Isn’t “collusion” here just another way of describing political organizing? Like, different interest groups which each care only about their own issues get together and decide to support each other’s issues so that they can win power and each accomplish their agendas.
This seems....at the very least not bad, and probably actively good.
A good historical example of this would be the Teamsters joining in coalition with the MLK-era civil rights movement. Are you saying this is bad collusion? Or is this good solidarity and organizing? How would one tell the difference?
The “problem” you are describing here is people making political choices to join coalitions, and exists in normal democracy just as much as it exists in QV.
Within the context of this post, collusion means any way of getting around the quadratic cost of voting by spreading the votes across multiple people. This is undesirable because it defeats the purpose of QV, in much the same way that allowing some people to cast multiple votes in regular voting would. The purpose of QV is to get an accurate picture of how much people care about things. You could add a separate layer to allow coalition forming, but the QV layer is the wrong place to allow this.
Further, while the examples I present in the post are symmetrical, there are also less symmetrical examples of collusion. For example, even with a secret ballot, if threatened with bodily harm, I expect a significant fraction of people to be intimidated into voting the way they are instructed (and this argument applies doubly for agents whose actions can be proven).
But it seems like a lot of this political organizing (or “collusion”) occurs through the channel of convincing people to start caring about your issue. This is a good thing! The Teamsters in the 1960s really put themselves on the line for Civil Rights, I don’t think it’s correct to say that they did it for purely Machiavellian reasons. At least now, the Teamsters seem really proud of their history on this and have a whole section of their website devoted to it.
Actually paying people to vote your way would be illegal of course. But it’s illegal now, and not widespread in the United States AFAIK, because the risk/benefit on it is so bad. To expand on this a bit, to the extent this is what you’re referring to as “collusion”, in a polity with any significant number of voters, you’d have to buy a lot of votes to influence the outcome (bare minimum thousands, most of the time). But every single person that you approach with an offer to buy their vote is a risk to turn you in, and you face serious felony charges if caught. Totally not worth it.
If what you really mean is using policy to “buy” the votes, then we’re back to this seeming good. The outcome is that a lot of people get a policy that they like, and they use their votes in a way that seems likely to them to get that. Again, seems good.
To the extent that you are using actual dollars to “vote on” (really buy) policy outcomes, I guess you have a lot of other problems with the system. To the extent you are using “voting tokens” or something as described in Vitalik’s post, then the proper, virtuous, and pro-democratic strategy is to convince more people to spend some voting tokens on your issue. Then you end up with an outcome broadly acceptable to many, which is what you are supposed to get in a democracy. Of course, it’s not that clear to me that this in practice works out all that differently than regular democracy, since convincing the mass public to support you is much more effective than spending a lot of tokens yourself.
I don’t see how that’s a useful hypothetical scenario. If you have enough secret agents that you can coerce a large percentage of voters to do what you want, what voting system is able to stop you?
“I will help you with your thing if you do the same for me” is the core ethos of non-dictatorial civilization. IMO, QV encouraging cooperation (not “collusion”) is a point in its favor, not against.
A good historical example of this would be the Teamsters joining in coalition with the MLK-era civil rights movement. Are you saying this is bad collusion?
In general, collusion is “secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others” (Google dictionary). When the Teamsters joined in coalition with the MLK-era civil rights movement, this was neither secret, nor illegal, nor intended to cheat or deceive others. So it was not collusion.
In the opening post, the term “collusion” presumably comes from Vitalik’s article: Quadratic Payments: A Primer.
Collusion is also tricky. If we can’t prevent people from selling their votes, the mechanisms once again collapse into one-dollar-one-vote. We don’t just need votes to be anonymous and private (while still making the final result provable and public); we need votes to be so private that even the person who made the vote can’t prove to anyone else what they voted for.
If two people are trading votes in a Vitalik’s Quadratic Voting, they are bypassing the mechanisms to make votes anonymous, private, and unprovable, which are the same mechanisms that are intended to prevent the collusion of selling votes. I don’t know if Vitalik intended for vote trading to be illegal under QV, but that’s my interpretation.
