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Comment by igitur | Hacker News Reader

I accept that this is a superior voting system to one-person-one-vote. However, for it to succeed, it should not merely be superior, it should also appear superior. The trust the voters put into the system is paramount. And for that to be true, the vast majority of the voters have to understand exactly how it works. Unfortunately, and, yes, I'm a cynic, I don't believe we are close to having a voter base that is capable of understanding, and hence accepting an outcome of such a voting system.

Disclaimer: I'm not a US citizen.

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A possible counter-point may be the existence of the Australian System of voting. Complex, debatably widely misunderstood...yet I'd argue widely accepted.

I realise of course, there is a world of difference between pointing out there is a country with a different/more complex voting system, and migrating a country with culture/history of a given voting system to a more complex alternative...

I love the Australian voting system. It is based on two seeming unrelated, but intertwined rules.

1. Instant runoff voting (preferencing the candidates from 1 to x).

2. Compulsory voting (actually a fine for not visiting the polling station and getting your name crossed off, voting is optional).

The two systems together work to keep everyone involved to a certain extent in the political system, a choice in who you can actually vote for, and historically, stable centralist governments. We have over the last decade or so ended up with less stable governments, but this is more a reflection of a convergence to the centre. The differences between the major parties is now so small that changing does not make much difference in policy.

The one downside is it does make Australia a rather boring place to live :)

Wouldn't it also be a negative?

Basically, you cannot have radical societal or cultural changes because you have to get everyone on board ahead of time.

In a two party system and optional voting, you can have only a small fraction of the population who particularly want some changes actually get those changes. Also, this strategy can be used to destabilize a system away from local maximum (if we are searching for some better state).

Yes if you want radical change it is a negative. Having said this radical change does not have a good history. I think that gradual change that has the support of the majority is the best way to achieve lasting change for the better.

A really good current example is same sex marriage. Australia is one of the last western countries to allow this (should be implemented before the end of the year), but it now has the support of 70% of the population. I would rather see change occur that lasts, than a small minority impose their will on the majority and having to deal with the resulting backlash.

That small minority might feel quite differently. Which is the point of the QV idea, I suppose.

Another way of looking at this is that gay marriage is banned because of the will of 30% of the population

Granted a lot of this is about stickiness of laws but it seems like a huge battle has to be fought for removing systemic inequalities, when that seems to be a major problem in the current system

It's only very recently that reproductive rights have broad majority support. The Civil Rights Act could never be enacted if it had required 70% support.

Once the battle is won then these rights get protected. At a time when systemic inequalities are at the forefront, inhibiting change seems like something that would go against the general political currents.

SSM was banned when it did not have popular support and will now be unbanned when it has popular support. It is a philosophical position, but I think large change should come with popular support and if you don't have popular support for your idea then keep working until you do.

It is worth debating if the civil rights act should have been enacted before it had popular support. Rather than undermining the basis of suppression, imposing something on the majority without their support brings a resulting backlash that can last generations. We only have to look what drove the last 50 years of politics in the US south to see the result. From my comfortable perspective it might have been better to let the south come to its own opinion (with a lot of outside nudging) that things really had to change.

Well these things have popular support, it's just there's a gulf between 50% and 60%, and yet another between 60% and 70%

Its hard because laws that ensure basic civil rights go through the same process as tax law, but one is vitally more important for a better future for all

The move in support for legalising SSM has come rather fast - 5 years ago it was less than 50%.

Yes relying on achieving popular support before acting will always mean that change happens later than it really should, but I think this price is worth paying to ensure long term support.

I do think political systems that reguire building broad popular support are desirable in general because they encourage openness.

What if the status quo keeps moving in a direction that slowly makes things worse for a certain group of people?

You basically cannot get out of it unless you can convince most people that it's a good idea. With a 2-party system you can get someone who represents those people to rule for a while and maybe correct the course.

Also, with optional voting, we basically delegate decisions to those who really care about something. Having lived in a country with mandatory voting, I saw a few elections where people's views and the results of some elections were easily manipulated by false news close to the election day. People who are ambivalent I think are more likely to change their decision over such things.

> The one downside is it does make Australia a rather boring place to live :)

I don't know about boring, from my perspective it's more comical. Who's turn is it to be Prime Minister this week? and can she stack it in high heels on the grass again. We've had the same PM for nearly a year, must be time for another spill.

