
Google Votes: A Liquid Democracy Experiment on a Corporate Social Network - sinak
http://www.tdcommons.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1092&context=dpubs_series
======
sytelus
Current implementation of democratic systems is result of the fact that
process for voting had been expensive in pre-Internet era. One of the major
thing Internet does is to make process of voting dirt cheap. One no longer has
to setup physical voting booths, deploy thousands of election officials,
physically tally votes and so on. This means we can give direct democracy a
real chance. Why should we let senators or presidents make _all_ of the
decisions for us for years? Why not just vote for every issue directly? Why
shouldn't _anyone_ on Internet be able to propose a law and have it voted by
people in the country directly? This can change everything...

...or so I thought. There are several problem with direct democracy: (1) Most
people are not expert at things like foreign policy, economics and so on. (2)
Many people can be heavily influenced to vote either way by creating powerful
PR campaigns. (3) Most people have no time or capacity to digest tons of dense
information to get the background. (4) Some information needed to make
decision must remain classified.

This paper actually proposes a viable option here that works around many of
the above issues. Instead of delegating all decisions for next 4 years to one
person, we delegate case-by-cases and for arbitrary time length. This allows,
for example, for a real economist to be elected to make a economy decision or
nuclear scientist to be elected for Iran deal like decisions and so on. It
might work. The bottom line is that we can get rid of arcane pre-Internet
political system of senators, congressman and presidents.

~~~
wnevets
>Current implementation of democratic systems is result of the fact that
process for voting had been expensive in pre-Internet era. One of the major
thing Internet does is to make process of voting dirt cheap. One no longer has
to setup physical voting booths, deploy thousands of election officials,
physically tally votes and so on. This means we can give direct democracy a
real chance. Why should we let senators or presidents make all of the
decisions for us for years? Why not just vote for every issue directly? Why
shouldn't anyone on Internet be able to propose a law and have it voted by
people in the country directly? This can change everything...

Cost of physically tally votes isn't the reason the US is a representative
democracy. The mob is inherently irrational, stupid and over reactive, which
is why the founders settled on representatives. Case-by-cases voting also
doesn't solve this problem, even with the internet.

~~~
kriro
"The mob is inherently irrational"

I strongly disagree with this sentiment or at least I think it should be put
to the test more often. There's some wisdom of the crowd factors that would
suggest the mob doesn't need to be smart on an individual basis but my main
objection is philosophical in nature. It strongly object to the Plato ideal of
elitists that rule over the dumb (be it for good reasons or not). I think the
case outlined by Popper in "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (particularly
book 1) is pretty solid.

~~~
quanticle
>I strongly disagree with this sentiment or at least I think it should be put
to the test more often.

Donald Trump is proving that sentiment right now.

More seriously, there's a difference between a crowd and a mob. Notably, crowd
opinions are uncorrelated - everyone in the crowd comes to their own
conclusion, and then they vote. Mob opinions are correlated. People whose
opinion differs from the mob, even are intimidated into either changing their
opinion or, at the very least, remaining silent. Thus the mob quickly
converges on a single opinion, whereas the crowd maintains a diversity of
opinions.

~~~
monstruoso
>Mob opinions are correlated. People whose opinion differs from the mob, even
are intimidated into either changing their opinion or, at the very least,
remaining silent.

Voting is supposed to be secret. So I don't think what you say applies at all.

~~~
zardo
People, for the most part, don't come to political opinions on their own, they
are influenced by others. It doesn't take overt threats, people just don't
want to be different than their peers, so they do what the people around them
do.

------
abalone
One potential problem with this in the public sector is that when you have a
lot more representatives (potentially anyone), much less scrutiny is given to
any one of them. I've seen this in ranked-choice systems. Most people still
end up picking the candidate that spends the most money (gets the most
exposure), only with even less information about them because the money and
coverage is spread more thinly.

And I'm not sure that immediate recall power is really an effective defense.
Even in representative systems with transparency, few people make the effort
to study issues and track voting records. And who would you delegate to
instead? Someone you know even less about, probably.

A "grand election event" with primaries has the benefit of winnowing and
focusing attention on a small set of candidates. Unfortunately that also tends
to be those with the most money to spend.

~~~
x5n1
> And who would you delegate to instead? Someone you know even less about,
> probably.

