Hacker News Reader

This seems really vulnerable to vote buying, unless the person receiving the vote delegation isn't informed that they're voting for two. Otherwise, your boss will say "delegate me your vote, or else". If he doesn't straight-up fire you for refusing[1], he can write bad performance reviews for two straight quarters and then dump you. Or imagine if a church threw caution into the wind (sacrificing their tax-exempt status) and said "delegate your vote to your preacher/pastor/etc., or you're going to Hell". Unless you can lie about delegating the vote, then you may as well not have it.

In the above cases under the present system, I can just say "sure boss, I'll vote for Obama/Romney/whoever" and then walk into the booth and vote for whomever I like.

[1] - This is arguably not illegal in some "right to work" states in the US.

Hi Zach, yes, that's true. I definitely think it's a good feature to let people know their voting power though. It might be solvable by only letting them know in segments: 1-5, 6-10, and so on, or something like that.

This sounds like the Liquid Democracy system, which the Pirate Party of Germany uses to decide on party-internal policy questions. (Other organizations may have had it before them, but they're the first I heard it of)

The major point of dispute there is that this system cannot be simultaneously anonymous (nobody knows whether I voted for or against nuclear weapons for public schools) and independently verifiable (anyone can check that everybody's delegations have been computed correctly).

Thanks limmeau, indeed it does sound exactly like Liquid Democracy. I have thought about the problem you raise and it is indeed a drawback.

Right, and liquid democracy is really a specific application of proxy voting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_voting

A startup working with this idea: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/social-media/8394883/J...

One interesting point about this concept is that one of the limiting factors was likely that it was too complex to keep track of who had whose vote. Traditionally, with paper and bureaucracy, it would have been a near impossible task to calculate that on the day of the vote, Carol has been delegated Bob's vote and Alice's and that neither have rescinded such delegation prior to the vote. The paper trail made it infeasible.

However, now that we have computers to do most of the figuring, things can happen in near real-time thereby removing this constraint and making this (more) possible. Certainly there are many other side issues (authentication of Alice delegating her vote to Bob, did she do so under duress?, etc.)

Very interesting idea though and, as you said, probably an old idea, but one that may have been scrapped due to these technical issues. Now that we can overcome them, seems worth revisiting.

Thank you vaporstun, that's exactly what I think as well. Delegating of votes is not a new idea, it's used in lots of societies - I got the idea from my housing cooperative. But it quickly gets out of hand after just one level of delegation, and if people are allowed to delegate their vote and then vote, well such a system has to be electronic.

As I said, I'm sure there are ways for ambitious politicians to game the system so please try!

I don't think your categories work very well (even absent politicking, is a bill to raise teachers' salaries an educational, financial or social bill?). The rest of your scheme is complicated but seems to work as designed.

That said, a big advantage of the currently popular party-based systems is that it ensures at least a minimum of coherent policy-making - a party that votes for both more spending and tax cuts can at least be called on it. I didn't follow it closely, but I've seen suggestions that California's experiments with direct democracy have at least partly caused financial troubles.

Thanks Joachim! The categories are meant as examples only, but I think that when applied to a nation state the various departments might be a good start.

It might seem complicated but I don't think it is, rather I think I am bad at explaining it. Then again, in the words of Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér, "that which is dimly said is dimly thought", so I will try to clear it up!

The main problem, I think, is how to count the votes, i.e. when Alice has delegated her vote to Bob, and Bob votes, and then Alice votes, I think there might be race conditions where people could game the system. So, it might be that you would have to have "voting windows", where people who carry the most voting power has to vote first, for instance.

Don't worry: I understood you just fine.

I'm still not convinced of your category system: if lots of people give their education vote to EducationFirst and their finance vote to NoMoreTaxes, the classification of the "increase teachers' salaries" bill becomes very important. I'm not aware of any current system to classify it under either department; you could let people elect category-sorting representatives, but that is an entirely new set of problems (the NoMoreTaxes representative may plausibly argue that every bill spending money should be in the finance department, for instance - not coincidentally a department where his/her party has lots of power.)

I don't think there's any kind of race condition: Alice just sends the voting office a note "if I don't explicitly vote, I vote the same as Bob" and the voting office can just check whether or not she did when counting the votes (there is no need for a live tally, right?)

I don't know where you get the idea that formations such as EducationFirst or NoMoreTaxes would appear in this system. I think it's more likely that we will see basically the same formations as today; liberals, conservatives, democrats, green and so on.

That said, it's an important feature of the proposed system that it encourages, or even demands, a higher level of engagement with the issues than under today's system. Voters should vote directly in issues that concern them deeply. What the system fixes is rather a problem with direct democracy, where people vote the "wrong" way, or don't vote at all, in issues they don't understand or that don't concern them.

This is done by letting people delegate their voting power to someone they trust - it might be their neighbor, their mother, a colleague or a professional politician. But to mitigate the problem with concentrating power to few, that delegated vote is not to be counted on; someone can change or even retract the vote at any time.

Calling it race condition was probably wrong, what I mean is situations like this:

· Bob delegates his vote to Alice

· Alice votes No

· Bob sees that his vote is currently on No, and he likes that to he doesn't feel the need to change his vote

· In the last minute before the voting closes, Alice changes her vote to Yes

· Alice has gamed Bob, because if Bob had known Alice would vote Yes, he would not have delegated his vote to Alice in this motion.

Of course, the above scenario might not play out simply because it hurts Alice - Bob would surely never delegate his vote to her again. But I think it's a real problem nonetheless.

NoMoreTaxes was inspired by the American Tea Party, and EducationFirst was inspired by the Dutch D66.

Re: race condition: I just assumed that votes would be secret. Are you sure you want to jettison that feature?

I think every voter needs to know where their vote lies, when it's delegated. Someone will only know where the vote of the person they delegated their vote to, currently lies. That is, Bob has delegated to Alice, Alice might have delegated to somebody and so on. Bob sees that his vote is on Yes, and so knows that Alice's vote is on Yes. Alice knows whether she voted for Yes or if she has delegated her vote.

See limmeau's comment here, it turns out that the system exists and is called Liquid Democracy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2485452

As I posted, secret / anonymous votes are essential as long as there is economic or other inequalities within the voting population. Bribery and enforcement are serious problems. For instance, it is well documented, that you can buy the national "mail votes" of Italiens living in Germany for as little as 40 Euros! One might argue, that for the voting system within a party, secrecy is not as important. However, many, many members of the Pirate Party in Germany broke up with the party, exactly because of this missing feature, when Liquid Democracy was introduced.

This isn't a different voting system; it's only a special case of the current system. Keep in mind, in your system it's got to be possible to NOT delegate your vote; it has to be possible for everyone to just vote on their own without delegation. In that case, what happens? You haven't really specified the voting system, just an additional feature that a voting system might take on.

That's true - if everyone votes on their own, it's direct democracy.

I was thinking about an essentially identical system to yours some years ago and I came up with an amendment to prevent direct democracy (if desired): nobody can vote for themselves unless they have at least X votes; if not then they must delegate.

Similarly you could try to assemble everyone who has at least X votes into a parliament (if you pick X appropriately), though I'm worried that the cutoff for getting into parliament might cause a chain of tactical redelegations which never stabilizes.

Thanks for these insights, both are interesting. I've thought about the same thing with the parliament, but I fear there are problems with that. If it turns out that there is a fairly stable selection at the top it might work and should make the voting more efficient.