I would trade instability in PM's for stability in policy any day.

Your post did make me LOL remembering Julia trying to walk on grass in high heels and then faceplanting.

> The one downside is it does make Australia a rather boring place to live :)

That's not a bug, it's a feature. There's a reason that "may you live in interesting times" is considered a curse.

How is this a superior voting system? It just seems to be a way for those with more money to have more influence in the voting process. We've got enough problems with money in politics as it is, we don't need any more of them.

It's quadratic, do some quick math on how expensive it is to buy a victory.

It's actually more cost effective to buy people's votes the usual way.

It's not necessary for a single wealthy individual to be able to buy a victory by themselves for the results to be skewed towards the will of the wealthy.

If 1000 votes cost £1 million, and 100 wealthy individuals all decide to spend that much in an election, that's 100,000 votes when these individuals would only usually have 100 votes. That's going to have an impact, especially on local elections.

As for it being more cost effective to buy votes the usual way, the "usual" way relies on voter fraud and massive advertising campaigns, one of which is illegal, and the other is very expensive and the voting decisions are not guaranteed. On the other hand, quadratic voting would be legal and guaranteed.

By the usual way, I was referring to large advertising campaigns that I'm sure yield more votes per dollar than a quadratic voting system.

One of the things you're missing is that people who can afford to buy that many votes for a single issue are very rare and could easily be out voted by a small organized group that buys multiple votes, but with a lower power multiple.

Assuming all votes cost $1, then 1,000 votes costs 1mil. That could easily be nullified by 100 voters buying 10 votes.

Consider also that the money would be rebated equally. So you might spend $100 and get back $250 and win the vote.

> "Assuming all votes cost $1, then 1,000 votes costs 1mil. That could easily be nullified by 100 voters buying 10 votes."

Do you not see the problem with that? With the situation you describe, it takes the coordination of 100 individuals to nullify the actions of 1 wealthy voter. Do you not see how much easier it is for the wealthy voter?

If merely 100 less-wealthy voters out of the whole population couldn't coordinate to buy a few extra votes—and they wouldn't even have to explicitly communicate, it would just take 100 people who individually hear about the issue and decide to vote more—then how important can the issue really have been to them?

I believe this is what is meant by "the collective decision rapidly approximates efficiency as the number of voters increases".

That's missing the point I was making. I'm attempting to highlight the difference in effort that is required. Do you accept that the rich voter makes less effort in the hypothetical 1 vs. 100 voter situation?

I'm not sure that is correct. Assume that you have only 101 people in the voting pool. The one person who is wealthy pays $1,000 for 100 votes. To match that voting power, you'll only need a handful of the other hundred to pay $4 for more votes. What I think you are overlooking the fact the wealthy person's $1,000 is going to get distributed to everyone which gives them more voting power. Everyone gets at least $10 at the end of the vote. If a few people are willing to invest the $10 back into their vote, they can easily overcome the rich persons' vote even though a vote was purchased for each person in the system.

How balanced this is, I'm not sure. Why use the square of the number of votes rather than the cube? But it isn't immediately clear that this gives a few rich people significantly more voting power in a situation where a larger number of poor people feel strongly about an issue.

> "I'm not sure that is correct. Assume that you have only 101 people in the voting pool. The one person who is wealthy pays $1,000 for 100 votes. To match that voting power, you'll only need a handful of the other hundred to pay $4 for more votes. What I think you are overlooking the fact the wealthy person's $1,000 is going to get distributed to everyone which gives them more voting power. Everyone gets at least $10 at the end of the vote. If a few people are willing to invest the $10 back into their vote, they can easily overcome the rich persons' vote even though a vote was purchased for each person in the system."

Two points:

1. You've chosen a value that's too small for the wealthy voter. $1000 is the cost of eating out at an expensive restaurant (e.g. https://financesonline.com/10-most-expensive-meals-from-mich... ), not the amount someone with money will spend to gain influence in an election.

2. There are cheaper ways to multiply the vote. Let's assume quadratic voting was in place in the 2016 US Presidential Election, and you're a wealthy person who wants to see the Democrats win. You have $1,000,000 you're willing to spend. What's the cheapest way to maximise your influence? Reach out to other Democratic voters to give them money to multiply their votes. On your own, the $1,000,000 may only net 1000 votes, but spreading the $1,000,000 around to people who were going to vote Democrat anyway could see that number skyrocket. Let's say you give $100 to 10,000 voters, now you're looking at 100,000 votes.

