Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

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Getting money out of politics would be a great reform (removing lobbyists, campaign finance reform, etc.). It also strikes me as almost impossible to implement. It's like getting the president of a company to switch to system whereby leadership is elected by the workers. It's all risk and low reward for them.

However, another political reform I've toyed with in my head is secret voting in the House and the Senate.

Who cares if Raytheon or Disney "owns" a given representative if those corporate sponsors can't actually be sure that they're getting the votes they paid for. It would also neutralize a lot of the petty party line votes and manipulation. Every issue would ostensibly be decided based on the representatives' actual value system.

Obviously the downside would be that the public at large would be unable to hold their representative accountable for a particular vote, but that seems like the lesser concern compared to the very obvious corporate vote buying and party-line bullshit that happens today.

How is that a lesser concern? How can the public have any influence over their politicians this way? You're saying corporations can choose who gets into power becasuse they finance them, and the public cant even tell what they're voting for to punish them. It seems all around worse.

I'm not sure - I think there's certainly an interesting truth that people act differently when you remove the pressures of public scrutiny.

In particular - they are much less likely to always blindly follow party lines, or corporate wishes, and I think there's value there.

How would you feel about a tweaked system? All votes are recorded, but the voting record is entirely withheld until 3 months before the next election for that seat.

The public is made aware of the voting record when it matters: During the next election. But during the term, they are much less susceptible to corporate donors and lobbyists, or pressure from members of their own party.

>In particular - they are much less likely to always blindly follow party lines, or corporate wishes, and I think there's value there.

I want the politician I vote for to more or less follow the party line on important votes. That's why I voted for her.

Personally - I think that's a shortsighted and naive approach. The "party" is not your friend. Politics are not team sports, and they shouldn't be treated that way.

I also think this leads to a preponderance of "division" politics - where the goal is to find a wedge issue that forces people to pick a side.

It's poor governance all around.

Because the corporations would no longer have a record that a politician actually voted in their favor. They would be donating to campaigns based on rhetoric alone. Therefor the representatives would have no incentive for voting anything but their conscience.

(Obviously disclosing your cryptographic vote receipt to a donor would be forbidden.)

Yes, but this would also apply to the electorate. Voters would have no record around what a politician actually voted for either. Which would seem to be hugely problematic for a system of representative democracy.

That only solves for explicit quid pro quos. It does nothing for the case where corporate sponsors donate to candidates who honestly signal during campaigning that they are the kind of candidate who cares about those sponsors' interests.

I think explicit quid pro quo is far less impactful/prevalent then pro-corporate donors simply looking at the pool of campaigners and putting weight behind candidates that look like they'll vote how the donors want. All that requires is for the donors to be able to at least partially predict future behavior from candidates' current appearance. Secret votes won't change anything on that view.

This is how things actually work.

Also, small dollar donors are driving polarization of US politics, so I'm not sure big donors are really the problem.

With regards to secret voting which scenario do you find more probable?

1) Politicians decide to pull a fast on corrupting interests and start voting in the interests of society instead of focusing primarily on what benefits themselves and special interests.

2) Politicians decide to pull a fast one on society and start defacto selling influence more than ever, given they can simply publicly claim they picked the "right" side of any given bill.

Secret voting is one of the characteristics of sortition[1] governance systems.

Just like on a jury for a court case, people are randomly selected from the population to sit on the legislature. They naturally vote their conscience, and when their term is up, they go back to their normal life. Because compliance with a bribers' instructions is unobservable, bribery is not incented.

The beauty of it is that you don't need to hold anyone "accountable" because there is no election, only random selection. Of course, the devil is in the details. Should prisoners be eligible for selection, or the illiterate?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

I wonder if the Senate could pass a rule that allows them to choose when to take a secret vote. I don't know of anything in the Constitution that prohibits such.

The Senate routinely takes voice votes for which no rollcall division is recorded.

But there is generally little incentive to make votes private because in general legislators want to engage in credible credit-claiming (including about margins of passage and rates of bipartisanship) and parties want to preserve the whip as well.

As I understand it, just as in the Commons here, although it's technically possible to do this for a controversial issue it's basically pointless, and so it's actually used when it's obvious how the vote will go and nobody cares.

You don't need a rollcall to know why you lost if not even enough people were in favour of your proposition to even force the actual count.

The intended reform would be that the rollcall would happen, yet the details (beyond a total Yes/No count) would not be released, presumably even to the voters themselves. This is a problem because it's hard to maintain trust in such a system.

For popular elections the scale is such that election monitors on behalf of interested parties can easily see a bunch of administrators correctly tallying votes and not focus in on the fact that, hey, voter #283204349 picked Jim Smith for Grand Leader -- however when you're talking about exactly 100 senators that's surely much harder to get right.

What? Republicans in Congress will routinely vote against funding legislation and then show up at ribbon cuttings bragging how they fought to get the funding for their district. Just out and out lie about voting for it.

The Constitution provides open ended and vague language allowing both chambers to set their own rules for conducting business, so yeah, both could.

In the US, wouldn't that require a constitutional amendment? I thought Citizens United declared money to be free speech (paraphrasing) .

Yes, Citizens United made it explicit that money is speech and as such can't be hindered. I suspect that because of this ruling, we couldn't just pass a law that prohibits money in politics because the ruling precludes it.

A constitutional amendment would nuke the current limitations, but it's impossible in practice for us to get there. On the other hand, as we've seen as of late, no decision by the Supreme Court is set in stone, so we could, in theory, get Citizens rolled back and then some. That also seems unlikely in the short term.

Congress could fix it if they really wanted to. Make a law that essentially reverses the interpretation of Citizens United, and then take it out of the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.

Not that this is in any way likely to happen, of course.

If such a law were passed (and I agree, it's extremely unlikely), I expect that litigation would be filed as to it's constitutionality. Which would put the ball back in the Supreme Court's court, so to speak.

I'd like to see how that would work. In the past, SCOTUS has acknowledged that the Constitution indeed grants Congress the ability to remove legislation from the court's jurisdiction.

Notably, the Constitution does not grant the court the power of judicial review. The court granted itself that right. So in a battle between precedent and the text of the Constitution, I hope the latter would win.

While this is the common shorthand, what actually happened is pretty different. The ruling is people don't lose their rights when acting as a group. John Smith, Girl Scout troop#2365, and Bank Of America are all equally protected to create and publish a Pro or anti politician message. There isn't really a law that can just say money isn't speech, because that doesn't change anything.

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