The “collusion” issue leads to a state of affairs that two political groups can gain more political power if they can organize and get along well enough to actively coordinate. Why should two groups have more power just because they can cooperate?
The impression I got, was that collusion between likeminded people created an “indirect democracy” where causes supported by the most people could most efficiently advocate their position.
If that is the case, then this system does punish parties that are less willing (or able) to cooperate, which could feasibly be a bad thing, if it means that unpopular results occur because one side is less nuanced on it’s position (e.g. a 40% group beats three 20% groups who cannot cooperate).
One way around this, maybe, is a Negative Vote (allowing a united method opposition), but that has foreseeable issues, especially if Negative Voting is as efficient or more efficient than Positive.
A 40% group will (and IMO should) beat 3 non-cooperating 20% groups in pretty much any voting system.
tl;dr: I disagree. Other than first-past-the-post, which is terrible, 3 non-cooperating 20% groups with similar preferences will and should beat a co-operating 40% group. This is also true for quadratic voting.
Here is a detailed scenario matching your 40/20/20/20 example. Suppose we have the following voters:
Alice prefers apples to other fruit, and strongly prefers fruit to vegetables.
Bob prefers bananas to other fruit, and strongly prefers fruit to vegetables.
Charlie prefers cherries to other fruit, and strongly prefers fruit to vegetables.
Yasmine prefers yams to other vegetables, and strongly prefers vegetables to fruit.
Zebedee prefers zucchini to other vegetables, and strongly prefers vegetables to fruit.
Y and Z are able to coordinate. A, B, and C are not. This is not because Y and Z are more virtuous, nor because vegetables are better than fruit. It’s for the prosaic reason that A, B, and C do not share a common language. All voters have similar utility at stake, for example Charlie is not allergic to yams.
In a first-past-the-post voting system, with apple, bananas, cherries, yams, and zucchini on the ballot, Y and Z can coordinate to gets yams and zucchini on alternating days. This is good for Y and Z, but does not maximize utility.
However, in a (good) ranked voting system, we instead get a tie between apples, bananas, and cherries, which we break randomly. This is good for A, B, and C. Proportional representation would get a similar result, assuming that the representatives, unlike the voters, can coordinate. Approval voting would get a similar result in this example.
Quadratic voting calculations are a bit harder for me, and I had to experiment to get a near-optimal voting strategy.
Let’s suppose that A votes as follows:
$30 for Apples (+5.48)
$15 for Bananas (+3.87)
$15 for Cherries (+3.87)
$20 against Yams (-4.47)
$20 against Zucchini (-4.47)
B and C vote similarly but according to their own preferences. Naively this maps to A preferring apples to other fruits (by $15) but strongly preferring fruits to vegetables (by $35). I don’t have good intuitions for whether A would vote this way in practice.
Meanwhile Y and Z coordinate and vote as follows:
$10 against Apples (-3.16)
$10 against Bananas (-3.16)
$10 against cherries (-3.16)
$70 for yams (+8.36)
On alternate days Y and Z coordinate to vote for zucchini, as in the first-past-the-post coordination example. Again, I don’t have good intuitions for how they should vote, but I experimented with a dozen strategies and this one was best I found.
The results are:
Apples, Bananas, and Cherries: 6.90
Yams: 3.32
Zucchini: −13.4
So although coordination/collusion allowed Y and Z to boost their effective voting power, they are not able to enforce rule-by-minority in this example.
OK, by “cannot cooperate”, you meant “unable to coordinate communication about their already-shared values” rather than “unable to agree to support each others’ unrelated interests”. Got it.
Okay, I accept your point that a cooperating 40% group will beat three non-cooperating 20% groups with unrelated interests in pretty much any voting system. That doesn’t change whether A+B+C are physically incapable of communicating, or they lack sufficient trust to make an agreement stick, or there is a law against voting agreements that they are following (and Y+Z are not), or something else.
So it’s not the case that QV is vulnerable to collusion/cooperation when other voting systems are not. I think the remaining debate is whether QV is more vulnerable, or vulnerable in a worse way. I’m not sure what the answer is to that.
