On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 2:34 AM, Michael Rouse <[email protected]> wrote: > It seemed like an interesting idea, but the drawbacks mentioned included the > possibility of non-payment and the problem of secrecy.
The main problem is actually that the chances of you actually having to pay is extremely low. > Bingo, campaign > contributions, where donations (at least those above a certain amount) have > a name attached to them. I think that they should be allowed to be secret. Effectively, we are saying that people can only support their favourite candidate if they are willing to do it in public. That is unfair to non-mainstream viewpoints. It could be accomplished by having a few organisation in a row. I pay money into organisation A and they confirm that I haven't gone over my donation limit. I then tell them to send the money to account X with organisation B. I then login to B and X is my account number, and I tell them to forward the money onto the candidate I support. You can have more levels to make it more secure, but as long as one or other of the organisations keeps the data safe, nobody can know who I donated to. It also means that people cannot buy politicians because they won't know where the money came from. (Slightly off-topic :p). > Now, I don't know if this breaks all of the other good features of GCTT, It does. There is an incentive to under-donate and hope that everyone else still supports your favourite. > Set aside a portion of each donation in an > account, and after the election either return the money to the original > donor, or (in the case where the GCTT criterion is met) giving the "made a > difference" amount to whoever we decide the recipient to be. For example, if > Candidate A wins by 1% over Candidate B, and someone gave 2% of the total > campaign contributions to the winning candidate, he or she would lose half > (or as close to that as the set-aside was) to the lucky person or government > agency. This is the 'pay in advance' idea. It is a possible solution, but it also has problems. The admin would be massive and would almost certainly not be needed. > Let's assume that half of the money given to each candidate can be spent by > that candidate for advertising and related campaign expenses, and half is > saved in a "payoff" account. After the election, the payoff account of the > winner is split among all the losing donors in proportion to how much they > gave to the candidate they supported. If I had a similar idea where you just bet directly and the candidate that is most likely to win according to the market is then declared the winner. This has the added advantage that it doesn't require much central operations. The "Central Stock Exchange" would only have to deal with major players. When betting you bet against your favourite candidate. In effect, if he wins, you are happy and if he loses, at least you win your bet. The post is below, Warren called it a "Bookie kingdom". http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RangeVoting/message/1536 ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
