Michael Allan wrote:
Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
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.
If coercion is a problem in this case, then it is strictly a social
problem. If the private sphere of individuals, families, employers,
and so forth, is restricting the public communications of individuals
wrongly, in defiance of the norms, then society itself has a problem
in the relations between its private and public spheres.
It is not a problem for a voting medium that functions exclusively in
the public sphere. The purpose of the medium is to accurately mirror
public opinion, and so it must also mirror the distortions, including
those caused by private coercion. If people cannot *speak* their
minds freely, they ought not to *vote* them either. This connection
between speech and voting is especially crucial to a voting system
that is based on communicative assent, as I propose here. It is
essential that the voters, delegates and candidates all be engaged in
mutual discussion. If the votes were not public, then the discussion
would die out, and voter behaviour would cease to be informed by
communicative reason.
You may put it that way, but I think that goes the other direction as
well: if it is true that distortions (by carrot or by stick, e.g
vote-buying or coercion) degrade the public sphere so that one have to
use a secret ballot in ordinary elections, then the distortions will
remain when using a method that relies on public sphere information
(that is, what you call communicative assent), yet the means of masking
that distortion no longer applies, because it's no longer a private
matter of voting, but a public one of discussion.
Or to phrase it in another way: the distortions of action can be called
corruption, since this is really what happens when you're letting the
distortions govern how you act when you're supposed to be acting either
in accordance to your own opinion, or as an agent of someone else. For
obvious reasons, we don't want corruption, and we would seek to minimize
it, but it's still a problem.
The secret ballot came into use to protect voters from the distortion.
Presumably the distortion was real and sufficiently severe to need such
measures. If we remove the protection, the distortion will again be
uncovered. It may be a problem with society, or with the method, but
it'll be there, whatever the cause.
None of the above applies to traditional voting mechanisms, of the
sort normally discussed here in election-methods. Those mechanisms
are not designed for the public sphere. They are designed for the
private sphere, opening a private communication channel from
individuals to the government. Traditionally, the only communications
that become public are those of the reverse channel, in which the
voters are informed via the mass media, as a passive audience.
Any sort of voter-reconfigurable proxy democracy has the kind of feedback
that enables coercion or vote-buying. ...
Re vote buying: Although the vote is public and compliance may easily
be verified by the buyer, there is no guarantee of *continued*
compliance. The voter may take the money from one side, then shift
her vote and take it from the other. Vote buying is likely to be a
poor investment.
The vote-buying effort would, of course, be a this-for-that endeavor. I
provide money, you provide the vote - I "buy" your vote. After you've
voted, I got what I bought, and I may buy another vote later.
Alternately, it can be continual: for as long as you, as a proxy, mirror
me, I'll pay you. Stop doing it and I stop paying.
In both cases, the vote is the commodity.
... 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 ...
Such a deferred and contingent payment will be unattractive to someone
who is selling her vote for a few dollars. She probably wants the
money right away. If her payment is contingent on subsequent
administrative action by the government - what the buyer really cares
about - then the delay is apt to be too long. In a legislative
context, for example, the assembly must schedule a separate, in-house
vote. The vote buyer must then engineer a massive shift in public
votes, just prior to the in-house vote. But caveat emptor, because of
the:
i) cost of buying votes in vast numbers;
ii) risk of discovery in such a large operation;
iii) likelihood of the assembly ignoring the vote shift, knowing it
to be a momentary artifact.
Crucial to (iii), public vote shifting for/against the proposed bill
will continue non-stop, even after the assembly accepts or rejects it.
So the assembly members will have ample opportunity to learn from the
public's past voting behaviour, and avoid mis-interpreting it. They
will have ample incentive too, because their seats will be the issue
of public voting in separate polls.
I thought the system would have a deferred direct democracy component,
as others have talked about in previous descriptions of proxy democracy:
that each voter has a vote but can assign it to a proxy. If that's the
case, then though each decision has less value, there are more of them
from which to gather feedback.
I'll grant the part about assembly voting, though I'll note that if an
elected assembly votes, then the composition of that assembly can be
done by using ordinary secret voting, in which case there is no problem.
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