(I’m not brgind or EdgyCam, I can’t speak to what they meant)
Isn’t “collusion” here just another way of describing political organizing? Like, different interest groups which each care only about their own issues get together and decide to support each other’s issues so that they can win power and each accomplish their agendas.
This seems....at the very least not bad, and probably actively good.
A good historical example of this would be the Teamsters joining in coalition with the MLK-era civil rights movement. Are you saying this is bad collusion? Or is this good solidarity and organizing? How would one tell the difference?
The “problem” you are describing here is people making political choices to join coalitions, and exists in normal democracy just as much as it exists in QV.
Within the context of this post, collusion means any way of getting around the quadratic cost of voting by spreading the votes across multiple people. This is undesirable because it defeats the purpose of QV, in much the same way that allowing some people to cast multiple votes in regular voting would. The purpose of QV is to get an accurate picture of how much people care about things. You could add a separate layer to allow coalition forming, but the QV layer is the wrong place to allow this.
Further, while the examples I present in the post are symmetrical, there are also less symmetrical examples of collusion. For example, even with a secret ballot, if threatened with bodily harm, I expect a significant fraction of people to be intimidated into voting the way they are instructed (and this argument applies doubly for agents whose actions can be proven).
But it seems like a lot of this political organizing (or “collusion”) occurs through the channel of convincing people to start caring about your issue. This is a good thing! The Teamsters in the 1960s really put themselves on the line for Civil Rights, I don’t think it’s correct to say that they did it for purely Machiavellian reasons. At least now, the Teamsters seem really proud of their history on this and have a whole section of their website devoted to it.
Actually paying people to vote your way would be illegal of course. But it’s illegal now, and not widespread in the United States AFAIK, because the risk/benefit on it is so bad. To expand on this a bit, to the extent this is what you’re referring to as “collusion”, in a polity with any significant number of voters, you’d have to buy a lot of votes to influence the outcome (bare minimum thousands, most of the time). But every single person that you approach with an offer to buy their vote is a risk to turn you in, and you face serious felony charges if caught. Totally not worth it.
If what you really mean is using policy to “buy” the votes, then we’re back to this seeming good. The outcome is that a lot of people get a policy that they like, and they use their votes in a way that seems likely to them to get that. Again, seems good.
To the extent that you are using actual dollars to “vote on” (really buy) policy outcomes, I guess you have a lot of other problems with the system. To the extent you are using “voting tokens” or something as described in Vitalik’s post, then the proper, virtuous, and pro-democratic strategy is to convince more people to spend some voting tokens on your issue. Then you end up with an outcome broadly acceptable to many, which is what you are supposed to get in a democracy. Of course, it’s not that clear to me that this in practice works out all that differently than regular democracy, since convincing the mass public to support you is much more effective than spending a lot of tokens yourself.
I don’t see how that’s a useful hypothetical scenario. If you have enough secret agents that you can coerce a large percentage of voters to do what you want, what voting system is able to stop you?
“I will help you with your thing if you do the same for me” is the core ethos of non-dictatorial civilization. IMO, QV encouraging cooperation (not “collusion”) is a point in its favor, not against.
In general, collusion is “secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others” (Google dictionary). When the Teamsters joined in coalition with the MLK-era civil rights movement, this was neither secret, nor illegal, nor intended to cheat or deceive others. So it was not collusion.
In the opening post, the term “collusion” presumably comes from Vitalik’s article: Quadratic Payments: A Primer.
If two people are trading votes in a Vitalik’s Quadratic Voting, they are bypassing the mechanisms to make votes anonymous, private, and unprovable, which are the same mechanisms that are intended to prevent the collusion of selling votes. I don’t know if Vitalik intended for vote trading to be illegal under QV, but that’s my interpretation.
The “collusion” issue leads to a state of affairs that two political groups can gain more political power if they can organize and get along well enough to actively coordinate. Why should two groups have more power just because they can cooperate?
