The complicated business of electing a Doge | Hacker News Reader

The complicated business of electing a Doge

theballotboy.com

91 pointsdr_dshiv47 comments

TIL what a "Doge" is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_(title)

I thought the article was gonna be some kind of commentary on Elon musks, and either doge coin or that government thing he is head of but isn’t.

Was quite surprised to see the pope mention almost immediately.

why do you think he picked that name? Hint: It's not the dog meme.

And here I thought it would be some kind of new blockchain consensus mechanism. (Not disappointed)

Looks like he should be an emperor in Star Wars

To be noted that the Venetian Republic lasted 1,100 years, more than any other republic in history [0] (the microstate of San Marino might be an exception, but the date in which it started is somewhat controversial).

I live in Venice, and most of the few people that are considered expert on the subject, claim that the election system is one of the reasons why it lasted so long. If not for Napoleon, it might still be around.

[0]: https://veneziaautentica.com/history-of-republic-of-venice

Quite OT:

As a stamp collector in my youth, I am well acquainted with San Marino. On the subject of its elections, Wikipedia says:

San Marino had the world's first democratically elected communist government – a coalition between the Sammarinese Communist Party and the Sammarinese Socialist Party, which held office between 1945 and 1957.

And as a historical footnote,

The [Communist] government instituted several reforms and, of the industries of San Marino, only nationalized three drugstores.

Here is a fun paper with rigorous analysis of the protocol: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40573814

"Electing the Doge of Venice: analysis of a 13th Century protocol"

Also some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38598171

It’s strange that the sibling comment is flagged. I ordinarily never remark about flagged comments - but as a public service announcement:

Direct links to PDFs, as in the first of the above submissions, can be annoying to deal with in mobile browsers. Sharing the abstract is a nice gesture and not simply noise.

You should be able to vouch that comment (click on it to do so, it'll be in the post-action links at top of comment).

You can also email a vouch to HN's mods at hn@ycombinator.com. They can remove flags directly, though the email lag response seems to be increasing (give it 24--48 hours), which makes direct vouches all the more valuable.

The generalized term for the use of random selection in governance is called “Sortition” and has roots in Ancient Athens:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

A few Orthodox churches select their patriarch by random selection, except it's from a handful of candidates selected by other means. The Oriental Coptic Orthodox Church ultimately chooses their patriarch using a blindfolded child who pulls a name from a chalice.

I’m curious if a sortition would work for passing legislation.

Instead of wrangling legislators and trading favors to get exactly 50%+1 votes, have the pass/fail determined by a single randomly selected voter. It would encourage much more cooperation and broad consensus building because a bill that gets 50%+1 votes isn’t 50/50 pass fail.

(Of course you’d need some sort of rate limiting so you couldn’t just keep spamming votes until it passes)

> It would encourage much more cooperation and broad consensus

And what would you do when someone who wasn't part of that consensus passes crazy legislation?

Or, randomly select the senate members and keep the 50% + 1 rule

Because about 10% of voters are total crazy people. Let them make the occasional random decision and we will be at war with the moon people within a month.

Exactly. Venice's govt was not a democracy - the Serene Republic was designed to basically filter in only the most influential, yet had a system of checks and balances so that power wouldn't devolve to just one family (like what happened in Florence and Milan). Sortition was part of that system.

Immediate problem with that sort of system is that you could attempt something time after time after time. And eventually hit the decision...

I love the idea of sortition. Wish more people knew and used the word in their political vocabularies.

I've always wanted to see someone experiment with a hybrid. A coin has value because it has two sides (e.g. just one coin face spend very well). So I've always wanted to see sortition and meritocratic elections paired.

Either you use a lottery system to select who can run for office in a given cycle (say 1000 people get the nod to run for State Senator), and then those that wish of that set can run for office in the traditional way.

You use a voting system to select a set of candidates (say 5-10 of them) and then "cast lots" to select the winner.

Either way allows the electorate to steer the process, but also accepts the hand of fate. Marries chaos and order, yin and yang, stability and turbulence.

I've always wished that there was more record of this having been tried out. And respect for the value of a little chaos in the system. Large system designers often use turbelence/randomness in ways that reinforce otherwise ordered systems.

"One of William F. Buckley‘s most famous quotes goes something like this: “I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”

Source: https://www.johnlocke.org/what-was-it-that-buckley-said-abou...

Two interesting meta-points. Candidates didn't necessarily want to be Doge - it really was a loss of independence and potentially wealth for already wealthy individuals from powerful families. Second, the one Doge who tried to become a King was remembered for all eternity by hanging a black cloth over his official portrait in the palace.

I read through the previous discussions of this, and this article and the previous discussions seem to overlook two things that could have some power to explain the weirdness.

First, the development of the process: the system described came into effect in 1268, because previous systems had failed to satisfy fears of factionalism. IA bit earlier in 1229, a simple, one-round electoral council of 40 had stalemated, so lots were drawn, leading to a feud between the Dandolo family and the winner, Giacomo Tiepolo. Giacomo's son Lorenzo Tiepolo was the first elected under the 1268 system, which Nicolao Michele seems to have devised. Not mentioned in the article or discussions is the rule that the men selected were 30 years or older. [0] The violent factionalism and feuding preceding the new system, however, seems to indicate that oligarchs were fiercely competitive. The aristocrats were always going to choose some one aristocrat from their own ranks, but they were strongly divided against each other as well. I'm not sure there would be a solid faction of fifty or so to monopolize the process, especially given the random selections.

