[EM] Helping the Pirate Party to vanish
Kristofer Munsterhjelm
km_elmet at lavabit.com
Thu Mar 14 02:16:20 PDT 2013
On 03/13/2013 05:09 AM, Michael Allan wrote:
> If the experts in the Election Methods list can't find a serious fault
> with this method, then it might be possible to bring down the party
> system in as little as a few years. Mind you, it would be no bad
> thing if it took a while longer, given the disruption it might cause.
Regarding liquid democracy methods in general, I think the vote-buying
problem is pretty serious. Or rather, that's not the worst part of it,
but it's a symptom of a more general aspect.
This general aspect is that the network of delegation can't decide when
the power vested in a person is sufficiently great that he should be
public, and conversely, when the voters have sufficiently little power
that they should be anonymous.
Intuitively, for proxies with great power, the need for transparency
outweighs the repercussions of doing so, while for individual voters the
opposite is the case. But the voting method has no way of knowing where
one changes into the other.
Thus there seems to be two standard solutions. The first is to keep
everything private, and the second is to keep everything public. The
first is rather more difficult than the second, since one has to know
something about the proxies in order to subscribe to them; and neither
is really desirable.
I should clarify that vote-buying is only one side of the
transparency/anonymity problem. If you have a version where everything
is public, then vote-buying is not the only weakness. There could also
be vote coercion ("subscribe to this proxy or else") or small-town
effects (try being a liberal proxy in a particularly conservative town
in the Deep South).
Now, some people say that this isn't a problem, and more broadly that
complete disclosure is no problem. I've had that discussion on EM
before, and I know of people who think that, more broadly, Brin's
"Transparent Society" would be a good thing. Both from small-town
effects[1] and from vote-buying, I disagree.
If only one could solve this problem, liquid democracy could be really
good. I imagine it would be possible with judicious use of crypto, but
that would obscure the system quite a bit. You'd also have to code into
the system the "sorites" decision of where power becomes great enough
that transparency outweighs privacy.
-
[1] The "Law of Jante" is a Scandinavian term, after all. Similar things
exist elsewhere, e.g. the Japanese "nail that sticks up".
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