The impression I got, was that collusion between likeminded people created an “indirect democracy” where causes supported by the most people could most efficiently advocate their position.
If that is the case, then this system does punish parties that are less willing (or able) to cooperate, which could feasibly be a bad thing, if it means that unpopular results occur because one side is less nuanced on it’s position (e.g. a 40% group beats three 20% groups who cannot cooperate).
One way around this, maybe, is a Negative Vote (allowing a united method opposition), but that has foreseeable issues, especially if Negative Voting is as efficient or more efficient than Positive.
I don’t understand. A 40% group will (and IMO should) beat 3 non-cooperating 20% groups in pretty much any voting system.
A system that encourages groups to work together for their collective benefit seems like a solution for that situation, not a problem.
tl;dr: I disagree. Other than first-past-the-post, which is terrible, 3 non-cooperating 20% groups with similar preferences will and should beat a co-operating 40% group. This is also true for quadratic voting.
Here is a detailed scenario matching your 40/20/20/20 example. Suppose we have the following voters:
Alice prefers apples to other fruit, and strongly prefers fruit to vegetables.
Bob prefers bananas to other fruit, and strongly prefers fruit to vegetables.
Charlie prefers cherries to other fruit, and strongly prefers fruit to vegetables.
Yasmine prefers yams to other vegetables, and strongly prefers vegetables to fruit.
Zebedee prefers zucchini to other vegetables, and strongly prefers vegetables to fruit.
Y and Z are able to coordinate. A, B, and C are not. This is not because Y and Z are more virtuous, nor because vegetables are better than fruit. It’s for the prosaic reason that A, B, and C do not share a common language. All voters have similar utility at stake, for example Charlie is not allergic to yams.
In a first-past-the-post voting system, with apple, bananas, cherries, yams, and zucchini on the ballot, Y and Z can coordinate to gets yams and zucchini on alternating days. This is good for Y and Z, but does not maximize utility.
However, in a (good) ranked voting system, we instead get a tie between apples, bananas, and cherries, which we break randomly. This is good for A, B, and C. Proportional representation would get a similar result, assuming that the representatives, unlike the voters, can coordinate. Approval voting would get a similar result in this example.
Quadratic voting calculations are a bit harder for me, and I had to experiment to get a near-optimal voting strategy.
Let’s suppose that A votes as follows:
$30 for Apples (+5.48)
$15 for Bananas (+3.87)
$15 for Cherries (+3.87)
$20 against Yams (-4.47)
$20 against Zucchini (-4.47)
B and C vote similarly but according to their own preferences. Naively this maps to A preferring apples to other fruits (by $15) but strongly preferring fruits to vegetables (by $35). I don’t have good intuitions for whether A would vote this way in practice.
Meanwhile Y and Z coordinate and vote as follows:
$10 against Apples (-3.16)
$10 against Bananas (-3.16)
$10 against cherries (-3.16)
$70 for yams (+8.36)
On alternate days Y and Z coordinate to vote for zucchini, as in the first-past-the-post coordination example. Again, I don’t have good intuitions for how they should vote, but I experimented with a dozen strategies and this one was best I found.
The results are:
Apples, Bananas, and Cherries: 6.90
Yams: 3.32
Zucchini: −13.4
So although coordination/collusion allowed Y and Z to boost their effective voting power, they are not able to enforce rule-by-minority in this example.
OK, by “cannot cooperate”, you meant “unable to coordinate communication about their already-shared values” rather than “unable to agree to support each others’ unrelated interests”. Got it.
Okay, I accept your point that a cooperating 40% group will beat three non-cooperating 20% groups with unrelated interests in pretty much any voting system. That doesn’t change whether A+B+C are physically incapable of communicating, or they lack sufficient trust to make an agreement stick, or there is a law against voting agreements that they are following (and Y+Z are not), or something else.
So it’s not the case that QV is vulnerable to collusion/cooperation when other voting systems are not. I think the remaining debate is whether QV is more vulnerable, or vulnerable in a worse way. I’m not sure what the answer is to that.
(I’m not brgind or EdgyCam, I can’t speak to what they meant)