Designing an information age democracy

[mithriltabby]

Today, Jamais Cascio tweeted (as he ponders the notion of “occupying the future”):

Calling out and bringing down a failing system isn't enough; we have to start right now to build something better to replace it. #otf

I replied:

The cornerstone of a better system will be a way to make decisions about improving the system without partisan freakouts.

That stuck in my mind when I was swimming tonight, so I started pondering how one might go about designing an information age democracy. My first thought was to go big: come up with a fractal decision-making structure designed to exploit the human brain architecture for tracking Dunbar’s Number (N_D) of people, dividing the population into groups of size N_D÷3 who designate a representative to deal with the next tier up, also of size N_D÷3, and was thinking “yeah! Emergent properties! Swarm intelligence!” and then I did the math and figured out that even a city the size of Sunnyvale would need a couple of thousand people involved. So I decided that maybe I should be a little less ambitious.

My next thought was to find ways to aggregate votes in a way that doesn’t leave as much opportunity for them to be corrupted by lobbyists. I wanted something that would allow a busy person to be effectively making voting decisions they liked, without necessarily taking the time to study the issues. What I came up with was something I might call “proxy-enabled direct democracy”, or perhaps a “digital-proxy republic”:

1. Any citizen eligible to vote can, if they wish, vote on every legislative issue coming up at any level: federal, state, county, district, city, whatever. Votes are held open for seven days unless the executive for the district declares an emergency, in which case the time can be shortened, but that automatically puts up an issue for recalling the executive. Votes are, by default, private.
2. If a citizen does not wish to obsessively track every single legislative issue going on at every level that affects them, they can assign their vote to a proxy, whose votes are public; a proxy knows how many people have entrusted them with a vote, and can broadcast messages to them, but does not know who they are. The proxy assignment can be specified based on jurisdiction and tag, with tags assigned by members of the appropriate level of the judicial branch. (e.g.: civil liberties, environmental policy) As long as the vote is open, the assignment can be revoked.
3. The proxy can be a person, organization, or algorithm. The most important algorithm is No, which automatically votes no on everything; all citizens are enrolled in No by default until they choose otherwise. It could also be something like “any time the ACLU and EFF agree, go with that”. And it could be “contact me via phone/email/whatever to resolve conflicts in my rules”.
4. A proxy can in turn delegate to another proxy.

So this means that if you always like my choices on my election research posts, and I registered as a proxy, you could assign a vote to me and figure I was doing all the policy-analysis dirty work. Someone more skeptical might specify an algorithm like “any time slothman, palecur, and rhylar agree on something, go with that”, figuring that anything that got past our disparate viewpoints would be worthwhile (and while there might be a suspicious amount of support for ambitious space-launch megaprojects, they would have sane funding sources). Setting something like this up should be possible for non-technical people with modern voice-recognition technology, given what we’re seeing from Siri.

I think this might be a good replacement for the House of Representatives, though a Senate of elected humans might still be useful in its role as a “cooling saucer”, as long as there were constraints to free them from lobbyist influence.

There would be interesting voting blocs springing up; I expect alliances of megachurches with blanket proxies from their parishioners would be major players, for instance, and the traditional political parties would be setting themselves up as vote aggregators. There would be big advertising media blitzes while votes were open, trying to persuade people to shift their votes. The default of “no” rather than “abstain” would change the kind of work done in persuading voters; given current voter turnouts, it would likely bring government to a screeching halt until people felt enough pain that they got to the polls.

That’s the first pass. Critiques and suggestions are welcome.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I used to approve of direct democracy - then I moved to the west coast, where instead of just bond measures, the entire populace votes on a wide range of laws and constitutional amendments, including many proposed by the populace. IME, more than half are utterly horrific or mind-numbingly stupid ideas like attempting to legalize various sorts of homophobia to reworking the tax system to a flat tax, to vile "law & order bills" that seem largely aimed at increasing the prison population as fast as possible. Of the remainder, most are merely bad ideas. There have been a few gems like increasing Oregon's minimum wage to what was at the time one of the highest in the nation that actually passed. However, so did everything from a idiotic bill to force the state to pay for potential (aka purely theoretical) reductions in property value due to changes in zoning laws to a wide variety of horrific prison bills, many of which were opposed by the legislature.

In short, I think direct democracy of any sort is an absolutely terrible idea.

[mithriltabby]

I think if you check the voter turnout records, very few direct-democracy initiatives garnered the votes of more than half of registered voters. The problem is that a failure to show up to the polls shows up as an “abstain” rather than a “no”, which is why I made this system default to “no”.

[palecur.livejournal.com]

CA is an object lesson in how terribly direct democracy scales; the only proposition I'd support nowadays is one making it much more difficult to get propositions on the ballot.

Also amused that our "terrible fucking ideas" and "rare decent notion" lists are probably very similar, but with the titles reversed.

[cmccurry.livejournal.com]

To put a system like that in place, you would have to do away with our Constitutional Republic. Implementing something like that would require you to amend the Constitution itself, a process that is not going to happen overnight regardless of how good the replacement will be.

Direct Democracy sounds great on paper, but it can be just as slow, corrupt and burdened down with procedure as what we have now.

