[top-politics] Re: Secret votes

Magnus — 2006-11-23 10:42:33+0100

>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.

[top-politics] Re: Secret votes

Serge — 2006-11-23 00:05:52+0100

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.

[top-politics] Re: Secret votes

AbdLomax — 2006-11-22 20:11:32+0100

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.

Read more… / Lire plus…

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.

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?

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….