[EM] Clarke-Groves-Tideman-Tullock voting with money scheme

[Raph Frank]

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 2:34 AM, Michael Rouse <mrouse1 at mrouse.com> wrote:
> It seemed like an interesting idea, but the drawbacks mentioned included the
> possibility of non-payment and the problem of secrecy.

The main problem is actually that the chances of you actually having
to pay is extremely low.

>  Bingo, campaign
> contributions, where donations (at least those above a certain amount) have
> a name attached to them.

I think that they should be allowed to be secret.  Effectively, we are
saying that people can only support their favourite candidate if they
are willing to do it in public.  That is unfair to non-mainstream
viewpoints.

It could be accomplished by having a few organisation in a row.

I pay money into organisation A and they confirm that I haven't gone
over my donation limit.

I then tell them to send the money to account X with organisation B.

I then login to B and X is my account number, and I tell them to
forward the money onto the candidate I support.

You can have more levels to make it more secure, but as long as one or
other of the organisations keeps the data safe, nobody can know who I
donated to.

It also means that people cannot buy politicians because they won't
know where the money came from.

(Slightly off-topic :p).

> Now, I don't know if this  breaks all of the other good features of  GCTT,

It does.  There is an incentive to under-donate and hope that everyone
else still supports your favourite.

> Set aside a portion of each donation in an
> account, and after the election either return the money to the original
> donor, or (in the case where the GCTT criterion is met) giving the  "made a
> difference" amount to whoever we decide the recipient to be. For example, if
> Candidate A wins by 1% over Candidate B, and someone gave 2% of the total
> campaign contributions to the winning candidate, he or she would lose  half
> (or as close to that as the set-aside was) to the lucky person or government
> agency.

This is the 'pay in advance' idea.  It is a possible solution, but it
also has problems.  The admin would be massive and would almost
certainly not be needed.

> Let's assume that half of the money given to each candidate can be spent by
> that candidate for advertising and related campaign expenses, and half is
> saved in a "payoff" account. After the election, the payoff account of the
> winner is split among all the losing donors in proportion to how much they
> gave to the candidate they supported. If

I had a similar idea where you just bet directly and the candidate
that is most likely to win according to the market is then declared
the winner.

This has the added advantage that it doesn't require much central
operations.  The "Central Stock Exchange" would only have to deal with
major players.

When betting you bet against your favourite candidate.  In effect, if
he wins, you are happy and if he loses, at least you win your bet.

The post is below,  Warren called it a "Bookie kingdom".

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RangeVoting/message/1536