How do we technically give consent to our governments
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Hi All,
I haven't posted here since sometime in 2021, and I have a lot of reading to catch up on. What I have been doing in the meantime is working on the issue of consent and how it can be implemented at scale.
The idea is we would have a series of votes as part of the process of building our collective consent. What we would be voting on would be policies or policy bundles over a number of issues. The goal is to reach a consensus on what we collectively want our government to do. Also, this is done as an iterative process, with periodic votes until a consensus is reached with no explicit time limit.
My last post here was on Serial Approval Vote Elections (SAVE), and while there was some interest in it then, I realized I needed to do something to make it possible for folks to actually play with the idea. I now have a web site, SerialApprovalVoteElection.org that I invite you all to take a look at. It is not quite ready for the general public, but I think the folks on this site might well be interested, and could provide feedback to me on what to do next with the site.
The more general issue is whether a system like SAVE would be useful to us in providing information to our representatives about what we really want our government to do for us. To actually consent to the way we are governed. And to indicate when our government representatives are not acting with our consent.
The way I currently envision how the full process would work is that some non-government organization starts the process with an official master website of all the initial motions, with each of these motions a topic in a Collaboratorium or Deliberatorium. (I have not contacted Mark Klein at MIT about this, but I think it might well be consistent with his goals.) The overall structure of these motions is the basic text along with commentary both supporting and objecting arguments. (Duplicate "me, too" type comments are collapsed into a number for each argument regarding the motion. (The numbers are not votes, but rather a way to allow people to show they support a given argument without swamping the page with extra verbiage.) The reason to use documents of this type is they can be structured so as to be comparable to other motions.
The other thing the NGO needs to do is have a way to come up with the voter list, or voter eligibility criteria. (I am personally in favor of a vote going to every person subject to the rule of the government regardless of citizenship, on the grounds that anyone physically present and able to act independently can take action anyway, and it is better that the action takes the form of a vote than of an act of terrorism.) (I'm also in favor of some type of online voting, and some work on that has been done by Ben Adida, Helios: Web-based Open-Audit Voting.)
Once the initial set of motions is in place, the SAVE process begins. The first vote is a simple approval vote (AV), in which voters simply vote for which of the motions they like. The winner of the first round becomes the focus of the next round which is the first focused approval vote (FAV) round. There is time between the votes for voters to absorb the results and to discuss what happened. In the FAV round, voters are no longer voting for just the motions they approve of, but instead are asked to vote for all the motions they consider better than the focus. They can also vote for the focus itself, which is interpreted as a vote to end the process with the current focus being the consensus result.
After the vote tally for an FAV is counted, the system either finds the focus motion received more than half the vote and move votes that any other motion, in which case the consensus motion has been found and declared as the final winner. This round would be followed by a mandate approval vote, which is a normal AV vote with the sole purpose of measuring the mandate or support for every motion on the ballot.
What happens more often, particularly in the early rounds, is the focus does not get more than half the vote or, rarely, gets more than half the vote but less than some other motion. Then the system determines the focus for the next FAV round. If no motion received more than half the vote, the focus is a (strong or weak) Condorcet winner and remains as focus for the next round. If some other motion gets more than half the vote, the focus from the current round will be replaced by another motion as the focus for the next round. The algorithm for the next focus decision is strictly deterministic and public, as is the data driving the decision.
Since there are only a finite number of motions, at some point a motion will be chosen to be the focus that has already been the focus motion in a previous round. This, obviously, happens when there is a Condorcet winner, but it also happens when there is a top cycle. Whenever the next focus is a repeat, the voters are allowed to propose new motions. There are no restrictions on the motions other than their having a format that allows comparisons with existing motions. If a new motion introduces an entirely new issue, previous motions are presumed to be unspecified regarding the new issue. New motions (with or without new issues) can be thought of as being in one of two types: diversity motions, or compromise motions, although the division may not always be clear. If a voter does not like any of the initial motions, that voter might propose their own ideal motion as a diversity motion, an the motion will get votes from like-minded voters. If voters already have one or more motions they like in the mix, a voter might propose a compromise between the focus and a subjectively better motion that lost to the focus, with the thought that the compromise might get more votes against that focus.
The introduction of new motions means it is possible to defeat Condorcet winners and break top-cycles, and the electorate is thus freed from any limits from the initial set of motions, and more importantly it is quite likely that the final winner of a SAVE process will be better than any of the original motions.
As a political theory process, this vision of a future process is distinct from votes for individual offices or roles. It is a way for the electorate to provide guidance and feedback our legislative, judicial, and executive branches regarding what, exactly, we consent to, and perhaps more importantly what we do not consent to. Moreover, as a system that can be implemented over the internet, it allows voters to express their views in a nuanced way without having to write to a particular person or take part in a demonstration. With a large enough electorate and a secret ballot, it is safe to express one's true feelings on political issues.
