
Delegative Democracy – a scalable voting model - bdr
http://www.andrewbadr.com/log/24/delegative-democracy-a-scalable-voting-model/
======
astigsen
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
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.

~~~
mercurial
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?

~~~
chton
The problem is not that they would do worse. The problem is that they would be
entirely dependent on the information they were provided. Anybody who gives
them that information has their own opinion, and whether they want to or not,
that opinion informs the way they dispense information. This means the random
members of the population aren't deciding based on objective evidence. They
can't really form their own opinions if every bit of information is biased one
way or another.

That is why I said it was similar to a trial-by-jury. The jury isn't versed in
law or in the details of the case, so they get all the information they need
to make a decision from the lawyers presenting the case. That leads to
situations like one we had in my home country: A woman was sentenced to life
in prison for a murder without any evidence. None at all. She had motive and
was 'an asshole', and that was enough for the jury to be sure she did it.

If there was a way to objectively give them the facts of the case and the
knowledge they need, the system would be perfect, but unfortunately that's not
possible. And until it is, i would rather have people making decisions based
on their own badly informed opinions than people making decisions based on
others' opinions with a veneer of legitimacy.

~~~
mercurial
Sure, but in the current system, how many of these facts come to the lawmakers
via deep-pocketed special interest groups? How many lawmakers know what war
looks like, when they vote for military action? How many have any idea of how
to regulate the banking sector? How many vote only based on what their party
has decided?

There is the question of writing laws in the appropriate legalese. In
practice, at least in France, most laws come from the executive branch, and
the Parliament examines them in a commission, "patches" them by adding
amendments, and votes. I'm sure the legalese part could be taught or handled
by specialists. Apart from that, I don't see why it would function in a worse
fashion that what we currently have.

~~~
chton
Sure, many of the decisions in the current system are 'impure' in some way.
Everybody has a price, everybody makes mistakes, everybody is uninformed about
things. The big difference is the decisions still come from the elected
lawmakers. They're often wrong, and even more often just guessing, but in the
very least the system is transparent, we know where the power resides.

In the case of a randomized group, that power isn't with the group, it's with
the people who educate them on the matters and who frame the issue. There are
a million ways to present any matter, and none of them are objective. You're
putting the power to influence and even determine a nation's decisions in the
hands of the experts that inform them, rather than the randomly selected
people. It would become very efficient to buy those people instead of the
voters.

The problem of the matter isn't whether it would function worse. The problem
is that it would function _less transparently_. It would ostensibly be a fair
and completely unbiased system, but that could be manipulated behind the
scenes in far more insidious ways. That's very dangerous. Personally, I would
rather have a more unfair but more transparent system.

~~~
mercurial
How is the current system transparent in this regard? How do you know where
your MP/Congressperson got their information from (since we apparently agree
that representatives are often not expert in the subject matter)?

~~~
chton
I don't know, but at least I know it's them making the decision. I know
they're corruptible, and I know their information can be manipulated and can
be incomplete. It's transparent because everybody knows this, that's why we
can complain about it. In some cases, we can call out lawmakers for it and get
things changed. We know which ones tend to decide badly, and we can vote
against them. It's an important balance in the system. If I have no control
over who votes, and the whole system is made to look objective, that balance
and that transparency is lost.

~~~
mercurial
Ok, so your main beef with the lottery system is the anonymity of the randomly
selected lawmakers? Well, if you don't know who they are, neither do the
lobbyists. You still have Berlusconi/Putin-style influence-by-media, but
that's not any different from what you have now.

~~~
chton
My beef isn't with the anonymity, my beef is with the supposed objectiveness
of the educators they use to give the randomly selected lawmakers the
knowledge they need to decide. Those are the people to lobby, those are the
people to buy, but they are hidden from the rest of the population. The only
way to keep them honest would be to make every bit of information they give to
the lawmakers public and freely available, so we can be sure the lawmakers
aren't being manipulated. That runs into the same problems the delegate
democracy has too: you can't make everything public in a state that still has
foreign affairs.

~~~
mercurial
My understanding is that only few representatives get close to state secrets,
and they get them all from the executive branch (eg, the Intelligence
Committee is relying on whatever the country's intelligence services deigns to
tell them). Don't see why it should be different with randomly-selected
lawmakers.

------
haberman
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-polit...](http://www.vox.com/2014/11/1/7136343/gamergate-and-the-
politicization-of-absolutely-everything)

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.

