Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 343 posts

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#251

Post by dctoedt »

Sounds like just a new name for cumulative voting, which has been a thing in closely-held corporations for decades. From a (U.S.) Securities and Exchange Commission Web site:

Cumulative voting is a type of voting system that helps strengthen the ability of minority shareholders to elect a director. This method allows shareholders to cast all of their votes for a single nominee for the board of directors when the company has multiple openings on its board. In contrast, in "regular" or "statutory" voting, shareholders may not give more than one vote per share to any single nominee.

For example, if the election is for four directors and you hold 500 shares (with one vote per share), under the regular method you could vote a maximum of 500 shares for each one candidate (giving you 2,000 votes total—500 votes per each of the four candidates).

With cumulative voting, you are afforded the 2,000 votes from the start and could choose to vote all 2,000 votes for one candidate, 1,000 each to two candidates, or otherwise divide your votes whichever way you wanted.

https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answers-cumulativevotehtm.h... (extra paragraphing added)

More analysis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_voting

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#252

Post by bilbo0s »

pdonis wrote: post #241
bilbo0s wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without any violence at all... Excepting, of course, all the violence used to keep the slaves as slaves in the first place I assume? Because, what? That's not real violence? Come on man. It's slavery. There was already grotesque violence. Only question was, what were different nations willing to do to stop it? But where slaves were concerned, every nation involved was already perfectly ok with massive, grotesque, a…

> Excepting, of course, all the violence used to keep the slaves as slaves in the first place I assume? Because, what? That's not real violence? It's real violence, sure, but it's there in all of the cases, so it drops out of the comparison we're making. We're not talking about the costs of slavery itself; we're talking about the costs to end slavery. A million lives seems to me like a much bigger cost to end slavery…

This is the US man. We didn't pay the British Crown a cent, and no one saw any reason to change that policy for southerners. Paying for freedom is not something America as a nation was given to doing in the Late 18th and 19th century. Heck, vast majority of us wouldn't do it today. This country was literally founded on the principle of not paying for freedoms. And this history is the very reason we carried so much caché and influence through the 20h century. People knew our history and admired it. Historically, the incrementalists have taken a back seat to us, not the other way around.

And I mean come on guy? What's with these ideas? Any violence against slaves just "drops out". But other violence does not? We should pay off slaver owners? A million lives is too much to pay to end slavery?

A million lives is far less than the body count of 400 years of the slave trade. How many lived and died as slaves? How many were killed, beaten, or left for dead? Or maybe just thrown overboard? etc etc etc.

As to the question of paying off slave owners, what part of our history to 1860 would lead you to believe that it was our policy to pay money for freedom? You either didn't pay attention in history class, or you are willfully ignoring the nature of how we got our start. Presumably because it is inconvenient, and doesn't fit with your narrative.

And, yeah, on the question of just ignoring the violence against slaves, that's just not even worth commentary.

But hey man, we can just agree to disagree. Obviously we're just different people. You have a nice rest of the day.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#253

Post by bilbo0s »

pdonis wrote: post #243
bilbo0s wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without any violence at all... Excepting, of course, all the violence used to keep the slaves as slaves in the first place I assume? Because, what? That's not real violence? Come on man. It's slavery. There was already grotesque violence. Only question was, what were different nations willing to do to stop it? But where slaves were concerned, every nation involved was already perfectly ok with massive, grotesque, a…

> Only question was, what were different nations willing to do to stop it? Yes, exactly. Some nations were willing to tell their moralizers to shut up, and just pay off the slaveowners. The US wasn't willing to make that compromise; we let the moralizers drive the process, so we had to fight a war and kill a million people.

>The US wasn't willing to make that compromise; we let the moralizers drive the process, so we had to fight a war and kill a million people...

Yeah, "moralizers" like Hamilton, Washington, and Ben Franklin, who were so obstinate and short sighted they refused to simply pay the British Crown instead of fighting such a destructive war. Too bad you couldn't be there to show them the error of their ways.

