitor roughly 535 federal legislators, to make sure they're not taking bribes or kickbacks in exchange for their votes on particular pieces of legislation. Could you imagine if you had to instead monitor all 207.6 million eligible voters? True, it also becomes more difficult to influence a significant number of them through nefarious means. (Suppose you need to bribe five senators to tip the scale in your favor on a particular piece of legislation. So you offer them each $1 million. Now suppose every eligible voter got to weigh in. You'd need to bribe more than 10 million of them, assuming they all voted. And a $1 bribe isn't nearly as attractive as a $1 million bribe.) But on bills where the vote is really, really close ... there is really no viable way to keep everybody honest. 3) A legislator's workload is (or should be) a full-time job. It takes a lot of time to read through bills and understand them. It takes even more time to fully consider its broader implications and its potential unintended consequences. As part of that process, you'll likely have to engage in discourse with fellow legislators; evaluate expert testimony; listen to the concerns of constituents, trade groups, lobbyists, and other organizations; and weigh the potential for the law to be challenged as unconstitutional. All of that takes time, and it's unrealistic to expect every eligible voter to assume that responsibility for the purpose of voting on policy directly. 4) In practice, the cases in which this augmented representative democracy would result in a vote different from the legislator's would be relatively few -- and yet there would be a whole lot of extra effort required to support the system. Basically, you would need an issue where the legislator's vote is different than what the people who elected him would expect (and the legislator, if he wants to be re-elected, is only going to do that sparingly), and you would need a substantial turnout of people willing to overrule him. Considering how few people vote in general elections, that's a tall order. 5) When you break it down, augmented representative democracy is really direct democracy, and not true representative democracy. And one objection to direct democracy -- take it for what it's worth -- is that there's a danger of mob-mentality policy decisions. If you look at some historic decisions, at least here in the U.S., the legislature was a bit ahead of the curve, compared with the population at large. So ... I guess the question is ... could direct democracy have derailed or delayed something like the civil rights legislation of the mid-20th century?

jacques_chester 12y ago

Some version of this idea pops up every few months on HN. It's a recurring trope of techno-utopianism. Here's what I said previously. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2936365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2936365 I'd say something approximately as arrogantly today.

dalek_cannes 12y ago
Paper is a technology that revolutionized the way we practice politics and law. It didn't lead to a utopia but made the system scalable beyond a tribe or village. Technology is meant to solve problems of scale here, not of human nature.

Lidador 12y ago

How about Qualitative Democracy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5cCyAqCkIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5cCyAqCkIw

revscat 12y ago

This looks like an interesting mechanism for fixing the moderator problem on Reddit. It would take a couple of cycles to get working rules in place, but it looks promising.

azov 12y ago

> Someone with power, like an employer, could pressure people into handing over their votes. This is absolutely what's going to happen if such system is implemented. Appearing to delegate one way, but having their votes counted another way? Seriously? It is way too complicated for an average voter. Even if you implement some sort of plausible deniability scheme (so that aforesaid someone can't just login with your credentials and set it up the way they want) - imagine explaining plausible deniability to a 90-years-old grandma or some uneducated farm worker, or a drug addict... Elections are rigged this way even in countries with supposedly secret votes: bad guys might ask you to prove your vote by, say, snapping a picture of "correctly" filled ballot alongside your ID, but even that is not necessary - enough people will do what someone with power tells them to on a vague threat "if you try to fool us we will find out", or because it's a "patriotic" thing to do, or simply because they are told to and don't know better. Not to mention that a huge number of people just couldn't care less. Half of population simply don't show up at the polls. How many of them will simply sell their right to vote for a token sum of money? The current system is bad in many ways [1], but this proposal is even worse - way too much potential for abuse. [1] Some reasons why - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting

patcon 12y ago
You should watch this: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_fraud?language=en http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_frau... There are established ways around the percieved problem, even before you start thinking on cryptographic solutions EDIT: sorry, voting digitally isnt addressed in those links :/
sreejithr 12y ago
I couldn't agree more. In certain states in India, the so-called "buying" of votes is pretty rampant. Politicians offer food, alcohol, TV, money, you name it. Whatever is at their disposal is distributed to the community to instigate people to vote for them. And of course, a lot of people are still falling for the "if you try to fool us we will find out" nonsense. The election commission has curbed it to a huge extent. Yet the scale at which such a scam is happening is simply mind boggling. When I see "delegative democracy", all I see are holes.

