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Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by mc32 on Friday May 03, 2019 @08:47AM (#19817897)
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 can expend multiple “bullets” to counter.

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by alipang on Friday May 03, 2019 @08:49AM (#19817908)
This seems to be the obvious problem. If I only care about X, and you only about Y, we could vote individually (100 tokens -> 10 votes for X, 100 tokens -> 10 votes for Y), or we could collude and make that vote (2 * 50 tokens -> 2 * 7 votes X, 2 * 50 tokens -> 2 * 7 votes Y).
Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by gyaniv on Friday May 03, 2019 @08:55AM (#19817949)
I don't see the problem with that, because it would require me to convince you to vote for Y although you want X.

And in addition, seeing as this is an anonymous (I'm assuming) vote, then I could lie to you and vote my way (to get more votes for Y), but then if everyone will do it, the colluding wouldn't work, so we need to be able to trust each other and work together, which is exactly what we in the end, for people to work together and not against each other.

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by ulucs on Friday May 03, 2019 @09:07AM (#19818034)
Coordinated groups have voting power of sqrt(total money)*sqrt(number of individuals), uncoordinated ones have sqrt(money). If you are for some cause, you should just find like-minded individuals and pool your total money. They have very limited incentive for keeping the money for themselves because they also agree with you on the issue.

Then the other side should also coordinate tightly in this manner, and now you have a new problem: polarization.

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by anigbrowl on Monday May 06, 2019 @01:15PM (#19841543)
Yeah but you're assuming people naturally line up in two camps. It's possible that you've been inadvertently trained to think this way if you inhabit a duopolistic society.
Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by Jolter on Friday May 03, 2019 @12:28PM (#19819793)
Money?
Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by mlillie on Friday May 03, 2019 @12:55PM (#19820074)
100 'dollars' to spend
Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by luckylion on Friday May 03, 2019 @09:08AM (#19818039)
> I don't see the problem with that, because it would require me to convince you to vote for Y although you want X.

X and Y need not be alternatives for the same problem, X might be about financial deregulation and Y about privacy deregulation.

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by Redoubts on Saturday May 04, 2019 @09:38AM (#19826366)
Sounds like how party coalitions work in the US.
Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by btown on Sunday May 05, 2019 @08:42AM (#19832509)
“Your religion, your salvation, requires that you allocate tokens as your local Party Organizer assigns. Only then can we combat the godless agenda the elites have shamelessly created this quadratic system to perpetuate. Do not let them bait you from deviating from our coordinated plan to stop them.”

Anonymous voting doesn’t help when independent thought itself is trained away from an early age.

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by lazzlazzlazz on Sunday May 05, 2019 @12:15AM (#19831122)
This is just persuading your compatriots to vote, which is normal and part of democracy. That's not "collusion" (an increasingly vacuous word these days).

There's nothing wrong with persuading people.

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by godelski on Friday May 03, 2019 @10:51PM (#19824058)
This is democracy though.

The idea of a majority having more power than a minority is, as another user puts it "a feature, not a bug". If your goal is to best represent your population, then you want a system that counts people's opinions equally, regardless of what group/s they belong to.

The problem here isn't the voting system so much as the structure. The way to "better represent" minority groups is to have different weightings to those groups. But then that's difficult because you have to specify which groups are more equal than others. Clearly we like racial minorities and don't like minority groups like white nationalists (at least as a public), but most lines aren't this easy to differentiate.

The goal of voting systems like this is not so much to tackle this majority vs minority problem but rather to reduce tribalism. In a first past the post voting style your optimal strategy is not to pick the thing you like the most, but to rather pick the thing that you think is most likely to win and more closely aligns to your beliefs. These voting systems are more about finding common beliefs. For example, republicans and democrats agree on many issues. These systems are about anti-polarization, not about weighted representation.

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by EnderViaAnsible on Saturday May 04, 2019 @12:15AM (#19824402)
Majorities being > than minorities is an aspect of democracy in its natural state, for certain, but I would not go so far as to call it a feature. The bicameral legislature of the U.S. was designed precisely to avoid this "feature"!
Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by dragonwriter on Tuesday May 07, 2019 @08:20AM (#19848724)
> The bicameral legislature of the U.S. was designed precisely to avoid this "feature"!