Even if those without the most money win, quadratic voting stacks the odds against them.

> You've chosen a value that's too small for the wealthy voter.

Yes to make it simple to intuitively see how rich people paying more gives more voting power to everyone else IF they choose to spend it that way. If you want to think about US presidential elections, you'd need to increase the total number of people by 3,000,000. Based on my math, this would just further amplify the effect I was trying to illustrate with my numbers.

> Even if those without the most money win, quadratic voting stacks the odds against them.

As I understand the math, it doesn't necessarily do this. The goal was a voting system that takes into consideration not just how many people want a particular outcome, but how badly they want a particular outcome. Today the way that is done is by donating money to be spent on advertising to sway votes or get people to go to the polls. Quadradic voting is designed to be more fair than the current way of allowing people to magnify the strength of their preferences for a particular outcome.

My initial reaction was the same as yours. After looking at how the math actually plays out and considered how money is currently spent on influencing votes I think it is probably a lot fairer than it looks at first for the goals it is trying to achieve. (Still could be a really bad idea for other reasons.)

> "Yes to make it simple to intuitively see how rich people paying more gives more voting power to everyone else IF they choose to spend it that way. If you want to think about US presidential elections, you'd need to increase the total number of people by 3,000,000. Based on my math, this would just further amplify the effect I was trying to illustrate with my numbers."

I respect that you had good intentions, but I think the approach was flawed.

In your example, $1000 vs. $400 ($4 * 100), what does it take for the rich person to gain the lead again? They can either spend more or split the money. For example, if they split the $1000 with a family member who was voting for the same party/candidate, that's all it would take to gain the lead.

Also, consider the difference in fundraising potential between the rich and the poor. For example, in the 2016 US Presidential Election, Bernie Sanders ran what I believe to be the most successful citizen-led fundraising campaign in US political history, raising approximately $228 million:

https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate?id=N00000528

In contrast, in the same election, just the top 23 super PAC donors alone spent a total of $468 million:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/superpac-do...

So the most successful crowdfunded campaign in history was outspent by just 23 people.

I don't know if you were a Bernie supporter or not, but I hope you'd agree that he was a candidate that people were strongly behind. However, due to the income inequality in the US, the difference in spending power is massive. It's not a matter of the general public wanting something badly enough, $228 million is a clear message that the want was there.

The only caveat with all this is that not all the super PAC money would've been spent for a single party. However, the majority would've been spent supporting corporate-friendly candidates.

Spending a million dollars represents a lot of effort. Even if you're rich.

Represents a lot of effort in what way? Certainly not in terms of time to spend or earn it, both of which can be achieved in less than a day. Also consider that wealthy individuals are already spending a lot of money in elections. For example...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/super-pac-donors-2016_us...

"An analysis of 2016 super PAC filings shows that the 257 donors giving $500,000 or more have contributed a total $709 million."

The point is that Americans (me included) are going to put very little trust in a system which allows you to literally buy votes. Everyone should have the same amount of votes no matter the wealth and I don't see myself compromising on that issue.

The system where you buy votes is the current system, mind.

Somewhat true for elections of political representatives, but even more true for things like Senate Committees - these require party membership fees that get paid, which come via donations from lobbyists.

Not party political, both sides do it: http://www.definingthemachine.com/party_dues.html

But do you feel any better about the idea of being compensated for not getting your preference?

Not really. It seems sort of like selling some of my political power to the wealthy.

Your post is actually extremely important and spells out one of the primary weaknesses of such a system. As long as the budget obtained for the vote does not have an opportunity cost with the rest of a person's wealth/budget (and I can't think of any practical way to make that happen in reality), what the voting system will in effect create is increased voting power by the wealthy, as they suffer comparatively less marginal loss from expending their entire voting budget goals towards their agenda, irrespective of their strength of belief: the downside comes from their lack of any real real-world budgetary pain.

Unless one can come up with a way to inflict the same budgetary pain on each individual for each vote-expenditure, I don't really see how you would argue for its implementation/superiority in practice (against the other forms of voting out there I mean, not necessarily contrasted just against first past the post...).

Though this all depends on what one means by "optimal voting" or "efficient", since I don't believe there can be an objective definition of such.