dllthomas 12y ago

I've been thinking something along the lines of "legislature by jury" might be a better way of tackling propositions. Currently, I'm asked to make decisions about a bunch of issues that I don't know very much about. I can spend a lot of time researching them (and I usually do), or I can not vote (I do often triage a couple), or I can vote no if I don't understand it (or don't understand why the full time legislators can't just do it)... but regardless, it's a lot of time and effort and I imagine my vote is more or less lost in the sea of people who have paid less attention, and so much comes down to how effective the advertising, and I'm not confident that "stronger arguments in the set of arguments that can be understood in 5 minutes by the average voter" is a very good proxy for truth. On the other hand, I do have some faith my my fellow citizen. Ask a group of us to set aside some time, do some research, sit down with some others, and make the best decision we can... and it wouldn't surprise me if we did a better job than either the legislature (not having to constantly think about how X will play with Y in the next election) or the broader mass of voters (having the time to focus on one particular issue, and knowing we have the responsibility of having our voice matter). Oh, and pay us a high rate for our time. It would still be cheaper than running a campaign.

Kinnard 12y ago

I'd love to see something like this explored on a blockchain.

richmarr 12y ago
I opened this thread and immediately started scanning through to see who brought up the blockchain. While I agree, it would be interesting, in practice the only country you might be able to convince to adopt it would be Iceland (because they're awesome) and yet, they have probably the least disfunctional democracy in the world so have no need to adopt it. Might be worth exploring for steering open source projects, or prioritising objectives within a company.
- Kinnard 12y ago
  I think that may accurately describe the field today. But the game board is changing.

Lerc 12y ago

I had long decided that this was what I would focus on if I were going to be someone who did the start-up thing (I'm not. Mental illness is not compatible with doing a start up). Rather Than governmental Democracy. Have a system where people can communicate information and ideas to large non-governmental entities. Run a tree of delegates who feed information based upon its quality up to a higher level. Anyone may listen to anyone and speak to anyone but you can also choose to ignore anyone. You choose delegates for each individual case by picking someone receptive to your comment. People higher up the tree will generally only listen to people they know and trust. This system would provide a useful middle ground to the current situation that people find themselves in when they need to communicate. Their main point of contact are automated systems or de-facto automated humans following processes. To get action on some significant issues, you need to win the publicity lottery and have you case become virally popular to the point where someone who can actually help makes contact. It isn't as ambitious as running a government, but would serve a real need. As an example of the sort of thing where this may help, there have been numerous instances of Obvious Malware on the Google Play store that have managed to acquire a significant number of downloads. When these instances have been noticed and appear on reddit /r/android, they are swiftly removed from the store. I'm sure similar instances have happened where a company has taken the action they needed to take only after the problem has reached the front page of HN. Rather than having to make a big public noise (which only really works for a few), people should have an avenue to get information where it is needed. As a business model I would aim to have companies pay to have their top tiers of the tree managed by full-time staff.

JDDunn9 12y ago

Sampled democracy is a much better solution. Replace Congress with 1,000 randomly sampled citizens. That's the only way to get true representation.

hliyan 12y ago
I've thought about this myself. You would probably need a larger sample though. And if the difference is not statistically significant, a full referendum may be called for. The random selection also does away with a lot of lobbying-related problems.
jeffdavis 12y ago
I think you need some degree of self-selection. To be a good representative, you need to dive in pretty deep, and it will take a couple years to be useful at all. You also need to have the mindset to draft good legislation -- it's too easy to leave a mess of laws, which the judiciary will need to try to piece together. If you dismiss these concerns, what you'll get are a bunch of people easily manipulated by aides, staffers, lobbyists, etc. And those people certainly are self-selected and ready to work. But the idea to do away with traditional elections isn't so bad. A bunch of people throw their hat into the ring with a fairly low barrier to entry (some number of signatures, say), and you choose randomly among them. It would be difficult to pick a term length, though.
- JDDunn9 12y ago
  I think self-selection is a huge part of the current problem. People who are drawn to political power, are likely also drawn to military power. I think this contributes to the never-ending war-mongering the U.S. does. Lobbyists, special interest groups, etc. would have no power, since they can't help you win an election. People are most easily manipulated for casual decisions with low value. If they had the responsibility, I think most people would rise to the challenge. If they can't, we need to end juries immediately.
- bobcostas55 12y ago
  Representatives don't draft legislation. They almost never even read the legislation they vote on. That's what they have staff for.

grondilu 12y ago

Being able to give your vote means you're able to sell it. I'm OK with this, but I'm pretty sure most people aren't.

known 12y ago

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power"--Abraham Lincoln

known 12y ago

I suggest http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recall_election http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recall_election should be simple/swift/inexpensive.

known 12y ago

Winston Churchill said: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

known 12y ago

We should use http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fmri http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fmri to select best politicians/representatives