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.
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.