So after all this, I have questions: Does this seem like a reasonable system? Is it worth pursuing?
I'll be posting a bit more about my website on SAVE a little later tonight. In the meantime, I hope you are all doing well, or at least as good as can be expected.
Best Wishes,
--tec -
@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.
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@cfrank Thanks for the comments. I certainly agree we need dialog, and I also think there is a hunger for something different. Whenever I see or hear about protests with the chant "Tell me what democracy looks like --- This is what democracy looks like." I feel like they have it wrong. What is going on isn't democracy, but rather an expression of a desire, a need, a hunger for democracy.
Since the 60's, there have been calls for structural change in our government, something more than just a change in leadership or representation. I developed SAVE with that in mind. SAVE is (or is supposed to be) a powerful method for making collective choices. It is designed to take input from everyone and come up with something we all can live with. It is, or could be, a way for we, the governed to tell our government what we want it to accomplish.
And our message isn't just directed at our government; it is directed at all of us. It becomes, or could become our own internal polylogue (monologue = 1, dialog = 2, polylogue = many) where we determine what it is we collectively want, and what we will consent to.
The way I see it, SAVE, if it really does what I designed it to do, is a tool to fill an unmet need. The start of the public phase of this project starts here, with other knowledgeable folks looking at SAVE and confirming (or refuting) that it addresses the issues that Arrow and Gibbard / Satterthwaite raised about voting systems, that this system will end with an outcome that if not completely ideal, is actually pretty close to it. And once the process is understood, it can spread to wherever groups want to make collective decisions.
From a voter's perspective, in the first round the question is "Which, if any, of these motions do I approve?" As this is AV, you can vote for as many items as you wish, and there is no penalty for honesty. With the second round, a focused approval vote, the question is different: Which, if any, of these motions are better than the focus motion? And, should we stop with the current focus motion as the final winner? Then, at the end when we have our final winner, we are back to a variant of the first question. Which of these motions do I support?. Added to this set of questions, we have the situation that whenever the focus repeats we can propose new motions that can provide a different take on possible solutions, introduce new problems to consider, or try to find a more acceptable motion to resolve our differences.
I'm at a conference this week so will be delayed in any responses, and I also just updated my site with some fixes and new features. Please be patient with my lack of immediate response. I am paying attention, and will respond. Thank you very much for providing feedback and opening this dialog.
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@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.
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@cfrank You have brought up several valid issues, and I think I have answers for some of them.
I agree that representatives can serve to make our government more efficient. I am not convinced that they always do so.
One real-world example of representatives making government more efficient is the citizen referendum system in Switzerland. Citizens can initiate petitions on a referendum and with enough votes the referendum is included in a vote. (I don't know a lot about the details, but there is a lot of material on the web.) Historically, most referenda do not pass, but I think in some of those case it has been because a referendum has raised the visibility and priority of an issue to representatives of the government, and as a result the government proposed a more politically feasible option that was accepted by the voters. (There are up to 4 elections each year.)
The key point of the Swiss government example is that the representatives can get feedback from their constituents in fairly short order if they stray too far from the will of the people, and that feedback gives them the opportunity to correct course.
Structural issues in the USA severely limit such feedback. We, as the general population, have to write letters, make phone calls, attend meetings. While in the meantime potential and active office holders contact lobbyists to set up fund-raising events with donors in order to raise campaign funds. Money does not always decide elections, but it can certainly influence them.
One of the things SAVE can do (at least how I see it) is raise issues and provide real, solid numbers about what is important to the electorate. While using SAVE for a simple yes/no petition is severe over-engineering, that is not its purpose. SAVE allows multiple issues to be processed in parallel. Single issues can be combined with other issues either to build coalitions, or because the issues are related and part of a larger whole.
I'm beginning to think that my choice of the word 'consent' is not quite right. SAVE is a way to implement multi-party, multi-issue negotiation at scale, to determine what we want our representatives to do. It is not passively consenting to something someone else has proposed, but actively and collectively constructing something acceptable to a super-majority of the participants.
Part of SAVE will definitely involve consent as part of a review of our current collective state, as we express what we think is correct or appropriate. And part of SAVE will definitely involve denial of consent as we express what we think is incorrect or inappropriate. Yet the most important aspect of SAVE is that it can involve everyone concerned with an issue.
US politicians, whether they won or lost, have often said 'the people have spoken' when the election results are in. I strongly disagree. At best, under our current system, the people have grunted. SAVE allows us to articulate our collective will, and speak it as truth to ourselves, and to make clear to those of us who have chosen to represent us exactly what we want done.
I'm not sure I've responded to all your issues, but we can certainly iterate for a few more rounds.
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@tec referenda are interesting as an example, I would say they are more efficient in a sense, but the cost of that 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?