Forum Council

The notion of consent is of foundational concern in political philosophy and has come up many times in this forum over the years. I wanted to share this lecture from a bioethics perspective, as food for thought:

Youtube Video

@tec referenda are an interesting example, I would say it is more efficient in a sense, but the cost can be coherency. For example, referenda in California have led to incoherent policies, because the public often wants to have its cake and eat it too: the public wants service X, but simultaneously doesn’t want to pay for it, so they vote for X but also vote against tax increases that would pay for X. This effectively forces the government to borrow to reconcile public demands, which leads to debt that the public also doesn’t want.

The government then gets criticized for borrowing, but in a sense, that is misplaced responsibility—the direct translation of an incoherent set of policies is the source of the issue, and borrowing is a symptom. This shows that representatives also serve the role of taking on coherent responsibility for coherent policy decisions, but citizens’ policy referenda can undermine that role in the kind of situation I described. Probably, the effects of this kind are less severe or even negligible in smaller, more internally cohesive populations like in Switzerland.

Feedback is absolutely necessary, and structural issues as you indicate are major obstacles. If SAVE is a policy proposal generator, it seems to serve the role of a structured public forum. Is that accurate in your view? It seems like a more democratized form of a special interest group. How would the interests become translated into policy?

I made a bit of conceptual progress with a potential proof (or route to a counterexample?) of participation for approval vs. B2R.

The setup is as follows: E is an electorate, C is a candidate set, and v is some single new voter that when combined with E forms E'=EU{v}.
The electoral processes of interest are then E(C) and E'(C), where we hope that participation is satisfied in the sense that if the winner of E(C) is W, and the winner of E'(C) is W', then v does not strictly prefer W to W'.

We can consider the sequence of B2R losers L1, L2, ... Lk, and the corresponding L1', L2', ... Lk'.
Then since under B2R the first k losers can never include the top-sorted candidate who is the adversary of the B2R survivor, it follows that the participation property will propagate by an inductive hypothesis if at any point (as in for some k), the sets {L1, L2, .. Lk} and {L1', L2', ... Lk'} coincide.
It could also be possibly useful to know that B2R is equivalent to BNR.

In any case, I think this method makes sure that the winner is either a highly approved candidate, or a candidate that a majority prefers over a highly approved candidate, which to me is an interesting guarantee.

I also have found instances where the Condorcet loser is elected, and failure of IIA. Still, the Condorcet loser criterion seems only possible to fail by small chance when small electorates vote over very few candidates.

@tec I agree, most informed, pro-democracy people demand structural change to improve faithfulness of policy as well as more civic engagement. Direct policy-focused voting is ideal in principle, but on a large scale, it could be very inefficient. In my conception, the purpose of representatives is essentially to specialize in the aggregation and fusion of policy information and then interface with policy decisions. Unfortunately, removing that layer of abstraction might lead to chaos in various ways.

I think your question/title of this post gets to the practical heart of what voting theory is about. Since we're concerned with consent here, what do you think the "ingredients" of consent might be? For example, I roughly imagine that to give consent, an individual needs adequate information about a proposal, sufficient resources to process that information about it, and mitigated or minimized "unnecessary" conflicts of interest. Those are all normative constructs, but the idea is that maybe we can decompose a complex construct like consent into simpler pieces, and then examine how those pieces might or might not hang together in the right way.

More thought can make the construct of consent more complicated and multidimensional, It’s definitely something I want to read more about. I think core “defeaters” of consent would be sufficient severity of avoidable conflict between interests, plus epistemic aspects, and maybe others not considered.

To me, some of the main issues with our current system is that we lack various aspects of that triangle. Individually, we don't have enough information, we hardly have sufficient resources to process what information we do have, and conflicts of interest are baked right into our institutions. Including the vote-for-one system, where the conflicts of interest are obvious, it's essentially extortion. In my view, representatives should function to address the first two points about information processing. What are your thoughts?

Also no worries about prior engagements with conference and delay, I'll be frank in that I also haven't been able to give your proposal more than cursory consideration because of my own business, but as we and possibly others discuss, I'm sure we'll be able to prepare more food for thought. On the surface, it seems like your proposal does address the ingredients of consent I outlined, but efficiency and practical adoption may be significant issues. Not insurmountable though, and you may have already considered as much.