How would you vote? If you are talking about sending in your vote electronically, then you have the risk that the system will crash, that the proxy's vote will be altered and other numerous problems. And if you try to lower the risk on that with safeguards, then you have a great deal of expense to think about.

Personally, I like the system we have in general. I don't object to the gridlock simply because ramming bad policy through just to say we did something (Like the recent healthcare bill) isn't a smart approach. What I would like is to have the House and Senate only meet in D.C. for certain votes and be forced to stay in their home states for the rest of the year.

[palecur.livejournal.com]

Electronic voting's essentially a solved problem; crypto professionals and outlaw cypherpunks (the population of these has substantial overlap, of course) have produced a substantial body of work on the matter.

Implementation has been blocked in several arenas, notably the US, by the usual gang of suspects/idiots.

[palecur.livejournal.com]

While I still retain a great fondness for my own suggestion of Freely Tradable, Ruthlessly Transparent Vote Markets (Poor people have something of value to sell! Tracking the influence of monied interests is easy and objective!), your somewhat more baroque setup has a great deal to recommend it. Automatic No is the secret sauce; I would be much more dubious of the proposal without that.

Alternate plan: Revert the maximum size of Congressional districts to historical values of around 50,000. Yes, this multiplies the size of Congress by about 14. Make 'em telecommute. It'd make representatives a bit more, hm, representative. Of course, that'd only work with a ruthlessly efficient districting algorithm that maximizes convexity of district size/shape while sticking as close as possible to the state's average district population.

[mithriltabby]

Another idea I haven’t taken the time to write down is the Transparent Plutocracy, where the law that wins the highest amount of money wins, and the winner and loser both pay (unlike a regular auction), but all money spent on this is directly deducted from your regular taxes.

If you made Congressional districts 250,000 with five representatives elected through the single transferable vote, there would be less incentive for gerrymandering.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

We already have a proxy system. It's called "legislative representation." The idea is, volunteers offer their issue positions and their judgment in your service, and you pick the one you like best. Then, if you don't want to devote your time to this, you don't have to worry about it for another two or four years. If you do, you can always contact the representative, who is interested in constituent opinion on the issues.

What are the flaws in this system? One is a limited choice in proxies. That, your proposal would address. But more serious is the proxies being influenced by money and other bribes. But the voters are influenced by those and even more trivial issues - every time a candidate is pilloried for getting an expensive haircut, I think, can you imagine how much they'd be ridiculed and dismissed if they didn't have expensive haircuts? - and your system would do nothing to address the problem of inane algorithms.

The most serious problem with the representative system, however, is representatives without time to study the issues they've been sent to study, and being naive and less experienced in manipulating the system than the lobbyists who are trying to control them, a problem severely exacerbated by term limits. Handing the responsibility for specific issues to voters with even less time and less experience would only increase this problem many-fold. And don't think the lobbyists, whom you're trying to eliminate, wouldn't descend on the voters en masse in this system. They already do this, only mostly just at election time, when they're called election consultants.

[mithriltabby]

The notion is that people could assign their proxy to someone they trust, who could pass it up the line to someone who does have the time to study the issue. Of course, there’s nothing to stop people from handing them off to the Number of Votes Should End In As Many Zeroes As Possible Foundation...

[elf]

Here from mdlbear.

The issue wouldn't be "what do you do about people who hand off their votes irresponsibly." It's, "what do you do about organizations that set out to buy votes outright"--that offer people $100/year for their proxy. Which, yes, might be reversible at any time... but how many people will track how their proxies vote on every issue?

Can you make contracts about proxies--can a company pay people $500 for proxy for the year and they're contractually required *not* to reverse it, or suffer a $5,000 penalty fee? Seems an org could gather a lot of votes by catching people down on their luck, especially if the org advertised itself as being [liberal/conservative/green/whatever] and made appropriate pamphlets indicating how they'd be voting the way the person wanted to anyway.

Right now, people who are apathetic don't get a say in the results. In your suggested method, people who are apathetic become tools of whoever has the best sales pitch. While I don't like a country run mostly by apathy, I *really* don't want one run by the whims of whoever has access to the most apathetic people.

Apathy can be fixed at the individual level--right now, a person who gets a formerly-nonvoting group to start voting can make real changes. If the other currently-nonvoting people are, in the future, *voting* by handing their voice to someone else... it becomes a lot more difficult to overthrow a corrupt power-bloc.

The secondary issue is the one that plagues all online voting: how do you verify identity? How do you establish 1 person = 1 vote in a hackable setting? How do you deal with (1) "my kid grabbed my voter card & voted for me" (a.k.a. "my cat walked over the keyboard"), (2) server glitch failed to record vote, but did record use-of-vote-ID for that person, (3) anonymous decides to overwhelm the servers during peak voting hours (4) clever superhack virus designed to wipe out all votes made today, and of course, (5) people who don't have access to the internet or computers, either by location or disability.

I *like* the idea of direct-vote democracy, but I haven't seen anything that convinces me the logistics problems are surmountable.

While I'm willing to agree that the occasional server glitch is statistically meaningless, people are going to be a lot more upset at that, than the current problem that once in a while, a box of votes goes missing or gets damaged by fire and those votes are lost.

[aknitwit.livejournal.com]

I am still trying to process "slothman, palecur, and rhylar agree...".

[mithriltabby]

I figured that would be a high but not unreachable bar for legislation. :-)