Secondly, those random selections by lottery, combined with the opening of the article ("an official went to pray in St. Mark’s Basilica, grabbed the first boy he could find in the piazza") points to another participant in this process, God. While today we tend to think of election protocols in terms of human actors, sortition can imply belief in divine providence taking a hand. The nomination and approval of candidates (election) at least nominally uses human estimation of merit as its input, while sortition gives divine knowledge of merit a role. The intertwined repetition of the two may have been thought to negotiate a best possible outcome from each set of inputs; in practice, against the backdrop of feuding and factionalism, it likely also made the ultimate 41 electors unpredictable and thus less prone to bribery or prior arrangements.

[0] https://origin-rh.web.fordham.edu/halsall/source/dogesvenice...

I'm having some trouble thinking about how this works. I guess it's about who is eligible to be in the process - the "pool of people" or "population".

It reads as if a group of people chooses another group of people from a larger pool to make a smaller pool of people and repeats. Does these pool of peoples change? Can someone be in multiple groups? etc

Are there any more descriptive or animated examples of how this works?

Thanks for sharing that! I've read a lot about Venice and knew of their complicated electoral process but it seems that was quite an understatement.

That's absolutely bizarre. I'm sure if we had time to play it out a bit, there are ways to game that system easily enough, but it'd be really hard to see that from the outside.

Unrelated but I remember reading that the Doge of venice was the first person ever to be buried in the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.

Venetians big stunting on the Eastern Christians since the Fourth Crusade

Worth noting it had been around for nearly seven hundred years, people weren't commonly buried there. And the other poster is right, it happened as the Doge sacked Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade.

Reading about this process always makes me wonder: in a particular round, was an elector allowed to choose someone who had already been chosen in a previous round? And if yes, to what extent was this done in practice?

Depending on this detail, the character of this election process changes completely, since if repeats are allowed, it could easily degenerate into an oligarchy of ~50 people consistently choosing candidates from among their ranks.

Agreed. Also, could an elector be nominated to the next round? (i.e. does becoming an elector prevent you from winning the election)

When fifty decisionmakers are involved, nothing whatsoever could occur 'easily'. That is more or less the purpose of the system.

Eh, there will be a lot they don't agree on, but they could very easily agree on lots of stuff that's detrimental to the populace, i.e. mainly agree on who gets the spoils of exploiting the government. That's plenty to incentivize them to limit their competition to just each other.

No, they could not agree on who gets the 'spoils of exploiting the government', because (a) the whole concept is mostly fictional narrativizing, and (b) neither one person getting something, nor everyone splitting something equally, is something fifty important people can agree on, and the exact percentage split could be bickered over for a decade.

To be clear, I meant to say "mainly disagree on who gets the spoils" etc, but didn't notice until too late. (that might sound like a lame excuse, but I agree it obviously doesn't make sense as written.) We seem to be in vague agreement on that mechanic. But I think it's pretty plausible that an oligarchy would agree on keeping access to the pie, even as they fight over the size of their slices. Which, in the original context of designing a voting system, is a very relevant concern.

[stub for offtopicness]

[flagged]

HN's automatic title case editing made me consider the same.

Of course, the reason this article showed up may be because of the pun.

[flagged]

It's not that doge.

I know, it was a joke on my part. I guess some people didn't see the /s in it :)

All countries still use electoral systems where people are elected to represent the causes and views. And parties to organise those people and views. It’s ineffective and prone to corruption and subjectivity of representatives and money interests beginning with influence on elections. Solving of any issue can be delayed indefinitely if representatives don’t feel like it’s urgent.

In computer age it’s long overdue to have a modern system with people directly voting for issues and causes and not represented by any middlemen.

You're describing direct democracy. For an alternative with fewer downsides consider liquid democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy

If you like the general idea behind this and would like to see it in a bottom-up organizational structure rather than an established state, consider democratic confederalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_confederalism

I think referendums and plebiscites on specific issues are always a possibility even without the whole system being a direct democracy. I've always wondered why other countries have used them but the US never has.

I don't know of cases where the US federal government uses them, but it isn't that uncommon for state or local governments to have them. Although the laws around them differ between jurisdictions.

Historical reasons, United States has always been uncomfortable with Democracy despite all our cheerleading around it. US Founders had a fear of populist sentiment leading to "rash" decisions and thus United States system has always been setup as bulwark against it. Entire Senate elections and rules serve as bulwark. Electoral College is another bulwark. Constitution Amendment process another bulwark. Our acceptance of leaving many issues up to the court like Abortion, Gay Marriage and Immigration. List goes on and on.

The US federal government does not, but they are rather common in US states. The US federal government was structured with its direct constituents as states, not citizens, and while that has evolved a bit over the years, it still is reflected strongly in its structures (Constitutional amendments must be ratified by a kind of referendum, but it is a referendum of state legislatures, not citizens.)

>prone to corruption and subjectivity of representatives

The political assembly of Venice recognized this, which influenced their decision to introduce randomness via sortitions into the process of selecting both the electors and candidates.

> people directly voting for issues

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

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