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[top-politics] Re: Secret votes
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Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
At 06:26 AM 11/22/2006, Serge wrote: >I agree with echarp that this would remove the possibility of an >internet democracy on purely technical terms – and would like to point >out that today you can vote secretely but can’t track your vote. >Furthermore, without a public deliberations and voting record, finding >a trustworthy proxy will become nearly impossible, and transparence >would be gone from the system.
Consider as a starting point direct democracy, such as Town Meeting in the U.S. Then don’t make the system worse.
The starting point is questionable, not least because of its already discussed lack of scalability.Also, why do you choose Town meetings as a starting point, while it is in many ways a minor institution, as opposed to the dominating representative democracy form in the US?
In Town Meeting, everyone can see everyone speak and vote. If you are afraid of initimation, I’d presume you would go (1) to the police, (2) if you fear that the local police are part of a conspiracy, then the state police or a federal agency. If you think all of these are part of the conspiracy, then run and hide, you are in big trouble already. Try starting with a mental institution, they won’t find you there.
(I’m not claiming that there is no massive conspiracy, but, in my experience, those who think there is are in mental difficulty. I’ve seen this up close and personal.)
If it is dangerous to express opinions publicly, then this is what I call “difficult conditions,” Secret ballot is necessary, and we could have Asset Voting, where you vote for your proxy secretly. You vote for candidates who have already agreed to function publicly, either by registering as a candidate or privately with you.
And there are more details. But in most of the world, within certain limits, it is not “difficult conditions.” For TOP, fully public, what you would do is to allow admin to assign a number of proxies to public participants at the outset, based on validated votes in the secret ballot process…. from there on it is fully public.
If anyone, it will be the proxies finding themselves under pressure. And again, if most people are to be proxy, this approach is not even affording the protection of anonymity to half the people it claims to cover. Furthermore, pressure, as mentionned by Magnus, can take other forms than intimidation. It can also be corruption or vote buying.
Now, you seem to believe one can speak freely in democratic countries, and I am assuming you take the US as the basis for this. I am no conspiracy theorist and I see several US examples that would show otherwise. If supporting family planning and the opening of an abortion clinic in a US town with a fundamenlist christian community, you may be putting yourself at risk. If you were against the war in Iraq, you will know already that being an outspoken opponent at the wrong time could have made you a traitor just like whole allied countries that found themselves branded the “axis of weasels” and if you had a business or were in any way public, it is likely your interests would have suffered from standing for your opinion.
My point is that no matter where you are, of course speaking your mind on most issues won’t be a problem, but there are always a couple of important subjects which inflame passions and that carry a risk for anyone standing in the way of either the majority or a group of fundamentalists. This is why imo a form of protection is needed, dissociation between vote and voter being the best one I can see at this point. Do you see other ways? Or do you disagree that all democratic countries have issues so charged with passions that it may constitute a danger for open debate?
Best regards,
Serge
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At 09:53 AM 11/22/2006, Serge wrote: >Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: > > > > Consider as a starting point direct democracy, such as Town Meeting > > in the U.S. Then don’t make the system worse. > >The starting point is questionable, not least because of its already >discussed lack of scalability. Also, why do you choose Town meetings as >a starting point, while it is in many ways a minor institution, as >opposed to the dominating representative democracy form in the US?
I mention Town Meeting because it is a presently functioning direct democracy, used in government. Yes, it is not scalable as constituted. The basic reason it is not scalable has to do with communication. Direct voting is not the problem. Rather, meetings become untenably large.
Proxy voting would allow this to scale to higher sizes, and delegable proxy would allow it to expand beyond the population of the earth without severe difficulty.
Town Meeting could easily be fixed so that it not only becomes scalable, but also so that it functions much better than it currently does, which is pretty good, compared to the alternatives used in small towns in the U.S.
You don’t see very small towns (1000 voters) moving away from Town Meeting. It is only large towns that do it, once they reach the level that Town Meeting starts to become cumbersome.
Town Meeting is direct democracy that works, it exists, we have real experience with it. And it is mentioned in this thread because Town Meeting does not include secret voting. (However, Town Meeting takes place in State environments, and state laws may require secret ballot for certain kinds of decisions.)