AI. Get AI to sift through all the data, summarize it, and then select a set
of best qualified candidates in the world. This same AI would also have global
surveillance.

People are often crazy and politicians are often idiots.

~~~
DiabloD3
x5n1's comment is getting downvoted, but I'm not even entirely sure he's
wrong. We're building AI-type applications to help people run large companies
and other difficult problems that throwing more people at just doesn't help
(because, usually, its organizing people that is the difficult part; and when
its not, its organizing data to help people organize themselves).

Having some sort of large scale AI infra to help the government manage stuff
to well integrate local, state, and federal into a cohesive unit with well
defined boundaries and task ownership between the layers and departments would
massively fix the US government.

And before someone says "no duh, our founding fathers said this", they never
looked at it from the point of view of someone from our era that deals with
large scale application design (because, well, it didn't exist yet).

I mean, what would go a long way is manufacturing a programming language to
write laws in, so we could lint and compile time warn/error laws. That would
be a good place to start.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn)

(Do you seriously believe that a field as nascent and murky as macroeconomics,
coupled with the hectic state of public policy and political advisory -- that
these same people can then turn around and write a magical AI to quick fix
government planning as we know it?)

 _I mean, what would go a long way is manufacturing a programming language to
write laws in, so we could lint and compile time warn /error laws. That would
be a good place to start._

The law already _is_ a formal language, and court procedure is also formalized
and mechanical. The language of the law is such that it permits a high degree
of fuzziness, so one can benefit from common law, case precedent, jury
nullification and all sorts of nice judicial perks.

The "programming language for laws" that people on HN keep proposing will only
fuck everything up even worse.

~~~
x5n1
> benefit from common law, case precedent, jury nullification and all sorts of
> nice judicial perks.

for the right class of people. the same "perks" turn into something much more
sinister for the "wrong" sort of people. whether those be blacks or browns.
the point is to have one set of laws that applies logically to all situations
and to all people equally. Adding that as a constraint will either make the
laws much worse or much better.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
_the point is to have one set of laws that applies logically to all situations
and to all people equally._

This is already the case. Codifying laws into some sort of PL is a complete
diversion and redundant.

~~~
wolfgke
Then why do different courts come to different decisions then if this is
already the case. Codifying laws into some sort of PL exactly intends to
prevent this.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _Then why do different courts come to different decisions then if this is
> already the case._

This is a quirk of the US Federal legal system -- independent circuits. Any
sufficiently important matter is settled nationwide in US caselaw by the
Supreme Court.

The law is incredibly consistent. You will, without recognising it, have
hundreds or thousands of invisible interactions with it daily. It is
incredibly robust in the face of massively variable outputs. No software
product has ever come within a cooee of sustaining decades to centuries of
uptime at a stretch in the face of sustained attack.

~~~
wolfgke
> No software product has ever come within a cooee of sustaining decades to
> centuries of uptime at a stretch in the face of sustained attack.

If you consider each change of a law as a break of the uptime (I mean: there
is some "bug" in the laws, so it's changed), the uptime of, say, good embedded
software is far better.

~~~
jacques_chester
Show me an embedded system with live patching and as large a problem domain
and let's run that comparison again.

~~~
wolfgke
The AXD301 switch

>
> [http://ll2.ai.mit.edu/talks/armstrong.pdf](http://ll2.ai.mit.edu/talks/armstrong.pdf)
> (from slide 27 on)

>
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_\(programming_language\)#History)

"In 1998 Ericsson announced the AXD301 switch, containing over a million lines
of Erlang and reported to achieve a high availability of nine "9"s."

Additionally it is well-known that the AXD301 has live patching capabilities
(which is not surprising, since Erlang has).

~~~
jacques_chester
Does the AXD301 switch handle trusts, estates, criminal punishment, taxes,
court procedure, torts -- indeed, every single interaction between humans and
the environment that they inhabit, including into the past, into the future,
into space, under ground and sea, for concepts both physical and abstract, in
a heterogenous cooperative world-spanning framework applicable to all human
beings, animals, plants and objects, natural or artificial, living and dead?

Don't get me wrong: software engineering has accomplished great things. My
point is that the law has to face different, very fuzzy, unconstrained
problems that cannot be simplified.

(Also I would've used the Space Shuttle software, that's my favourite high
water mark. Or the seL4 kernel).

------
patcon
In case anyone is interested, a group in spain has been building an open
source, cryptography-based liquid democracy tool for the past few years:

\- Enterprise site: [https://www.agoravoting.com](https://www.agoravoting.com)

\- Community site: seems down (likely because they're refocusing on enterprise
in order to survive after a few years of spinning wheels as an open source
project)

\- Source code:
[https://github.com/agoravoting](https://github.com/agoravoting)

Unfortunately, their dev discussions have been in spanish and it's been
challenging to follow as intently as I'd like :(

