[EM] Buying Votes

[Jobst Heitzig]

Dear Greg,

this was really an interesting posting...

You wrote:
> As I have attempted to explain, voting is the exact opposite of
> individual rights and concensus.

I must admit I did not read everything you wrote in the last days, but 
this seems rather far-fetched to me.

The most we could say is that many forms of voting (that is, *certain 
methods*) are *incompatible* with certain individual rights (in 
particular, the right to be able to influence decisions) and/or with 
consensus.

However, as I tried to make clear again and again, there *are* methods 
in which every voter has some influence on the decision and in which 
some kind of consensus can be reached out of pure self-interest.

Many problems vanish when we drop the misguided requirement of 
majoritarianism.

> All of you know what democracy does, but let me put it in the context
> of commodification.

Well, we certainly know what systems currently termed "democratic" by 
most people sometimes do. And I hope we also know what "democracy" 
*should* do: give each voter the same power to influence decisions and 
protect her from being overruled by any group of voters.

> In every reasonable voting method (remember democracy is distinct from
> concensus), ...

I can only remember what I believe to be true. This claim is not!

> ... it is possible for me to gain power by pleasing some
> subset of society (so long as that subset is sufficiently large).
> 
> The people whom I must convince to support my decision can be
> different than the ones who will bear its cost.

This is mostly true for majoritarian methods, the majority being the 
group I must convince, the minority being the ones who will bear its 
cost. For non-majoritarian methods like FAWRB, this need not be true, 
since then the minority retains their fair share of the decision power 
and must thus be involved in the quest for a good compromise if that 
compromise is to be elected with certainty.

> I'll call this the Separation of Recipients. Elections divorce benefit
> and cost. 

Majoritarian elections, yes. Using FAWRB will make this much less likely.

> Normally, I cannot buy something and defer the cost to
> someone else without their consent.

You're totally right. This is the best motivation for giving each voter 
the same voting power instead of giving some majority all of the power. 
Then the majority has something to "trade". In order to get my proposed 
option elected, I need their cooperation which I must "buy" by taking 
their preferences into account in my proposal.

> This is always present in any democratic society.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_paradox

At the end of that article, some ways out of the "paradox" are 
mentioned. The second of these suggests to sign a "contract" to overcome 
the underlying prisoners' dilemma. In the voting context where secrecy 
is required, binding contracts can only be reached if they are somehow 
brokered by the method. This is effectively done in FAWRB by giving 
voters the possibility to assert their willingness to cooperate by 
marking compromise options as "approved", and by using these marks in a 
way which removes incentives to cheat.

> Majority rule and individual rights are inconsistent.

This is the most important lesson! Unfortunately, "majority rule" seems 
to be almost synonymous for "democracy" for most people (or at least 
most westerners). This makes it very hard for them to see that in fact 
majority rule makes democratic decisions impossible!

Yours, Jobst