Did you know that secret ballot was not in widespread use in the U.S. until something like the middle of the 19th century? Used to be you could bring in your own printed “ticket” containing a party’s candidates, and just sign it and hand it in. Yes, you signed it, to prevent multiple voting and ballot box stuffing. This is the origin of the term “ticket” to represent a party slate of candidates.
If anyone, it will be the proxies finding themselves under pressure.
Yes. As representatives are today. Pressure can be resisted when there is sufficient backing for representatives to justify public expenditure on proteciton.
And again, if most people are to be proxy, this approach is not even affording the protection of anonymity to half the people it claims to cover. Furthermore, pressure, as mentionned by Magnus, can take other forms than intimidation. It can also be corruption or vote buying.
Under Asset Voting, if there is no intermediate layer, most people are not proxies, under difficult conditions.
Vote buying is what is called “graft,” and “lobbying” that is coupled with campaign contributions (generally illegally) when it is the representatives who are being bought off. The smaller the number of people that a representative represents (and thus the larger the functioning direct electorate), the more expensive vote buying becomes.
Vote buying is not a problem in a public system, a direct democracy. It only becomes a problem when power is concentrated, it then becomes possible to apply a relatively small amount of pressure (money or threat) to a vulnerable node. When you have to bribe very many in order to accomplish your goal, it becomes too expensive.
Besides being illegal, generally. Trying to engage in illegal activity with many people gets pretty dangerous. It is not a problem.—at least it is not a problem that you need to solve.
There is a minor problem, to be sure, in swing situations. But, I think if you drop the idea that vote buying is a problem, and then look at what would happen with it in direct democracy, you’d see that what remains isn’t graft or bribery, it is compensation. If someone wants to provide some benefit for the voters of a town so that the town will allow them to do something, it isn’t graft. And it is legal. It does not have to be secret.
(In a swing situation, the town is already divided, and a relatively small number of votes could tip the scales, and thus, again, bribery becomes sufficiently efficient to be possible. But if you’ve got delegable proxy, with hundreds of people who are open proxies, it remains too expensive and too dangerous.
Now, you seem to believe one can speak freely in democratic countries, and I am assuming you take the US as the basis for this. I am no conspiracy theorist and I see several US examples that would show otherwise.
I don’t think you know the situation in the U.S.
If supporting family planning and the opening of an abortion clinic in a US town with a fundamenlist christian community, you may be putting yourself at risk.
Not really, if all you are doing is expressing opinion or voting. I have never heard of violence from such communities against people for merely expressing opinions, or for voting.” What *does happen is violence against people who are actively engaged in what these people believe is murder.
And even that is quite rare. Threats are more common.
If you were against the war in Iraq, you will know already that being an outspoken opponent at the wrong time could have made you a traitor just like whole allied countries that found themselves branded the “axis of weasels” and if you had a business or were in any way public, it is likely your interests would have suffered from standing for your opinion.
Again, I’ve never heard of anyone being harassed for being against the war in Iraq. Besides, at many points here, a majority has been against the war anyway. I’ve never heard of a business being harassed.
Look, I’m recommending FA/DP for China. There, you can be harassed for expressing opinion. So you have to express opinions very carefully.
But what you do is to build the communications network, in support of goals that are officially approved. (Such as environmental protection.) You do it in a way that does not directly attack any “enemy.” You have to be smart.
But the medium is the message. Once open communications networks exist, and once the proxy networks are in place, with people trusting people who trust them, that network can be used for almost any purpose. It would be rapid response. Yet, because of the principles built in from the beginning, if it is FA, the network itself is relatively invulnerable; that is, to attack it requires, essentially, an admission that you are such an enemy of the people that only preventing them from talking with each other can keep you in power.
The Communist Party of China does not believe this about itself. Rather, it believes that it protects the people against hooligans and rabble-rousers and those who would disrupt public order. The students at Tienanmen square overreached. Had they had FA/DP in place, there would have been no crushing of the demonstration, because high Chinese officials were trying to negotiate with them, but there was nobody to negotiate with. The demonstrators were not united except in a very vague cause, and too many of them wanted nothing less than total humiliation of the government. Which would not fly in China, they should have known that. Some of them did know it, but they were drowned out by the shouting of, essentially, fanatics.
DP concentrates effective power in such a way as to select for trustworthiness.
