Brad Ideas - New Democracy - Comments

Better or worse

brad — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 01:02:51 -0700

I don’t doubt at all that meeting in person provides a number of things that meeting via technology doesn’t. But they are not all good. Having all the reps in the same town, seeing one another is what generates the “inside the beltway” attitude, one of us vs. them. It’s possible if reps live and work in their district, they would be more in touch with the people and less in touch with their fellow lawmakers. Which is better?

In a sense, the limitations of the videoconferencing system might be a boon rather than a bane. Not all that they get from their sense of community is good for government.

Good or bad?

Phillip Helbig — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 11:13:40 -0700

I'm not so sure. Reminds me of the story of Thomas Edison's voting machine,
which could record the yeas and neas more quickly. Congress didn't want it,
someone pointing out to whom that, sometimes, a slow vote is a political
necessity.

That story might be apocryphal, no longer relevant today, not true at the
time, or all of the above. Still, it illustrates the principle.

REAL personal relationships are probably quite important in politics.

I think a good example is physical science. These guys (and they are mostly
guys) are as geeky as anyone and certainly not opposed to new technology. And
the new technology is used (a good example are electronic preprints). But the
traditional conference still exists. It has a different emphasis, though. In
the old days, one would go to a conference to get the latest results. These days,
someone might show a figure, remark that it is an older result, and say that
newer stuff is available on the preprint server. These days, the emphasis is
more on learning about things outside of one's own immediate field (thanks to
better communication, the people in the immediate field are quite familiar). However,
what hasn't changed is the importance of personal, real face-to-face, contact.
If that is important in physical science, then certainly much more so in politics.

Another point is that in many countries, there is no concept of district, the
MPs being elected via a party list etc. Of course, they still live somewhere,
but the concept of working for one's own district directly doesn't exist.

Sessions or parliament, committee meetings etc can be and are televised and/or
available on the internet. So, the concept of meetings visible to all and having
the participants not being together physically are independent of one another.

Plenty of other good reasons for it

slothman — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:44:45 -0700

It's also good for security; the legislature won't need to get shut down if there's a private plane deviating from its flight plan in the area. Even if lobbyists do manage to meet in person without monitoring, their travel costs (in both money and time) would increase, while the cost of maintaining the representatives drops.

This plan also has the benefit that it can be phased in gradually. Start by plumbing the district offices for videoconferencing, then install the equipment, then start holding sessions that way. Over time, sessions can shift more and more to videoconferencing, and the building in DC would gradually be used only for ceremonial purposes.

I agree that there is far

Ravenhawk — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:52:45 -0700

I agree that there is far too much obsession with raising money in the political world, although I would argue that the expenses behind advertising themselves are not the only part to this problem. Some technology is making things cheaper for advertising. We're seeing some quite good use of the internet as a tool for advertising candidates without the issue of "slot buying."
There is a problem I see with fund raising where the person who is able to raise the most money is often seen as a "better candidate" purely on the grounds of their fund raising skills. After all, if they weren't awesome, people wouldn't have given them all that money, right? I don't know exactly how we can address this problem as it is one of societal perception, but it's something that has bugged me as I see it in the news.

Vote against

brad — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 13:24:22 -0800

Well, we already have that to some extent. It's an interesting idea, but it may drive things even more to the most bland candidate. It's a thin line. We want a candidate who represents the people, but if you try to be all things to all people you do nothing. So we also want a candidate who leads, and explicitly doesn't represent some of the people. Their job is to counterbalance the various wishes and needs of the people and find the right course, not just to do what 51% of them want. And even at times to not do what almost all of them want if it violates the constitution, for example.

As noted, there are two purposes for secret ballot, and we've given up one of them today by allowing arbitrary mail-in (or 100% mail in) in most places. The missing goal is to prohibit ballot buying, selling and coercion. With public ballots, not only can you buy and sell but you may face social pressure in your peer group to check out your ballot and to make sure it's "right."

Secret Ballot? or Democracy?

Gene — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 04:16:37 -0800

Okay, so.. I do understand that people want to keep their vote secret, but doesn't that make voter fraud easier to commit and get away with? I would propose allowing people to choose which they prefer to do. If they choose to not vote secretly.. no rights being violated. Shorter lines for those who want to be secretive.

1. Make your decisions from the comfort of your own home. Go online to your voting site, make your selection, and click "Print Form". When you're ready, take your printed ballot along with your drivers license, the person at the voting location will verify you are who is on the drivers license, and you feed the ballot into a machine which confirms your vote.

2. Keep the old fashion way of voting for those who don't have the internet or want to vote more secretively. SSN + Drivers License or even a packet mailed with a special web registration number... so many simple ways... I think...

I think Primaries should change to have people vote on who they do not want in office. Don't you think that might have a better outcome? Lowest score move to Round 2.

Gene

32% noticed; 68% did not notice

Ping — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 14:43:30 -0800

It's the other way around (roughly 2/3 of voters miss errors). Sarah Everett explains her experiments in detail in her dissertation.

For background material

brad — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 11:01:53 -0800

See the New Democracy tag above, in particular the article on goals of voting systems. Plain paper works great in Canada, but is not so workable for the USA which may have 20 or more questions on a ballot. And the questions are different in each ward of each town. And the lobbies for the blind and disabled and non-English-speakers have a strong voice that opposes paper because they think machines which can assist disabled voters are a must.

