[EM] SODA unfairly hobbles nonparanoid voters.

[Jameson Quinn]

Basically, ⸘Ŭalabio‽'s objection is that SODA does not allow non-bullet
votes to be delegable. The reason that SODA is designed that way is not
"paranoia", as ⸘Ŭalabio‽ claims, but rather simplicity.

To see why multiple delegable votes would be confusing, consider the
following scenario. Let us say that I vote for A and B. After the votes are
counted, it turns out that all the other voters voted for X or Y, in a 50/50
proportion. My delegated vote could be decisive. But A approves X, and B
approves Y. So both of these approvals are added to my delegated vote, which
ends up being useless in deciding between X and Y.

Also, making multiply-delegated votes possible would entirely ruin SODA's
summability. This would make a number of useful anti-fraud measures
impossible, including precinct-level counting, sampled count audits, and
voter-auditable cryptographic ballot receipts like those of heliosvoting.org
.

⸘Ŭalabio‽, I understand and sympathize with your desire for multiple
delegation, but I do not see how a SODA-like system could meet that desire
without too high a cost in complexity and insecurity. If you think that you
can resolve these issues, please propose a specific solution and explore its
implications. As you know, voting system design often involves trade-offs,
and so "doing P has disadvantage Q" is not a good objection against a system
unless it's accompanied by "alternative S avoids Q without causing any other
disadvantages as serious".

Jameson

2011/9/4 ⸘Ŭalabio‽ <Walabio at macosx.com>

>        ¡Hello!
>
>        ¿How fare you?
>
>        I do not believe in attacking the ideas of others, so I refrained
> from making this post from the remainder of July and all of August.  I gave
> others months to develop SODA without criticism:
>
>        The problem with most traditional voting systems is that one must
> choose between jacks-of-all-trades-but-master-of-none and idiot-savants:
>
>        Let us suppose that the greatest living Agronomist who studied under
> Professor Norman Ernest Borlaug (if you do not know who Professor Norman
> Ernest Borlaug was, please kill yourself immediately), and a
> Renaissance-Politician who served in the military, thus got to see the
> world, on the GI-Bill, got a score of degrees, but the most advanced of
> which are A.Scs  and A.As, who went on to a score of careers before becoming
> a politician.
>
>        One can vote for depth or breadth.
>
>        With Asset-voting, one can have both:
>
>        Let us suppose that we have an Asset-Election where each voter gets
> 9 votes.  I chose 9 votes because it gives voters choice, but is easy for
> the voters to error-check:
>
>        In Base-10, make certain that the number of Asset-votes is a
> single-digit-number.  Make certain that the number in Base-10 is 9.
>
>        I could vote for 9 different Nobel-Lauriets who promise to transfer
> their votes to Renaissance-Politicians who promise to call on their
> expertise when needed.  In other words, with Asset-Voting, one can have
> one’s cake and eat it too.
>
>        SODA-Voting is a version of Asset-Voting.  SODA is based on the fear
> of being screwed by those who receive the Asset.  It is impossible eliminate
> the possibility of getting screwed.  This holds for politicians in
> nontransferable elections too.  The logical thing to do is not vote for
> backstabbing politicians again.
>
>        The paranoia of SODA is that it allows voters to make votes
> nontransferable so that the politicians cannot screw the voter during
> transfer negotiations.  This means 2 things:
>
>        *       One risks loss of voting power due to ballot-exhaustion (I
> suspect that SODA is susceptible to voting-splitting and Duverger’s Law).
>        *       Politicians can still screw over voters in the legislature.
>
>        SODA is a solution that does not work and it lets paranoid voters
> disenfranchise themselves.  I do not mind paranoid voters disenfranchising
> themselves because that means more voting power for me, but soda hobbles
> everyone to prevent that:
>
>        If one votes for more than 1 person in SODA makes the votes
> nontransferable.  That means that nonparanoid voters cannot vote for exports
> who then transfer their votes to jacks-of-all-trades under the condition
> that the Renaissance-Politicians call upon the experts when appropriate.
>  One must choose between the 2.
>
>        I do not like being hobbled because other voters are paranoid.  If
> other voters want to make their votes nontransferable, that is fine by me,
> but they should have to live with reduced voting power due to exhaustion
> rather than hobbling everyone else.  This is how I would do it:
>
>        *       Paranoid voters can indicate that their ballots are
> nontransferable by marking on the ballots that the ballots are
> nontransferable by marking them nontranferable, but must live with loss of
> voting power due to ballot-exhaustion.
>        *       Nonparanoid voters can choose 9 Nobel-Lauriets who then
> transfer the votes to Renaissance-Politicians who promise to call upon the
> expertise of the Nobel-Lauriets when appropriate.
>
>        Paranoid voters who are so afraid of being screwed that they make
> their ballots nontransferable just screw themselves.
>
>        ¡Peace!
>
> --
>
>        “⸘Ŭalabio‽” <Walabio at MacOSX.Com>
>
> Skype:
>        Walabio
>
> An IntactWiki:
>        http://intactipedia.org/
>
>        “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to
> your own facts.”
>        ——
>        Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
> ----
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>
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