Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: > Could not these domains work together? To my knowledge, that's what happens > now. People discuss politics and find out what they're going to vote. Any > sort of improvement on the availability of discussion, as well as of > information of representatives' actions will help that domain. Then, when > the voters actually decide to vote, they have privacy. Their opinions may > change based on what they hear or discuss, but at the end, it's a private > decision who they'll give their vote to.
I was thinking along the same lines, replying to your previous post! Here it is: Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote (previously): > You may put it that way, but I think that goes the other direction as well: > if it is true that distortions (by carrot or by stick, e.g vote-buying or > coercion) degrade the public sphere so that one have to use a secret ballot > in ordinary elections, then the distortions will remain when using a method > that relies on public sphere information (that is, what you call > communicative assent), yet the means of masking that distortion no longer > applies, because it's no longer a private matter of voting, but a public > one of discussion. > > Or to phrase it in another way: the distortions of action can be called > corruption, since this is really what happens when you're letting the > distortions govern how you act when you're supposed to be acting either in > accordance to your own opinion, or as an agent of someone else. For obvious > reasons, we don't want corruption, and we would seek to minimize it, but > it's still a problem. Consider all three types of voting system, the two existing, and the third proposed: TABLE 1. SYSTEMATIC CORRUPTION OF VOTERS ------------------------------------------------------------------ Voting System Individual Collective -------------- ------------------------ ------------------------ State -- manipulation by mass Electoral propaganda, financed by campaign contributions, or by influence peddling State Party discipline, -- Legislative the whipping system Vote buying, influence peddling Public Primary Social pressure from -- (Electoral and employer, school, Legislative) church, union, etc. * Vote buying, influence peddling ----------------------------------------------------------------- * family pressure is more nature-like than systematic, so consider it separately > The secret ballot came into use to protect voters from the distortion. > Presumably the distortion was real and sufficiently severe to need such > measures. If we remove the protection, the distortion will again be > uncovered. It may be a problem with society, or with the method, but it'll > be there, whatever the cause. That protection will not be removed. No changes to the existing voting systems are proposed. On the other hand, we cannot extend the same protection to the public system, not even partially. To enforce a secret ballot would violate the guarantees of free speech in the public sphere. Ad hoc, people can make public voting a fact. We can take any of the corruptions (Table 1), and investigate it in detail. That's one approach. Another (as suggested in your other post) is to consider how the two categories of system (state and public) will interact. There could be a positive synergy between them, with the corruptions of the state being weakened by the public system, while those of the public system are filtered out by the state's secret ballot. I would argue this is generally true, for all of the corruptions listed in the table. > The vote-buying effort would, of course, be a this-for-that endeavor. I > provide money, you provide the vote - I "buy" your vote. After you've > voted, I got what I bought, and I may buy another vote later. > > Alternately, it can be continual: for as long as you, as a proxy, mirror > me, I'll pay you. Stop doing it and I stop paying. > > In both cases, the vote is the commodity. Only the latter case would apply, as the commodity is continuous. There is a single vote on the table, and the voter can shift it around or withdraw it, at any time. So the payments must be meted out continually in nickles and dimes (as you suggest), or deferred. These types of payment will be less attractive to typical vote sellers. They won't be banking their returns, but spending them immediately. In addition to this, and the other factors (i to iv) that weigh against vote buying, I would add: v) Vote sellers may be identified by pattern analysis, and simple record keeping. Once identified and marked with a probability label, their collective behaviour may be tracked. The tracks will lead to the vote buyers. > I thought the system would have a deferred direct democracy component, as > others have talked about in previous descriptions of proxy democracy: that > each voter has a vote but can assign it to a proxy... Yes, it's essentially the same voting mechanism as Abd's delegable proxy (and others too). But the application differs. It's a primary system - nominating candidates for the state ballot, and candidate bills for the state legislature - and so the deferral of action works not only through the internal proxy structure (relatively fast), but across voting systems (slow). > ... If that's the case, > then though each decision has less value, there are more of them from which > to gather feedback. > > I'll grant the part about assembly voting, though I'll note that if an > elected assembly votes, then the composition of that assembly can be done > by using ordinary secret voting, in which case there is no problem. Yes, the state assembly is elected by the usual methods. The only change is external, in the addition of a primary that uses public voting. But it's a cross-party primary, so if the turnout is high enough, then it would predict the winner of the general poll. The accuracy of the prediction would be reduced if the primary was corrupted. Ordinarilly, the secret ballot on election day would filter out most of the corruption (I suppose), delivering the corrected result. But a truly massive corruption could overwhelm the filter, because the prediction would be self-fulfilling, to some extent. -- Michael Allan Toronto, 647-436-4521 http://zelea.com/ ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info