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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of expendable democratic power. It works something like this:

Each voter gets say (for example) 1,000 votes, which they allocate to whichever parties they want at election time.

The number of votes a party gets become its “currency”.

Any political party can put forward legislation to become law. They back their legislation with some number of their votes/currency.

Other parties can defeat legislation by spending a greater number of their votes to stop it.

When a party has spent all its votes/currency, it must wait till the next election to get more.

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Games are tricky things to balance.

When distribution is equal or in your favor, the obvious gambit here is to propose abhorrent legislation to the opposition. They will be forced to spend more votes to stop it. Leaving you with enough votes to strong arm any legislation you want.

Any minority of power no matter the margin would be effectively silenced.

Maybe it’s different with multiple parties in play but if we could stabilize a more than two party system then that changes the calculus of the status quo too.

I found the contract bridge player.

It might sound good on paper but I think in practice you would have various ways of exploiting the system or the system breaks down (what if say the left party has spent all its points fighting against tax cuts so now it doesn't have enough points to increase welfare and Healthcare programs or vice versa with the right party).

That’s not a disadvantage, that’s a feature. That the way it’s meant to work.

It’s precisely intended that if a party wants to spend all its its capital opposing, then it does that at the cost of being able to advance its own policies.

If it costs me two votes to oppose your legislation, but only one vote to introduce superseding legislation (which could supersede multiple of your legislative items), this seems like a much less stable system than today.

Chaos in law-making is probably worse than the disaster of two-party first-past-the-post.

You have invented direct democracy (except that we don’t need parties as middlemen, the votes can be spent directly on legislations — the role of parties is limited to helping drafting legislations and recommending how to vote — and these recommendations can be ignored, of course).

Switzerland works like this. It is a good system.

Not quite. It would be direct democracy if the “currency” was zeroed/refreshed for every ballot issue. As stated the inter-issue strategy makes this a different game.

As proposed, that seems sure to result in a series of unattractive-to-one-side legislation backed by 1 vote requiring the other side to use 2 votes to stop.

You could 2:1 amplify the power of your votes by creating a bullshit generator and the side with the most voluminous BS would end up with the only votes left.

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