~~~
qznc
There is also Adhocracy, which is even Open Source.
[https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy/](https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy/)

Voting, like crypto, is an area where I consider Open Source a strict
requirement.

------
jfager
I'm a big fan of this general idea but taken to the limit of being able to
delegate all issue votes to any person goes too far, and I'd prefer a system
that elected representatives who accrue a threshold number of votes. There are
a few reasons for this, but I'll just talk about one here, privacy.

Privacy is addressed in the paper but I think the real issues with it are just
glossed over. "You get to see how your delegate votes" is great and should
absolutely be true, but there are two other sorts of privacy that matter:
privacy from the _electoral system itself_ , and privacy from _closely related
people_.

In very Googley fashion, this paper seems to take for granted that of course
you'd trust the system itself with the knowledge of your votes and delegates,
and that its privacy-respecting duty is fulfilled by simply not broadcasting
that knowledge to the unauthorized public. But that's a terrible way to run a
government that at least partially relies on a secret ballot as a means of
expressing dissent and effecting change in the government itself, for
hopefully obvious reasons.

The other form of privacy that matters is on a much smaller scale. A delegate
who can exercise the votes of an arbitrarily small number of people is also
capable of ensuring they are exercising the votes of a specific set of people.
An abusive husband/father/wife/mother/boss/etc can know simply from the count
of votes they hold whether their victims are following through on their
command, and via transitive delegation they can pool that power with
collaborators.

~~~
cbsmith
There's all kinds of math on techniques for being able to audit the vote
without exposing individual voting behaviour. It is possible to prove to
yourself that your vote was counted without exposing what your vote was to
others, and also providing assurances that the result represents the aggregate
of everyone's "votes". I don't think there is much about the important aspects
of this design that require there be massive privacy issues. There are some
variants around "honest verifiers" that work even more simply. Most of the
homomorphic encryption excitement stems from some of the more sophisticated
variants of that approach.

~~~
jfager
Do you have any pointers to papers describing how vote auditing techniques
extend to liquid democracy? The Google paper doesn't even acknowledge the
problem, much less describe a solution, and most of the other papers I've read
on the topic are either extremely handwavy on the technical details of privacy
or make the same assumption as Google, that its good enough to hide votes from
the participants but 'the system' still knows.

~~~
cbsmith
I'm not sure I understand how liquid democracy would change the fundamental
problem context in a way that would change the problem for homomorphic
encryption...

------
tunesmith
"Although many ranked voting methods exist, the Arrow Impossibility Theorem
proves no single one can be ideal (Arrow 1963)."

That's not actually what Arrow's theorem proves. It just proves that a voting
system cannot simultaneously meet four criteria. It doesn't prove that those
four criteria should be required though. Independence of Irrelevant
Alternatives is particularly problematic.

Kudos to them for respecting the Condorcet Criterion though.

------
learnstats2
One important but less discussed aspect of democracy is how the issues to be
voting on are decided. By deciding what to vote on, I decide in which
directions society is allowed to change, and in which it is not.

In the paper, there is a successful vegan delegate who collects 14 proxy votes
on food-related issues. I'm not sure how this delegate would vote on the
examples, such as burger of the month, and flavors of frozen yoghurt.

------
eximius
Interesting.

A huge issue with implementing this practically on a large scale is identity
authentication. Without a modern, digital government, we can't hope to
implement anything nearly this nice.

We need an Estonia-like PKI for the US. Taxes, forms, passports, voting...
everything would be so much simpler.

(edit: besides teaching people how to use it, that is.)