Not really, it was just made to weight the scales (in both houses, by different mechanisms) so that a particular set of interests[0] would be less likely be a political minority even if they were a numeric minority. It retained the feature that political minorities were easily suppressed by the political majority, so long as it was a political minority in both houses.

[0] The slave states of the South.

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by falcor84 on Monday May 06, 2019 @08:29AM (#19838763)
Could you please elaborate?
Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by mc32 on Friday May 03, 2019 @10:58PM (#19824091)
What comes to mind to me is highly organized is, for example, a NIMBY crowd; a pro crowd is not as tightly coordinated, they get trounced, even if in polling the pros are in majority.
Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by gvhst on Friday May 03, 2019 @11:46PM (#19824313)
How do you define coordinated? Let's say you define coordinated as a group who on average spends a greater % of their voting budget on an issue than the other side. You also have a situation where the minority is coordinated and the majority is disorganized. In this situation, each individual in the majority would have to allocate a smaller percentage of their budget to an issue than an individual in a minority in order to have the same amount of influence on an issue. This is because.

1) You are spreading the vote credit cost across a larger population 2) Because of quadratic voting, if you hold the total number of a group's voting credits put towards an issue constant as you add additional people to a group, the impact that a group has on a particular issue grows.

Because of these two factors, the majority can be quite a bit more disorganized than the minority and still control the issue.

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by burgerzzz on Saturday May 04, 2019 @07:36PM (#19830091)
Some people are more equal than others? Umm... no.
Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by jakeogh on Saturday May 04, 2019 @03:06AM (#19824930)
Hence the US is a republic.
Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by godelski on Saturday May 04, 2019 @09:29PM (#19830519)
The second sentence of Wikipedia for "Republic"

> The primary positions of power within a republic are not inherited, but are attained through democracy, oligarchy or autocracy.

We're a democratic republic. Just saying the US is not a democracy but rather a republic is a woefully uninformed statement. They are not disjoint. Now let's stop parroting this phrase once and for all.

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by jakeogh on Sunday May 05, 2019 @04:40AM (#19831814)
Wikipedia is not a source. It's a spot to see what random people wrote about something. Maybe it's useful to find something, often I find it useful to see what is not said, but citing it is pointless unless you drill down to the edit and cite the editor.

https://www.bartleby.com/73/1593.html

The important point is we protect minority positions via inalienable rights. That is not guaranteed in a pure democracy. It takes a near impossible situation to disarm a minority in the Unites States. It is what sets up apart from traditional democracies. I'm fine with the term Democratic Republic, but if you are concerned about parroting It's not the word republic that gets parroted.

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by godelski on Wednesday May 08, 2019 @03:11AM (#19856561)
> Wikipedia is not a source.

Yes, I remember when our teachers used to hound this into us. But frankly Wikipedia has been as verifiable as the Encyclopedia Britannica. If you're going to say Wikipedia (the most commonly cited resource) isn't providing a good definition, provide a good source that counters. Your reply has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion at hand.

Also, see [0] (a good source) 1b and the discussion below.

If you're going to act high and mighty, do some background research. No one likes an armchair scholar. And if you're going to be a combative armchair scholar, you better do some actual fact checking.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/republic

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by jakeogh on Wednesday May 08, 2019 @06:14AM (#19857452)
a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law

Calling it a Democracy without mentioning the more important word misses the point; your original comment:

The idea of a majority having more power than a minority is, as another user puts it "a feature, not a bug".

That is exactly what our Republic protects against. The minority has the same inalienable rights as the majority.

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by dragonwriter on Saturday May 04, 2019 @09:52PM (#19830611)
> We're a democratic republic

In theory, more of a federal republic whose constituent members are democratic republics than a democratic republic itself. In practice those members are more oligarchic (specifically plutocratic) than democratic, though, but most of the people saying “republic not a democracy” probably don't want to come out and say “federation of plutocracies.”