As I understood it, "buy" does not have to be money. It could be hashing ability as in Bitcoin or maybe everyone gets X voting credits every few years which they "buy" votes in local and national elections.

I could be wrong, but I prefer the possibilities of such a system not directly involving money. The distribution of wealth is so imbalanced that I cannot see buying votes to have any kind of positive impact.

Yes. Perhaps the voting currency should be hours, not dollars. Make the first vote free. But N-1 more votes costs you N^2-1 hours from your "registered community service" account maintained by the government. No overdrafts allowed: the hours must be credited before they can be debited.

Otoh, if money already buys politics today, this system could be not worse than what we have now.

It's not, anybody can write a bullshit paper today. There is a reason this hard won democracy exist and why we dealt away with lesser systems where less people are in power.

The author of the papern should go visit North Korea or Saudin Arabia and perhaps live there if he thinks the majority is tyranising him with their voting rights.

Wait, this argument makes no sense. It wasn't until 1950 that we had game theory to analyze voting systems directly, and it wasn't really until much later that people looked at more efficient systems. It's not hard to show that the 1-1 voting scheme is pretty useless in that its Nash equilibrium isn't guaranteed to be reflective of the population's general desires.

So, fine, while the current form of democracy may have somewhat worked until now, that definitely does not imply that we reached an optimal voting system. If we can make the world a little bit better, why not?

(This paper looks interesting, but, of course the devil is in the details of implementation; would I personally want this system? No idea.)

Well, why wouldn't it make sense?

People were governed and had different levels of say through the history.

Perhaps the most extreme example would be the French Revolution where the aristocracy had more votes per person than the common peasant, and we know whose heads rolled afterwards.

The problem isn't game theory. The problem is that power attracts certain personalities that are not altruistic. The current iteration of having say in common decisions is explicitly trying to curb the maniacs from reaching/staying in power.

> If we can make the world a little bit better, why not?

Sure. But right now, will Trump sing Kumbaya, or is USA regretting the decision? If it was 40-40, imagine him buying 20% of the votes.

"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…" - Churchill

One-person-one-vote is a terrible system, with the only advantage of it being simple and easy to understand, which was important when votes could be counted only by hand.

CGP Grey has made an excellent and well known video series explaining this, so I don't think I need to debate it much further here.

CGP Grey Voting Series: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLej2SlXPEd37YwwEY7mm0W...

You didn't answer the question, you just said the current voting system is bad.

Isn't it a bit pedantic to want me to repeat arguments from the original post?

OK, here you go: "Weyl and Lalley prove that the collective decision rapidly approximates efficiency as the number of voters increases. By contrast, no extant voting procedure is efficient."

Do any of those CGP Grey videos actually address one-person-one-vote? Looking at the titles of the videos they seem to be mostly critiques of how votes are grouped rather than how much voting power a single individual has. For example, criticising the electoral college system in the US has nothing to do with one-person-one-vote, it's a criticism of how the winner is decided.

> I don't believe we are close to having a voter base that is capable of understanding, and hence accepting an outcome of such a voting system.

Completely on point. Especially true of the American public.

Getting people to migrate to this scheme is a huge problem. Today in America, voting is a right. However, to many, it appears to be a financially free activity as well. Or some may tie it in with "you get to vote if you pay taxes". Regardless, this "pay into a fund in order to vote" won't really go well -- we already pay a fund (taxes), and it's distribution is mishandled / non-optimally allocated / gamed by people in the system.

But the poor will (most likely) receive money in this scheme. This can be an incentive for them.

But that's where it all falls down - the poor in america are most likely not to understand why they need to "pay more" to vote when it's already "free"!

Well very few understand the the current US system so complexity is hardly an argument.

Would you trust a voting system you don't understand? More people think they understand the current system then a new more complex one.

Thats a different discussion. The claim was the complexity alone was the issue which its clearly not. A much bigger issue is the change itself. Even if we did a simpler system that everybody understood it would be hard to convince people to switch to it.

It doesn't matter how many people understand it, but how many people think they understand it - from what I've seen, a lot of people think they understand the US system (at least they did, until Trump won with a minority of votes :P )

I don't think you have anything that backs up whether most people think they understand the US system. And even if they did they would agree it was complex (which was the claim I was responding to)

It's the change that make it hard to implement and it's not just in politics but in most things humans are involved with.

We accept what is as the norm because we grew up with it.

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