--- On Tue, 13/1/09, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km-el...@broadpark.no> wrote:
> 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. Are you saying that it is not possible to build a proxy system that uses secret votes? Most election methods have traps that may reveal the opinions of individual voters. A voter-reconfigurable proxy system could fight these problems e.g. by collecting atomic changes to sufficiently large groups of changes to hide changes in the individual preferences. > 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. This would be another way to group the individual changes (delayed until the next vote). I assume that you meant that every voter would vote, possibly copying the opinion from a proxy. In this model the proxy would not know how strong she is (unless that info would be collected 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; How about voters that are certainly not going to change their opinion but that are happy to take part in the campaign in the hope of being paid in case the other camp wins? Aren't these problems quite similar also in some more traditional election methods? > or they can try to corrupt a proxy instead, since the > proxies' positions are publicly availably. Today the opinions of some high level representatives, e.g. MPs can be bought, but this problem is probably quite well in control. In proxy democracy where the number of proxies is high there would be a bigger risk of some of them selling votes. Of course those proxies could lose support when their voters notice that their opinions tend to be something else than what the voters assumed. It is also possible that the opinions of the proxies are not known beforehand. If there are many of them and they change often then their opinions can not be easily followed. If the proxies may change (or sell) their opinion just before the election there is maybe no point anyway in officially maintaining the opinions of the candidates (so information on their opinions would be available in the traditional way, for private/voluntary/ campaigning reasons only or could be guessed based on party affiliations). > > 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. Yes. The votes need not be public beforehand though. (In a some forms of proxy democracy voters may also be able to vote directly at any time if they want to be sure what their vote will be.) > > 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. Yes. Modern technology could also allow the voters to follow the opinions of all the numerous proxies / final voters (or at least those that are happy to publish their voting behaviour (there could be also low level proxies that consider themselves private people and want to keep their vote secret)). > > 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. I note that flexible proxy systems are in some respects also safer than current systems with fixed representatives since those changing proxies are harder to contact and they are not really part of the "fixed club of leaders" that may well have lots of all kind of bindings and dependences among them. > 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. We can say that today the default democratic system keeps the votes of the individual voters secret and keeps the votes of the representatives public. A proxy system can be seen to mix the border line between these two groups. There is usually a requirement that the voter opinions *must* be kept secret, and the system makes its best not to allow voters to reveal how they voted even if they want to (e.g. vote rejected if it contains additional markings, voting only in controlled locations and alone in the booth). In order to follow this tradition the lowest level(s) could be kept strictly secret as before. There is maybe no as strict requirement at the high end to keep the votes public. This is because high level proxies that want to keep their vote secret could simply not be trusted by the voters and they would lose support. Mandatory openness could however be a requirement at some level. How to draw the lines between the different levels then? One could use e.g. the number of proxy votes that one holds. Maybe proxies that hold X votes would be allowed to reveal their vote if they so wish. Maybe proxies that hold Y (>X) votes would not be allowed to keep their vote secret. As already noted this latter condition is not as important as the first one, and it could lead also to surprises (vote revealed) when the voter could not anticipate that she would become a representative of so many voters. There may also be some hysteresis that allows some delays so that the proxies have time to adapt to their new role. Note that traditional elections typically have a hysteresis of few years. Proxy systems could be in a way similar but just with considerably faster cycles. - If the proxy system allows only part of the voters to vote directly, this property could be combined with the public/secret vote rules. - There could also be a fixed number of top level representatives with different rules. They could e.g. get (higher) salary, have a seat in the parliament building, have fully public votes etc. - The rules may be different in different questions/elections. There are also some additional related publicity related questions. - Should the voter-proxy relationship be public or privately verifiable in some cases? (or do voters contact their proxies only as "potential but not verified voters") - Shall the number of voters (number of proxy votes) of each proxy be publicly known? At the low levels we should probably not reveal this information for similar reasons as in the case of hiding information on how each person voted. A simple approach is to use the same border lines also in these cases. Juho ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info