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by logfromblammo on Friday May 03, 2019 @11:00AM (#19819012)
The voting method breaks down entirely when you consider strategic voting by groups, and multiple-repetitions game strategies.

100 players would form a voting cartel, and each member would spread their votes out among all the members' favorite issues. Reneging on the cartel's rules means that the entire cartel retaliates on the next vote.

So each party has exactly 100 issues in their platform, and no individual voter can do anything to stop them.

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by memory_grep on Friday May 03, 2019 @03:15PM (#19821376)
You're assuming votes are public, which is not usually the case. If there's no way to check someone else's vote, there's no way to enforce a voting block.
Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by logfromblammo on Friday May 03, 2019 @04:25PM (#19821940)
If the votes aren't public enough to see the ballots, how do you know if a voting district cast the correct number of votes for the number of ballots cast? How do you know if the number of quadratic votes match the sum of sqrts of the individual votes? How do you check to see if anyone's cheating?

If you can see the ballots, you can filter for the ones that match the cartel platform, and count to 100. There may be a voting coordination strategy to find out who cheated. Maybe instead of 100 members, you have 99, and each member votes 2 for a different issue.

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by lopmotr on Friday May 03, 2019 @04:39PM (#19822057)
If there are enough candidates, you can encode a unique ID in the pattern of your individual votes to prove who you are to somebody reading anonymous ballot papers. I've heard this is possible in Australia with a huge list of candidates and multiple votes.
Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by jgowdy on Saturday May 04, 2019 @02:52AM (#19824880)
Legislative votes aren't typically public?
Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by dfischer on Friday May 03, 2019 @07:12PM (#19823079)
I like the idea of voting quadratically with money. Every vote scales with cost. Instead of hiding the reality, just expose it and limit it with quadratic scaling.
Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by MaxBarraclough on Friday May 03, 2019 @07:56PM (#19823299)
And people with no disposable income get zero representation, and aren't even worth pandering lip service.

Doesn't sound sustainable, but it's an interesting idea to play with. You could adjust the price-point to make it more or less price-competitive with lobbying and conventional bribery, and to serve as a sort of tax. Might make for a good cyberpunk setting.

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by dfischer on Tuesday May 07, 2019 @01:27PM (#19851531)
Well one vote is $1. The economies of scale fit in really quickly with manipulation. Second $4 and so on.
Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by empath75 on Friday May 03, 2019 @02:33PM (#19821012)
> So people who vote in isolation have less influence than people who organize and vote as a bloc.

I think that’s a feature not a bug. It would encourage people to propose plan or candidates that are acceptable to a wider part of the electorate.

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by munk-a on Friday May 03, 2019 @08:37PM (#19823473)
The US is already feeling the pain of bloc voting though - the two party system has managed to heavily entrench itself - we need to look at voting systems that may experimentation free or cheap.

I'd much rather see IRV gain traction to remove the spoiler effect and disincentivise negative campaigning.

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by philwelch on Saturday May 04, 2019 @03:34AM (#19825020)
IRV does a poor job of that.
Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by iambateman on Friday May 03, 2019 @06:34PM (#19822856)
All voting systems benefit highly coordinated groups.
Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by gvhst on Friday May 03, 2019 @11:13PM (#19824162)
Here is some back of the envelope math that I did: Assume you have two groups who are each 100% focused on a cause which the other group has no opinion of.

n = people in each group

b = individual vote budget

Each Group Votes Independently: n * sqrt(b) votes

If a group colludes s.t. group A gives (1/2)b votes to group B's issue and vice versa you get: 2 * n * sqrt((1/2)b)) votes which simplifies into Sqrt(2) * n * sqrt(b).

Yet coordinating between these two groups becomes more difficult and costly, growing somewhere between n (perfect coordination) and n^2 (total decentralization). Thus, regardless of how you coordinate it will always be more expensive than the influence you gain which grows at sqrt().

Even in this simple assumption collusion becomes a negative value decision.

Re:A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive by hotpockets on Friday May 03, 2019 @06:34PM (#19822857)
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 by bduerst on Friday May 03, 2019 @06:33PM (#19822853)
Increased cooperation across groups is the benefit - i.e. the opposite of zealotry and partisanship.