There is an old saying, “If you are going to shoot the king, don’t miss.”
FA/DP should concentrate broad communication power in the hands of those who can be trusted with it.
My point is that no matter where you are, of course speaking your mind on most issues won’t be a problem, but there are always a couple of important subjects which inflame passions and that carry a risk for anyone standing in the way of either the majority or a group of fundamentalists.
Sure. Which is why you don’t start with highly controversial topics. You let people in places safe from retaliation do it. The most you need is a base layer that is secret, and that brings together enough people under a single proxy that the group or society can afford to protect the proxy.
However, having a secret base layer is a problem in a hostile society. The approach in such situations is to concentrate on where broad agreement is easy. You just make it easier. You don’t shoot at the king. Instead, you help the people to cooperate with the king, and, at the same time, for the king to cooperate with the people. If it comes to a point where a king is killing the people who are trying to help him, well, that king will not last long.
(This was actually the situation with Saddam Hussein. It is a bit of a mystery to me how he managed to survive so long; he apparently had a very strong network of family supporters he could rely upon.)
This is why imo a form of protection is needed, dissociation between vote and voter being the best one I can see at this point. Do you see other ways? Or do you disagree that all democratic countries have issues so charged with passions that it may constitute a danger for open debate?
I agree that there can be such issues. But I disagree that it is a problem.
In FA/DP, much communication can take place outside of public view. FA/DP organizations aren’t taking controversial positions as an organization, but people within the organization, brought together by the organization, can. They will elect people who can be trusted to public office, using existing secret ballot procedures.
You have the problem because you are thinking of trying to do this within a structure that is actually exercising power. But that is not where you are going to start.
Build voluntary networks that have what I call collective intelligence. They must be TOP, but not so TOP that people can’t talk to each other privately as individuals. Then, with that intelligence, they will know how and when to deal with possible needs for secrecy.
You may build into the system secret ballot as a tool that can be used. But then you also have to deal with membership validation, a whole other problem. It is not necessary to solve this problem for most FA/DP applications, because a person gains almost nothing from creating an army of sock puppets. It’s still one opinion, being expressed, ultimately, by one person. And others will listen to that person or not.
A person who supposedly represents a million people who has a bad idea and promotes it is still a person with a bad idea. Only if he can convince others to implement the idea does it become actually dangerous. FAs don’t concentrate power, except for communication access. And communication is not forced on anyone. If the other proxies have learned that proxy M, representing or supposedly representing a million people, constantly comes up with bad ideas, they will simply discount him. Are they disregarding a million people? Probably not. The test comes when the rest of the proxies agree on something, believe that M is full of hot air, and go ahead with action, such as funding the campaign of someone for President. Do campaign funds show up for the candidate supported by M?
If not, that million people either does not exist, or doesn’t care and M just collected the proxies without actually being trusted by them, or they have no resources. They will still have votes, if they are real. So does M’s candidate get at least a million votes?
No, M would be better off learning to work with the others. Perhaps he needs to find a proxy who communicates well, but who will also tell him when his idea stinks, and why….
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Vote buying is not a problem in a public system, a direct democracy. It only becomes a problem when power is concentrated, it then becomes possible to apply a relatively small amount of pressure (money or threat) to a vulnerable node. When you have to bribe very many in order to accomplish your goal, it becomes too expensive.
Besides being illegal, generally. Trying to engage in illegal activity with many people gets pretty dangerous.
It is not a problem.—at least it is not a problem that you need to solve.
-I agee with that. So the number of proxies has to be kept high or many has to vote directly. Mening DD should be the base and the goal with DP as a backup for not so interesting issues, or too specialised to the voter who still want somebody to decide for him.
In FA/DP, much communication can take place outside of public view. FA/DP organizations aren’t taking controversial positions as an organization, but people within the organization, brought together by the organization, can. They will elect people who can be trusted to public office, using existing secret ballot procedures.
You have the problem because you are thinking of trying to do this within a structure that is actually exercising power. But that is not where you are going to start.
Build voluntary networks that have what I call collective intelligence. They must be TOP, but not so TOP that people can’t talk to each other privately as individuals. Then, with that intelligence, they will know how and when to deal with possible needs for secrecy.
-Sounds like there will be secret/closed parties forming, just as today, with hidden agendas.