~~~
jrochkind1
There are plenty of places to experiment with this system before you get to
actual state government. Internal to corporations or organizations or
voluntary associations, the latter of which especially have votes all the time
(and/or might even more with a good infrastructure for it).

~~~
mistermann
I can envision a _lot_ of people in corporate middle management having a bit
of a problem with the very idea of democratic decision making. An extremely
large part of the allure of those positions is power and controlling which
information filters up the management chain.

~~~
crdoconnor
This is why it will never be implemented on any meaningful scale in any
corporate environment. At least, not without the backing of a strong union.

~~~
qznc
There is plenty of room for "meaningless" democracy in corporate environment.
Vote on lunchroom menu for example.

------
qwtel
I just want to throw in the concept of "voter apathy". In my opinion it's why
all voting systems, liquid or not, are doomed to fail (or at least be very
inefficient). Even delegating one's vote to a relevant expert would require
some research, for which there is no good reason in such a system. (there
might be social pressure to delegate one's vote the "right" expert though,
somebody who appears competent on a superficial level (i.e. talking a lot),
but who's voting history might not reflect that competence)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Why?

I think, delegating one's vote to a known expert would actually be a problem,
not a solution. Just delegate it to a friend you trust, that knows more about
some stuff than you do. He then may use your vote directly or delegate it
further to someone he trusts.

What I fear in liquid democracy system is PR efforts that will be done to
market "experts".

------
Zigurd
My town has a town meeting form of direct democracy. But, in practice,
participation is low. It's long and tedious. Liquid democracy seems like a
great way to be represented, perhaps by the like-minded person who draws the
short straw.

------
dredmorbius
Numerous questions. How does delegative democracy:

● Prove that delegates are a valid delegate of one or more other parties?

● Show that delegates voted a specific way? These are non-secret ballots. What
happens in regimes for, as the saying goes, "votes have consequences"?

● Show that an individual's vote is going to a specified delegate _and no
others_?

● Avoid selling of votes.

● Avoid creation of straw accounts or identities?

● Assure some minimum level of competence among electors.

● Provide accountability for voting actions? Elected representatives
(theoretically at least) risk loss of office.

 _Edit:_ and one more: How does this address issues with bundled votes. E.g.,
actual legislatures don't vote individually on topics but deal with bundled
issues, with riders and insertions on bills. The process is as much about
architecting _how_ things are voted on as who votes how.

------
kriro
I am fighting a pretty big inner struggle over these issues...

On paper LD seems like a very good concept at least it seems superior to the
current form of representatives. I'm not 100% convinced complete direct
democracy on all issues isn't superior to LD. Wisdom of the crowds would
suggest you don't have to be an expert on everything, the point about
classified votes is a good one (of course one could argue these shouldn't
exist but that's another debate).

...however LD also requires a technical solution which seems far easier to
game and manipulate than old school ballots. Strong crypto + LD seems like the
way to go but you'd need a key for each citizen and loss of keys will happen
and need to be mitigated.

------
JulianMorrison
I can see two downsides to this. Neither a show stopper, but they ought to be
considered.

1) Bloc voting will be encouraged because delegation itself is unavoidably
visible to the recipient even if only in delegate count. This could be
exploited by abusers to take control of their victim/partner's vote, cults to
hand everything to the guru, and so on.

2) A feature of representative democracy that's reviled and relied upon in
equal measure is the ability of leaders, once elected, to take controversial
decisions, or to stick by earlier promises, creating stability. If the power
leaders exercise can change in real time, who could ever reach a decision eg:
close the border in an epidemic?

------
striking
I don't think this would work in a country. In my opinion, democracy only
makes sense when the state of the entire set of decisions can be held by every
voter's mind.

Food is a pretty easy decision. Taxes and wages and so on and so forth have
proved to be quite difficult for many people.

Republics work well because they break up the required duties among the
people, so the amount of work required to vote is decreased. This allows them
to have their own work outside of decision-making, even when decision-making
is a lot of work.

Great way to pick food, though.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> I don't think this would work in a country. In my opinion, democracy only
> makes sense when the state of the entire set of decisions can be held by
> every voter's mind.

At what point did we start believing that a country should have more decisions
to make than every citizen can evaluate?

~~~
Daishiman
The point where you realize that running a society is pretty fucking hard and
that there's a lot of really complex problems for which most people
_certainly_ have no way to inform themselves in sufficient speed?

~~~
JoshTriplett
> running a society

Except this isn't about running a society, it's about running a government.
There's a major difference.