The public of course would not care about open source, just the verifiers. But in fact, in the two-machine design with intermediate human readable paper ballot, you don't care all that much about the security of the first half so verification is nice but not essential.

Check earlier threads

brad — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 10:56:57 -0800

Earlier threads in this new democracy tag will point you to other articles about your questions. Actually, we can provide voters with receipts in a way that protects secret ballot and stops vote selling -- but the system is difficult for people to understand, so it is unlikely to happen. In fact, you end up publishing all ballots on the web, and voters can check theirs is there, but can't prove it.

Many people are fighting to stop having black box style voting, and we are winning in a number of areas. Having one machine help generate the paper ballots, and another machine optical scan them allows us to not have to worry nearly so much about the security on the first half, and thus is a good idea.

I agree with you but

Alex Goldman — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:41:36 -0800

Aren't you ditching what most people understand by "electronic voting". In my opinion, there's no way to secure a Diebold-like black box. I agree that we need to produce a paper with the voter's name and their vote on it.

We cannot provide the voter with an ATM receipt because of the vote selling problem -- proof of how you voted makes it easier to sell your vote.

So we produce a piece of paper with the vote that the voter wanted on it, the paper can be human verified . . .

what about Oregon? Are postal mail votes not worth the risk?

I think most voters probably

Phillip Helbig — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 03:12:39 -0800

I think most voters probably don't even know what open source is. Even if your
machines are really secure, that's only half the battle. The other half is
convincing people with a non-technical background that they are secure.

What is wrong with paper ballots? There is a circle next to each candidate or
party, and you mark that circle with an "X" for your vote. No hanging chads,
nothing unclear unless the voter intentionally made it unclear (in which case
the ballot is invalid). In countries with all-paper votes, preliminary results
which are almost as good as the real ones are available within half an hour or
so, and final results usually a few hours later. (Lack of good telecommunications
would make this longer, but that applies for automatic voting machines as well,
if not more so.) Is it really worth the risk of having people lose confidence
in voting altogether simply to have the result a bit earlier?

As far as open source goes, few people would be able to actually a) verify that the
code works properly and b) verify that the proper code was installed at the
important time. So in the end, it's down to taking someone's word for it.

Playing devil's advocate, and noticing that many (most) open-source folks are
of the libertarian persuasion, often extremely so, wouldn't there be a bit
of temptation to skew the votes in that direction, this hidden feature in practice
only visible to those of a similar persuasion? (Was it Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde
who said that he could resist everything except temptation?)

The framers hated democracy

Freedom Rider — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 12:17:18 -0700

"The framers of the consitution, while they did not envision the two party system we see today, intended for the winner of the popular vote to be able to lose the electoral college."
-Brad

The framers of the Constitution intended for America to be a Republic, NOT a democracy, whereby the individual rights of freeholders and landowners were protected from tyranny, including the tyranny of the mob (democracy is synonymous with mob-rule).

They didn't give a damn (nor should we) about non-landowners or how they would have voted. If the framers of the Constitution wanted a popular vote, they would have, well, framed the Constitution that way.

Today it does not matter who wins the election. The Federal Reserve (which is neither Federal, nor do they store any monetary reserves anywhere) acts as the surrogate King of America by electronically manipulating the money supply, thus controlling every facet of our lives.

See the comment above

brad — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 13:22:25 -0700

Ping’s link above has some good material on problems with STV.

Now the reality is that all the systems fail (if they need to provide just one winner) and most of the failures are in somewhat pathological cases, but some fail more than others, so it is better to use systems that fail less often in real cases, as well as systems that are easier to understand. Approval is easiest to understand and implement. Condorcet is also fairly easy to understand (except in ties.) Weighted systems are probably too complex for too many voters.

It is however worth noting that some of the “failures” are definitional. For example, the Condorcet Criterion (that the winner beats everybody else in a head to head race) is not met by many of the non-Condorcet systems. Some systems will choose a winner who is everybody’s 2nd choice and others won’t, and it’s subjective if this is a bug or a feature. (IRV does not choose a candidate who is everybody’s 2nd choice but few people’s first choice, while it does choose that candidate if they are not last in the first round.) Some criteria, like monotonicity make sense to everybody, and IRV fails this. Supporters of IRV just feel it has other virtues to make up for the non-monotonicity. However, IRV is inferior to Condorcet in all criteria. See Voting system.

reference?

Platypus — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 18:14:18 -0700

> The most widely known preferential ballot is Single Transferable Vote and its cousin the instant-runoff.
> Many election theorists, however view these as the worst possible system.

Can you give me a reference for this? You correctly point out that STV is pretty complicated and can confuse voters; does it have worse problems than that? Several countries are using it; if there are serious problems it seems like someone should have run into an example by now.

Wikipedia notes that strange things can happen if a party fields too many or too few candidates, but (particularly in the case of presidential elections!) this doesn't seem like a serious bug.

I'm also long a fan of

Ping — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 12:46:54 -0700

I'm also long a fan of approval, as you know.

Condorcet methods have the slight advantage that if you rank two candidates the same, it's no problem.