~~~
patcon
Here's what i say: Good. Bring it. I want our collective ignorance to shine,
so we can confront it head-on as the destructive force that it is.

Representative democracy was put in place when regular people were presumably
MUCH more ignorant. And giving citizens power through proxy likely spurred us
to become more aware as citizenry. But I imagine it was pretty jarring at
first.

Delegative democracy puts us in uncomfortable territory yet again, and I think
that's a good thing.

~~~
haberman
> I want our collective ignorance to shine

Ok, I present to you:

Anti-vax: [http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/21/4767530/vaccine-
deniers-i...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/21/4767530/vaccine-deniers-
inside-the-dumb-dangerous-new-fad)

Climate change denial:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial)

Anti-GMO:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/09/are_gmo_foods_safe_opponents_are_skewing_the_science_to_scare_people_.html)

Creation Science:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_science](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_science)

> so we can confront it head-on as the destructive force that it is.

That hasn't been working so well...

~~~
patcon
I find none of those overly concerning in practice, at least not to the degree
that they reflect poorly on delegative democracy.

\- [http://www.gallup.com/poll/168620/one-four-solidly-
skeptical...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/168620/one-four-solidly-skeptical-
global-warming.aspx)

\-
[http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NewsRoom/HarrisPolls/tabid/...](http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NewsRoom/HarrisPolls/tabid/447/mid/1508/articleId/1483/ctl/ReadCustom%20Default/Default.aspx)

\- [http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-
intel...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intelligent-
design.aspx)

------
baddox
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
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
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)

------
chton
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
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
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
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
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.

------
azov
_> 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
You should watch this:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_frau...](http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_fraud?language=en)

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 :/

------
mooneater
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)

------
JDDunn9
Sampled democracy is a much better solution. Replace Congress with 1,000
randomly sampled citizens. That's the only way to get true representation.

~~~
jeffdavis
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
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.

------
higherpurpose
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)

~~~
luke-stanley
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
Does anyone know of any software products that use this model at their core?

~~~
mooneater
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Party#DemocracyOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Party#DemocracyOS)
looks similar

~~~
mladenkovacevic
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.

------
dllthomas
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.

------
revscat
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.

------
Lerc
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.

------
humanrebar
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
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
_" 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?

------
jawns
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?

~~~
ultimape
I'd like to think a distributed workload model would help take the pressure
off of needing to have the bottlenecks that come from #3. I imagine a valve
like bazaar system - with groups forming spontaneously as the need for
leadership arises - might work out.

The trouble then becomes figuring out who's qualified to chime in on certain
issues - a free-for-all could mean anyone with a vested interest could form
these groups and we lose the ability to put in checks and balances to help
stop feedback loops due to mob mentality. Proving you even read the article in
question could be difficult.

The number of people who were spouting outright mis-information over the
obamacare documents was mindblowing.

Perhaps the first step is to reduce the scope of these laws and stop bundling
everything together.

~~~
mladenkovacevic
Yes. All decisions should be separated into subject focused groups. Then
individuals must qualify themselves for voting into those groups by
participating in discussions, doing research and having articles they've
written or submitted upvoted by other people who have already graduated to
decision makers within that group.

So any representative wouldn't have a single "score" that represents how many
followers they have but a number of individual scores as they pertain to the
focus that individual has chosen for themselves.

------
mojuba
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.

------
jiggy2011
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.

~~~
ahomescu1
> 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.

Whereas now a rich company/individual can just buy a politician.

~~~
jiggy2011
At least in the case of a politician you can usually look at their voting
record and see if that matches what you expected them to do.

------
webXL
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.

------
ams6110
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
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.

------
known
I suggest
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recall_election](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recall_election)
should be simple/swift/inexpensive.

------
known
We should use
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fmri](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fmri) to
select best politicians/representatives

------
Lidador
How about Qualitative Democracy?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5cCyAqCkIw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5cCyAqCkIw)

------
bmmayer1
In this model, what would stop a politician from paying voters to delegate
their votes to his supporters and thus directly buying the election?

~~~
ps4fanboy
Wouldnt you have to buy at least 50% of the votes sounds expensive

~~~
breischl
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.

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

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

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m0th87
It's almost-pagerank applied to democracy

~~~
jhrobert
It could. Look for Eigendemocracy

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

~~~
richmarr
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
I think that may accurately describe the field today. But the game board is
changing.

------
jacques_chester
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
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.