~~~
Daishiman
If your government sucks its impact on society is pretty much one the most
important things in the lives of a country's people that can happen. Unless
you've outsourced city planning, health code regulations, pollution
management, and other essentials to a third party, it's as close as it gets.
And someone's in charge of putting the legions of bureaucrats and technicians
doing those things.

------
Scaevolus
It's an interesting system, but it doesn't look like delegation is used very
often: "Of the total vote count across all issues, 3.6% were delegated votes.
This is a small percentage but is significant considering effectively all
users were new to the concept of delegated voting."

~~~
jfim
From the paper: "Issues with category "food" have the highest number of votes
cast, over 73,000, and the largest number of issues, at 150."

If you think about it, food is probably the most personal and least likely
thing you'd delegate, as you have your own preferences and it doesn't require
expertise in the subject. If it were for more serious things in which
expertise is required, it's more likely people would delegate votes; for
example, if there was a vote on the California drought using this system, I'd
probably delegate my vote to a hydrologist, as they know more about the
subject than I can reasonably gather.

~~~
gwern
But on the flip side, if food voting is driving it and explains why delegation
is a rounding error over multiple years of use, then their 'successful'
experience is of little import for people who are interested in whether it
would be good for voting on things more serious than burgers.

------
askvictor
I wonder if there also needs some incentives for getting involved in the
process. A lot of democracy is pretty boring, and you'd want those who we
delegate the boring bits to have considered things well, and that takes time.
A quick approach would be that you need to make a small payment to your
delegate for each vote, but that would have its own effects (e.g. people
casting random votes as they don't want to pay someone). So perhaps a voucher
system - every vote you make (delegated or direct) gives you a voucher. If
there are n votes in a year, then for every voucher you have greater than n,
you can claim a certain amount of payment.

~~~
patcon
My impression is that this would almost sort itself out in the wash, right?

If I'm holding a dozen votes from friends, I'm kinda like a super-citizen with
12 votes, and so I take that job more seriously because trust has been placed
in me -- no payment required. If someone is holding a thousand votes and
dedicating more time, I feel people would start creating grassroots tools to
get them compensated for spending more time understanding their issues. And so
on and so forth, right up to the groups holding millions, who maybe start
their own PACs or whatever the equivalent is.

But maybe I'm optimistic :)

------
titfn
Liquid democracy doesn't appear to protect against the "Tyranny of the
majority" [1], just like direct democracy.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority)

~~~
qznc
Isn't that an orthogonal problem? Liquid democracy does not change the number
of votes nor does it define how to make the decision (majority rule or
whatever).

~~~
titfn
if you plan to use this system instead of democracy, I think that it is very
relevant...

------
idlewords
The showdown between Liquid Democracy and Holacracy is going to be
breathtaking

------
jjb123
So is there an application that Google uses internally for this that others
could check out? Wasn't sure if it was through Google+ or if it was a 20%
project built independently/outside of Google+.

~~~
shardt
Google Votes is a 20% project that myself and several other Googlers run.
Currently, the app is only available internal to Google and we haven't open
sourced it. The paper is (obviously) public as well as two Tech Talks on
YouTube. [http://goo.gl/KLBxv0](http://goo.gl/KLBxv0)
[http://goo.gl/7yRSP1](http://goo.gl/7yRSP1)

Steve Hardt

------
theatgrex
I've thought about a structure like this for a long time. And I independently
came up with most of the same ideas as they did. One additional thing I've
also thought would be cool would be to have the implementation of a liquid
democracy system itself under control by this same system. So you could use it
to vote on pull requests and bug fixes and other things like that. I think
this step would be necessary for real government because the code that was
responsible for this system would in effect be part of the laws of the
country.

~~~
patcon
Might be of interest to you:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic)

~~~
theatgrex
yeah exactly what I've though about... a nomic code base :)

------
aaronharnly
(This should be marked [PDF]; although it has Content-disposition: inline, it
downloads as a file in some browsers.)

------
fEVboot
liquid, because it removes the one thing that matters: contextual foresight.
this is also the most expensive component, especially when weighing future
production.

'liquid voting' is only useful when trying to find the greatest, fastest
consumption.