I don’t like the idea of so much non-TOP. Ofcourse you can never stop people from discussing individually, but once you do it in a group, it’s something else.A person who supposedly represents a million people who has a bad idea and promotes it is still a person with a bad idea. Only if he can convince others to implement the idea does it become actually dangerous. FAs don’t concentrate power, except for communication access. And communication is not forced on anyone. If the other proxies have learned that proxy M, representing or supposedly representing a million people, constantly comes up with bad ideas, they will simply discount him. Are they disregarding a million people? Probably not. The test comes when the rest of the proxies agree on something, believe that M is full of hot air, and go ahead with action, such as funding the campaign of someone for President. Do campaign funds show up for the candidate supported by M?
If not, that million people either does not exist, or doesn’t care and M just collected the proxies without actually being trusted by them, or they have no resources. They will still have votes, if they are real. So does M’s candidate get at least a million votes?
No, M would be better off learning to work with the others. Perhaps he needs to find a proxy who communicates well, but who will also tell him when his idea stinks, and why….
-Sounds complicated and not so easy to forecast what would happen. A lot of possibilties for a corrupt M to manouver into support of the others and find their support anyway.
What differs it from todays RD systems?BR/
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Hey Abd,
So on the whole FA/DP points, I have already expressed my divergence of opinion. I believe that you may not be able to reach a critical mass of people who just talk (except maybe as an established politician, but I doubt one would give back power so readily), there needs to be an incentive – in the case of a political system the incentive is for decisions to carry power. You can argue that if deliberations and votes gather enough popular support this would influence decisions, but you still need to reach a critical mass before that happens – and the time needed to reach this critical mass is anyone’s guess if it is even possible and if people don’t lose interest at a faster rate than they join up.
As already stated, imo there is a need to start implementation of power-carrying systems straight away but humbly, at a very small level, local public collectivities, associations, maybe some companies. As all the experiments feed their remarks and insights into the system it can evolve gradually to take on larger tasks safely.
Right, so for your point on proxy protection to be valid there needs to be a small enough number of representatives for the protection ressources available to be sufficient. When talking of a participative or distributed system, a small number of reps is clearly not the likely outcome. And if you are going back to a system where representants are a very small part of the citizen body with special privileges etc, then I doubt instant recall will be very practical or practiced and that prevents DP from functionning. And while your point on graft / vote buying is true of a large body of proxies, restricting their number so that they can be protected puts the system at increased risk in this respect.
As for the examples of the US, I lived there a couple years so without being an expert in any way, I still have some knowledge of what the country’s attitudes may be. I was still living there when the war on Iraq was launched, I saw more than once Germans or French escape troubles just because some drunk overheard the accent (the infamous axis of weasels..), and I have seen some fistfights in peaceful protests. Other examples? Do you know critical mass, the bike riding thing? Well, how about cars running into bicycles on purpose – just because the driver is pissed off that once a month a bunch of people take a ride through town? I also remember the bottles of French wine being poured down the drain with as much publicity as could be gathered and the sales dipping because France was being a good ally and trying to prevent the US from getting itself and the unwilling rest of the West into the mess we are in today. But no it got vilified and French exports to the US suffered. Need more examples? How about addressing corruption in Italy – do you really think there would be enough carabinieri to protect the whistleblowers from the mafia when even special judges and prosecutors are vulnerable and are once in a while killed?
Or
would identity protection (and complete transparence otherwise) be both a more accessible and better protection and a clearer simpler system?
One last point:
1) Sure. Which is why you don’t start with highly controversial topics. You let people in places safe from retaliation do it. The most you need is a base layer that is secret, and that brings together enough people under a single proxy that the group or society can afford to protect the proxy.
OK so first I am confused as to whether you think starting highly controversial topic is dangerous as stated in 1, or whether you agree that such topics exist but don’t think they are a problem as stated indo you disagree that all democratic countries have issues so charged with passions that it may constitute a danger for open debate?
2) I agree that there can be such issues. But I disagree that it is a problem.
- Either way, I think you will agree that for people not to be able to raise important questions because they are frightened of the some form of retribution is utterly unacceptable in a democracy, and that every effort should be made so that people enjoy their full freedom of expression in a TOP system.
Best regards,
Serge
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