@tec I think it sounds like it would yield good results. I think we might need to have a more step-by-step dialogue about this to get a real understanding of what you’re proposing.

One thought that comes to mind is that while multiple rounds of voting is simple on its face, it’s also a radical adjustment to the approach we are currently entrenched in. For that to fly, it would require significant efforts to educate and familiarize the public with the concept. Generally speaking, the simpler a system is, the more likely it is to be adopted.

So my point is that I do like the principle, but personally I see it as something that could only realistically exist after a more foundational adjustment is made for it to develop on top of. Does that make sense?

For example, it seems to require adoption a priori of an approval voting paradigm. That in itself is a significant hurdle.

I was discussing voting systems with a friend, and he was curious about how alternative voting systems would integrate into existing infrastructure such as districting and the electoral college.

This seems like it could be a ground-up, potentially idiosyncratic thing, but we have seen adoptions in certain states of alternative systems and they have obviously integrated into a national level system. My curiosity is about the logistics of this on a larger scale, and if there is a clear roadmap that offers generality of scope for other states to follow suit.

I’m wondering if people have more knowledge on this subject, and if they would be willing to share or collect resources here for others to investigate. I’ll probably look into this myself. I’m also opening a subject about historical examples of alternative systems, please chime in with any thoughts or considerations!

@toby-pereira apparently so, because they left. But honestly in terms of the purpose of a forum, that doesn’t really subtract from anything.

Anyway, this original post was made well before RFK Jr.’s (imo reluctant) alignment with Trump. At least one of RFK Jr.’s predictions was correct, namely that Biden and/or Harris would not beat Trump. His “no spoiler” pledge would have given beating Trump the greatest possible chance, but Democrats refused to cooperate because they are power hungry, greedy, and benefit too much from the duopoly to concede to a third party candidate, even at the cost of Trump winning.

IMO, that’s primarily why RFK Jr. angled against them, in game theory terms it was as a punishment. It was a textbook failed prisoner’s dilemma, and they got a taste of their own medicine in a way that hurt everybody and could have been avoided. But I digress.

@A Former User said in Kennedy Jr’s Candidacy as a Route to Voting Reform:

This thread made me lose interest in this forum. RFK Jr. is a monster.

Just one person posting something you disagree with made you lose interest in the whole forum?

@Isocratia I mean, maybe. But if you bail from a conversation just because people are discussing ideas that don’t neatly align with your views, I think that kind of runs counter to productive discussion. Engagement is the whole point of a forum. Why not take the opportunity to make your case? On that point, I don’t think I was being dogmatic, I was just putting a moderate, measured perspective out here. In particular, that if a candidate has comparable support to what Nader did, he should also be on the debate stage.

As for Kennedy, I’m not sure if you followed his campaign directly, but from what I saw, his platform had some surprisingly rational moments. Whatever mistaken views he holds about healthcare, his core message was about dismantling corporate capture of government—which, let’s be honest, is exactly the route that’s brought us to the brink of fascism today. Frankly, he seemed more committed to stopping Trump than the Democrats did.

Like him or not, he was a third-party candidate who genuinely threatened to shake up the duopoly—something we haven’t really seen since Nader. And given how deeply dysfunctional the two-party system has become, that’s not nothing. The political landscape is a real-time disaster, and reform doesn’t just happen on its own. While it wasn’t his main agenda, one thing I appreciated about his run is that he was literally the only candidate to talk about ranked-choice voting and other technical fixes.

That said, I completely checked out when he aligned himself with Trump. At that point, his platform basically collapsed. His current sellout stance disillusioned a lot of his supporters—and honestly, he should’ve just bowed out once it was clear he couldn’t win.

If you see it differently, I’d be interested to hear why. That’s why I brought this topic up in the first place.

@toby-pereira yes definitely. I started trying to actually prove participation last evening, and it got much hairier than I would have liked... lots of branching edge-case conditions. I think an actual proof (or counterexample) of participation for this system would require some nice insights, and/or a larger scale planning and brute-force organized accounting of every relevant case.

For example, I’m quite certain the new participant V can never change the top sorted candidate to somebody they prefer less. So it would have to be an upset via the B2R survivor, who would have to become the new winner, and be preferred less than the old winner by V. But that situation gets complicated in terms of the sorting and the rank tie-breaking authority… Maybe some day!