Juho Laatu wrote:
--- On Mon, 12/1/09, Michael Allan <[email protected]> wrote:
Juho Laatu wrote:
... The topmost thoughts in my mind when thinking
about this
approach is that 1) the principles are good and 2)
making the votes
public limits the usability of the method.
Traditionally secret
votes have been a building block of democracies.
Public votes work
somewhere but not everywhere.
(1). Re good principles. I've heard it suggested that
modern
democracy is the political form that is best suited to
capitalism.^[1][2] If we change it to something with a
firmer base in
principles - a more substansive democracy - will it
continue to be
friendly to business entrepreneurs? If not, what will
happen? Has
anyone explored that scenario? (Any references?)
I can imagine that in some cases also
dictatorship can be the best option for
capitalism (in the sense of "capital
owners"). Democracy is however probably
more stable in the long run and
therefore better basis for a working
market economy.
Good principles may help market economy
by allowing the citizens to see the
state as "we", and thereby increasing
overall trust in the system, and
thereby enabling smoother (hassle
free) operation of the markets.
There would have to be some degree of democracy so the dictatorship
doesn't get lost in things that benefit only himself (and thus risk a
revolt), but if you go by the strict definition of capitalism, there can
also be too much democracy, I think. Since the labor market must remain
a market, people can't be given enough influence that they form
oligopolies of labor (that is, national unions). The other side of that
coin, though, is that nor should producers be given enough influence
that they can form oligopolies or monopolies either. In any case,
dictators usually limit organization of labor before they limit
organization of capital.
(2). Re public/private voting. Maybe there are two
possibilities:
i) Initial participation by a small group of public
"pioneers"
gradually changes attitudes. Open voting comes to be
accepted as
a natural form of expression in the public sphere.
Participation
levels grow. (There remains a core who will
not/cannot vote
openly. We can get empirical data on this.)
I'm afraid there will be also a third
category, people that do vote but that
do not dare to vote as they feel.
People may also vote since not voting
could be interpreted as not supporting
the mainstream opinions or as
possibility of having some unwanted
opinions.
Examples of group pressure are working
places where "all others" are believed
to vote certain way. Also in homes it
might be problematic for some members
to have radically different opinions.
The general problem is that if there's a way of finding out what a
certain person voted, or whether a certain person voted in a particular
way, one can apply pressure to get that person to vote a desired way (to
the one applying the pressure). That can be simple coercion, be it
formal (in "democratic" countries that aren't fully democratic yet),
semi-formal (mob bosses, or "vote this way or you're fired"), or
informal (social pressure). The coercion is "do it my way or something
bad happens" - it can also easily be changed into "do it my way and
something good happens", as with vote buying.
Any sort of voter-reconfigurable proxy democracy has the kind of
feedback that enables coercion or vote-buying. In order to verify that a
certain voter "votes" a certain way, the candidate or party in question
can tell the voter to connect to an allied proxy. The proxy can then
determine whether or not the voter actually connected.
Now, there may seem to be a way around this by having the proxy be
publicly available, so that voters that "subscribe to" a certain proxy
just duplicate the proxy's suggestions when voting. Producing the
required feedback becomes more difficult in that case, but it can still
be done. For instance, if the conspirators assume law X has
near-majority support, they can buy the votes of enough to get a
majority, and then pay them if X does indeed pass; or they can try to
corrupt a proxy instead, since the proxies' positions are publicly
availably.
The problem reaches further. I think we can generalize that it's not
only proxy democracies that has this problem. The problem itself is that
of conflicting goals: in order that the public knows what their
representatives are doing, the representatives' votes should be public.
But the greater the proportion of the people become representatives, the
more votes will be public, and so coercion and vote-buying becomes easier.
By that, one would assume that it'd be a problem in ordinary
representative democracies as well, because the representatives' votes
are known and thus one could use feedback there. I think the difference
is that representatives stay in their position for some time, so any use
of such tricks would also become known and would hurt the representative
in the end. I guess it's also related to that there are few
representatives compared to the people, so each can be checked more
thoroughly.
Ultimately, what we want is for the "representatives" to be effectively
aligned with the wishes of the people, while not being disproportionally
more aligned with the wishes of those who have more power. How to do
that isn't obvious, since the mechanisms don't know about power.
ii) A private voting facility (secret ballot) is grafted
onto the
public medium. Anyone who is content to participate
merely as a
voter (not as a delegate, or legislative drafter,
etc.) may vote
without disclosure. So we could extend participation
to those
who will not/cannot vote openly. Results verification
(and maybe
voter authentication) would be complicated by this,
but the
overall function of the medium should be unaffected.
There are some (although smaller)
problems also in this case. If someone
casts a secret ballot that may be
interpreted as having something to
hide. This may lead to pressure to
cast a public vote (and that could be
less sincere than the secret one). One
approach would be to keep all the "low
level" votes secret and publish only
the "representative level" votes (it
is however not easy to separate these
two categories).
Perhaps each voter could vote twice - once in public and once in secret.
The secret vote either says "defer to public", or something separate, in
which case the secret vote overrules the public. But if so, what's the
point of the public vote in the first place? I suppose it could be used
to measure the degree of pressure people feel exist in the society - if
all vote "defer to public" on their secret ballots, there's none at all,
and if all vote something else on their secret ballots, there's quite a
bit of it and many feel like they have something to hide. The only
information given to the public from the secret ballots would be the
number of "defer to public" versus (different opinion) ballots, and
that's not enough to set up feedback with.
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