Democracy via PageRank

Great Debates
1

There’s this idea I’ve had for a while about implementing a PageRank style algorithm for Democracy. The way it works is:

[ul]
[li]Every eligible citizen gets 1 vote to begin with.[/li][li]You are allowed to vote for ANY person and allowed to split your vote up into any fraction and to change your vote at any time.[/li][li]When you vote for a person, your one vote PLUS the votes of any person who voted for you get transferred to that person.[/li][li]The person currently with the highest number of votes is the President.[/li][/ul]

So if 1 person gives me 100 votes, 100 people give me 1 vote and 200 people give me 0.5 votes, then my “PageRank” would be 300 votes. I could then give 150 of my votes to John, 50 of my votes to Barry and 100 of my votes to Hillary.

Because votes are transitive, what will end up happening is an organic heirarchy of blocs. There will be millions of people who have just a few votes and represent a very specific interest group. They will then figure out the right person to pass their votes to to create groups representing blocs of thousands of votes who figure out the major political players who each represent a bloc of millions of votes. The president will be the person who can best assemble a loose coalition of those blocs.

There’s numerous flaws with this system in it’s most basic version. For example, to prevent the presidency changing hands rapidly as people shift their votes, you could make it so the presidency changes hands only during an “election” which happens every 4 years or if another person has 50% more votes than the current president which represents a vote of no confidence. I think something like this would require a lot of tweaking to work in the real world.

However, I think there’s some interesting and elegant properties about this system as well:

[ul]
[li] It changes politics from a global to a local decision and from a centralized to distributed system. Democracy is having increasing problems as it attempts to scale up. Currently, we have 100 million people who all need to make an informed choice of who should be president. 100 million people can’t all keep track of the pros and cons of various healthcare plans so they vote based on who they want to have a beer with instead.[/li]
With PageRank democracy, the decision is not “who would be the best person to lead the country” but “who is the person I know who I most trust to represent my interests” with which people are able to make a much more informed decision.
[li] It does away with the two party system and replaces it with blocs. Right now, the trade unionists are aligned with the greenies and the religious fundamentalists are aligned with the libertarians because our current system is inherently two party. By splitting up all of these factions, it allows for much more nuance than the standard left and right orthodoxy.[/li]
One person might represent the trade union bloc and have millions of votes but, in order to keep them, they need to maintain the support of several sub-blocs which all have different visions of what trade unionism is. And each sub-bloc has a similar set of sub-blocs under them.

It also allows people to split their beliefs up in a more fine grained pattern. I might be a greenie but also deeply religious and I can choose to apportion my votes to support both of those causes.
[li] It allows an organic upwelling of political talent. Like how blogging opened up the profession of journalism to the masses, PageRank Democracy would allow relative unknowns to become major political players by assembling a large bloc of votes around a particular cause.[/li][li] It’s more responsive to new political issues. Currently, everything happens on a 4 year election cycle and it’s hard for voters to have much of an effect outside of that. But if a new issue comes up that people deeply care about, say Net Neutrality, it would be possible to rapidly assemble a bloc of 10,000 votes which could then be used to pressure politicians down the line as something to pay attention to.[/li][/ul]

Is this a practical way of running a Democracy? Is it better than the current system? What sorts of changes would it cause in society? Any thoughts?

2

Interesting!.

The big trouble i see with this kind of “Electronic Democracy” so to speak is that in order to tally the votes in a reasonable time you will need every person to have some kind of networked “voting device”. 100 million of “Voting devices” can have a pretty big cost.

Another, related, problem is network security, how do you guarantee that each vote goes to where the voter intended?

3

One technical problem would be dealing with circular paths, e.g.
A votes for B and B votes for A
or
A votes for B; B votes for C; C votes for A

With just that, how many votes does each person have?

A second problem would be dealing with corruption, with groups trading votes behind the scenes. I think it’s better for voters to vote directly for candidates, rather than allow candidates to pass around delegated votes like this.

4

Under this proposed system, most people will vote for who they want to have a beer with.

5

Not to mention that people already can’t be bothered to read enough about a few candidates to intelligently cast their one vote. What makes you think that people are going to be willing to sit down and painstakingly budget vote fractions?

Also, the media would become even more enormously influential, since the tide of votes would change on a minute-by-minute basis according to any slanted, biased, fear-mongering reports that popped up on CNN or FoxNews.

6

Christ, who the hell wants to vote for politicians, like, continuously? Do you want to be bombarded with campaign ads 365 days a year? Do you want a president (or other politician) who has to fundraise perpetually to pay for those ads so he can remain in office?

7

How about we forego representatives and get to vote on every single issue? Majority rules!

8

And that is different from voting for George W Bush and Barack Obama in what way?

9

I’m pretty sure that was his point.

10

This sounds very similar to an idea I’ve toyed with a bit, that I call democratic feudalism. The idea was that anyone who can get X votes from the public at large becomes a baron, or whatever you want to call the lowest title. Then the barons vote in the same way to choose the earls, and so on, until you get the dukes electing the king. Anyone can change their vote at any time, and any “noble” that drops below some threshold (lower than the amount needed to get in; perhaps 3/4 of the original threshold or so?) is out of office. The number of “nobles” at any given level (except for the top) is not fixed, and can fluctuate.

The advantage of a system like this is that everyone knows the next person up in line. If you make it so, say, each level is 1/300 of the one below it, then the common citizens can be familiar enough with their immediate superior that the superior could know them personally, and then the next person up the line knows that fellow personally, and so on.

11

Won’t work.

The transitiveness means there is no incentive to cast your vote if someone else can re-cast it. That means everyone would wait until the last second to vote, and there would be no opportunity to recast anything. Then it reduces to a popular vote.

Of course, people’s votes could be bought earlier, I suppose. Not the effect you are after though is it?

Also, you’d have a hard time tracking votes (1 per person) while maintaining anonymity. No position ottomh on if that can be done at all or not, I’d guess not.

This is elementary game theory.

12

Not necessarily, Online bids are a good example of this. Some people will make early bids and then at the last minute everyone will vote. If they could recast votes you’d just have the vote making at the last minute like you do with sniping auctions. It would be hard to keep the votes opaque as you say, and people could definitely influence votes by voting early.

13

This is handled via the PageRank algorithm.

Corruption is a major problem but I’m not sure it’s not a major problem already, just less visible. One thing this system could do is make the horse trading at least more transparent by making public how you delegate your votes if you have more than a certain number.

Which is fine when you understand that a vote is not about who is the best leader anymore, it’s a delegation of responsibility. What you’re doing is trusting that this person is more thoughtful and knowledgeable about the political process than you are and that he will similarly delegate his vote to someone who is even more knowledgeable.

If you only have a single vote, then it probably won’t matter how you split your vote but some people will be responsible for a large bloc of votes and will be willing to devote a lot of time and effort into how they want to assign their votes.

I think this system becomes less susceptible to media persuasion as the people who control the large blocs of votes should be someway media savvy and immune to the fear mongering. Maybe this is wishful thinking and an overoptimistic view of humanity but I think things like the swift boat attack would have been far less successful if the people who mattered were willing to devote even a little bit of time getting to the bottom of it.

14

How, exactly, is that done?

15

See this paper for an implementation of PageRank.