Politics

Voting Theory

  • No silver bullet.
  • Politics In The Animal Kingdom is a great summary of a few methods.
  • There are better ways to build a ballot.
  • Approval voting is usually a good choice. Is simple to explain and to count, and comprehensibility is an important factor when choosing a voting method. That said, there are really good alternatives.
  • Voting isn’t really a way to get rid of conflict - it just pushes it underground. Spend the time Talking about it.
  • Pairwise comparison methods can help find consensus by comparing options two at a time. This reduces cognitive load and can reveal subtle preferences that might be missed in traditional voting. Because each comparison is “local”, you never have to answer difficult grand questions like “what are my top 5 projects”. Instead, you answer much more concrete questions like “which of these two projects is more important to me?”.
  • Voting is a zero-sum game, meaning that whomever wins does so at the expense of someone else. As a result, voting promotes competition, not cooperation. This issue can be mitigated when:
    • The default mode is failure, people are motivated to figure out how to escape their terrible fate. If one person loses, everybody loses.
    • There are clear actions, timelines, and consequences. By specifying the outcome beforehand, and making it undesirable, there is no choice but to take action or lose the game.
  • Pass/fail voting is unavoidably inefficient and excludes nuance; specialized, asynchronous, multivariate processes can reduce cognitive burden and broaden participation.
  • We need new, specialized decision-making processes that:
    • Push more “thinking” as possible into software, so people can participate asynchronously.
    • Replace yes/no votes with multivariate, real-valued allocations (“shades of gray”) so every voice moves the dial.
    • Allow liquid-democracy–style delegation, so expertise flows to where it’s needed.
    • Build in regularization (e.g. caps on how fast budgets can shift) and sunset/failure signals, so policies self-correct or expire.
    • Architect coordination as a fractal “pace-layering” of ever more specific algorithms, each handling half the remaining complexity with the simplest tool.

Interesting Ideas