/s

Yeah, this is another case where you and I are just different people. We'll just agree to disagree. Have a nice day though.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#254

Post by bduerst »

mc32 wrote: post #2

Looks like this would favor highly coordinated groups to have outsized influence over poorly coordinated groups. So people who vote in isolation have less influence than people who organize and vote as a bloc. I think it also means that places where one party predominates would require the minority party to be highly coordinated in order to have any chance with one single silver “bullet” whereas the dominant party ca…

Increased cooperation across groups is the benefit - i.e. the opposite of zealotry and partisanship.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#255

Post by iambateman »

mc32 wrote: post #2

Looks like this would favor highly coordinated groups to have outsized influence over poorly coordinated groups. So people who vote in isolation have less influence than people who organize and vote as a bloc. I think it also means that places where one party predominates would require the minority party to be highly coordinated in order to have any chance with one single silver “bullet” whereas the dominant party ca…

All voting systems benefit highly coordinated groups.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#256

Post by hotpockets »

mc32 wrote: post #2

Looks like this would favor highly coordinated groups to have outsized influence over poorly coordinated groups. So people who vote in isolation have less influence than people who organize and vote as a bloc. I think it also means that places where one party predominates would require the minority party to be highly coordinated in order to have any chance with one single silver “bullet” whereas the dominant party ca…

There are some additional assumptions you need. First that people are transparent. Second, that they are honest. Third that they are consistent. So, while voting in isolation has a cost — wasted votes — so does coordinated voting — misinformed votes. The wasted votes problem will never make you miss your favorite, but the misinformed vote problem could be catastrophic.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#257

Post by kazinator »

ivanbakel wrote: post #247
dvorak365 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But tokens aren't votes. A person whose ideology aligns with 100 options has 10x the ability to influence the outcome of the election towards their preferred outcomes than someone whose ideology aligns with only one option.

But "votes" with tokens aren't votes either. Claiming that a spread of 100 votes has 10x the effect of 10 votes requires some model of the vote - you don't know that 10 votes on a single issue doesn't have an outsized effect on swinging a decision where 100 single votes just bump a number up across the board. More than anything, the system just places power in compromise, which is nothing new - in a one-vote system,…

There is a problem if there are 99 items to vote for, which are all aligned with each other, more or less, ideologically, and 1 item that is diametrically opposed to these. Someone casting 99 votes for those 99 items has political power over someone trying to concentrate on that one, only able to cast 6. This system works best if all the choices are very distinct.

If numerous choices are really just minor variations of the same choice, that tends to undermines the system with a rather gaping hole. The cynical observer might note that in fact that's the idea behind it: entrench the power of the bland, indistinct choice in leadership.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#258

Post by iambateman »

If you’re a developer and you’re into voting, we’re working on building an open source app for Ranked Choice Voting with a nonprofit called FairVote. The old version is at rankit.vote.

Angular app, Firebase, couple different voting mechanisms.

It’s an attempt to help people understand how alternative voting systems can make the world a better place.

Email me if you’re interested in contributing!

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#259

Post by bduerst »

superkarn wrote: post #124
breuleux wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, why not choose all representatives by lottery? I don't think representatives need to have any particular competencies beyond being representative of the interests of the population. Hired staff can take care of things that require particular abilities. I reckon that a wholly random set of representatives would act like a direct democracy where every voter is free to fully focus on the issues, is allowed an…

Would this have a similar outcome as the "lottery" for jury duty? What happens if somebody who really doesn't want to do it is chosen?

What happens if somebody doesn't really want to do jury duty?

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#260

Post by bduerst »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #113
breuleux wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I'm aware. I'm arguing for universal lottery, and I think it would work.

Bribery would be more rampant than it is now. With no career aspirations to keep them in line, unethical people would take the lobbyist money and run.

Increase the penalties for bribes and make them severe enough that representatives won't risk it.
Post reply on HN