[EM] Buying Votes

[Greg Nisbet]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 1:49 PM, Jobst Heitzig <heitzig-j at web.de> wrote:
> 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 consensus.
>
> 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.

I'm not speaking about majoritarianism in this case, although you are
correct that it alleviates many of the problems. What I meant was
there is the potential for vote buying under any voting method where
voting is verifiable and non-unanimity can pass a policy.
>
>> 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.

Right. Democracies assumes a given series of weights for all people's
decisions (usually 0 (children/felons/non-citizens) or 1 (people
eligible to vote)). And proceed to crunch the numbers.
They do this in a way distinct from absolute consensus.

>
>> In every reasonable voting method (remember democracy is distinct from
>> consensus), ...
>
> I can only remember what I believe to be true. This claim is not!

democracy is distinct from consensus? Of course it is! I can win under
any reasonable voting method by pleasing less-than-everyone. In some
methods this need only be a majority, in others it may not be a fixed
amount of support. There is no definitive number of people I must
please to win a Borda election, for instance, the actual number
depends on a wide range of other factors.
>
>> ... 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.

Again. The vote-buying criticism applies to all non-consensus methods.
You are correct that non-majoritarian stuff makes this slightly better
by removing belligerence of the majority. I attempted to explain in
You Can't Have it Both Ways that a voting system cannot and should not
be designed to protect rights... but I digress.

None of this has anything to do with a "fair share". ANY verifiable
non-consensus method will lead to this.

>
>> I'll call this the Separation of Recipients. Elections divorce benefit
>> and cost.
>
> Majoritarian elections, yes. Using FAWRB will make this much less likely.

I have never seen any method lauded so much for disobeying a criterion. ; )
>
>> 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.

I don't follow. If I reward a majority, then that does nothing to
prevent future majorities from forming. Majoritarianism isn't some
complete shift of power to whoever can muster 51%...
Every voter has the same capacity to influence the election. OMOV and
majority are not in conflict. No rules says that a majority method is
automatically non-OMOV.

I don't think that non-majoritarian methods are intrinsically better.

>
>> 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.
>

Right... voting is non-contractual. THAT IS THE POINT! If it were
contractual (read "verifiable"), then all of the corruption and
evilness and vote-buying becomes reality. None of the ways out relate
to voting. Voters do not make contracts. Voters do not agree to
respect each others decisions. Voters do not designate pairwise
contests to each other to decide and then come up with an aggregate
ranking.

Also read the caveat at the bottom of that section:

"Taken all together all three ways do not resolve the paradox as such.
But, they answer the question: What can society do, if the paradox
applies and no corresponding social decision function can handle the
trade off between Pareto-optimality and liberalism. One sees that
mutual acceptance and self-constraints or even contracts to trade away
actions or rights are needed."



>> 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!

I will expand this slightly.

Democracy and individual rights are inconsistent.

To avoid sparking another term war, let me define what I mean.

Democracy -- a decision-making algorithm with unrestricted domain (it
is possible to vote for every candidate available in every way
available) that is unbiased (hence discarding
perfect-consensus-or-status-quo.) based on the input of the electorate
i.e. the governed.

individual rights -- libertarian stuff... right to life, liberty,
property, self-determination...

(Yay Libertarian Party!)

Being from California, I am from the west and thus am guilty of
equating majority rule and democracy. By democracy I meant
non-dictatorship non-perfect-consensus. I will be more careful next
time with choosing my words to avoid misstatements like that one.




Either way this is the bottom line:

If people know for whom I voted, society falls apart. I can manipulate
voters such that a majority (read "group capable of overpowering the
rest in an election") with a marginal benefit can steal crap from the
minority (read "group being overpowered"), who would lose a lot. I can
profit off this. People already do to some extent.

Like I said, our tendency to cheat our solicitors keeps us safe. It
keeps the solicitors from asking and it keeps us from obeying.

Democracy will only last until people realize they can just vote
themselves the money. Mutual distrust keeps them from realizing this.

I have to say though, it is much better than the alternative.

Gregory Nisbet
High school student from California with too much free time