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Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011·

One of the biggest issues with this system would be that a rich company or individual could buy large blocks of votes on a particular issue.

Another might be that a delegate could present a popular set of views in public for the purposes of gaining a large number of delegate votes but then they could privately vote for their real beliefs which might be much more fringe, or perhaps they might change their mind close to the election.

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> One of the biggest issues with this system would be that a rich company or individual could buy large blocks of votes on a particular issue.

Whereas now a rich company/individual can just buy a politician.

At least in the case of a politician you can usually look at their voting record and see if that matches what you expected them to do.

1. could make vote enticements illegal?

2. make any aggregate votes with greater than block size x (e.g. 100) public?

1. Maybe, but that could prove difficult in practice.

2. The ballot is no longer secret and subject to the problems of bribery etc.

Regarding 1, if you're directly attempting to intimidate/coerce/bribe enough people that it will make a difference, that's a lot of chances for something to go wrong.

Pretty much how representative government works. Also the Electoral College. At some point you have to trust people.

AFAIK electoral college delegates are selected by secret ballot so they can't directly buy votes. A similar system could be adopted in theory, but you might want to know whether you are casting 1 vote or 1000. For example what happens if 10% of the vote is delegated to one person who doesn't turn out to vote?

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