This post describes a system of voting/payments where you can make multiple votes, depending on how strongly you value your preferred outcome, but each vote costs more than the vote before.
Identity management and collusion are big issues with these systems, as the essay points out.
For programmers, one way to think about this is that each voter has a state, n, that tracks how many of times they've voted. And each vote is more expensive than the last. Eventually you either run out of money or you lack the desire to spend more money on another vote.
But if you can create a new voter account as easily as you can create a new Gmail account, then once n gets sufficiently high, you just switch to a new account to lower the price of your vote.
Or if a really rich voter with a high n-value pays someone with a low-n value to make a vote on their behalf, the system collapses as well.
Enforcing strict identity management (e.g. requiring valid state-issued ID cards) and implementing secret voting can help address these problems, but my guess is that if there is a strong enough incentive, people will try their hardest and come up with novel ways to thwart these safeguards.
But if you can create a new voter account as easily as you can create a new Gmail account
This is generally described as a Sybil attack [1].
you just switch to a new account to lower the price of your vote. ... Or if a really rich voter with a high n-value pays someone with a low-n value to make a vote on their behalf
AFAICT the article discusses these problems:
Perhaps the biggest challenge to consider with this concept of quadratic payments is the practical implementation issue of identity and bribery/collusion. ... Fortunately, there are technological means that can help, combining together zero-knowledge proofs, encryption and other cryptographic technologies to achieve the precise desired set of privacy and verifiability properties.
Fortunately, there are technological means that can help, combining together zero-knowledge proofs, encryption and other cryptographic technologies to achieve the precise desired set of privacy and verifiability properties.
This is placing too much trust in what is incomprehensible mathematics for 99.999% of the population. Even for those who understand it, they won't have any convincing way of being assured that 1) the maths is perfect and there are no flaws and 2) the voting technology in use is perfectly implemented.
On the other hand, the 'nineteenth century technology' of secret ballots is both obvious and simple. It's a shame that people like Vitalik are so dismissive of it.
I'm a developer with a strong math background, very security-minded, with experience using cryptocurrencies, pgp/gpg, privacy tools, etc.
I still would not be able to evaluate any sort of crypto program and certify its integrity, nor find any (save for the most eggregious) flaws. Even then, I have brought up questions in code reviews of "this seems to be flawed" only to learn "technically yes, but we have to do such gymnastics because of constraints xyz".
I, too, was big on the "blockchain is gonna make e-voting possible! Ra ra ra!" hype train for a while, but eventually wisened up to my own naivety.
I think paper is great because it's both proof of work (it had to be printed/written/modified) and proof of stake (e,g. I possess it and I can attest to its chain of custody), with zero lines of code!
SHA1 "is incomprehensible mathematics for 99.999% of the population", yet we do use it to great success. Same with public key cryptography. It doesn't seem to bother people that can't implement ssh/https from top of their heads, right?
On the other hand, the 'nineteenth century technology' of secret ballots is both obvious and simple. It's a shame that people like Vitalik are so dismissive of it.
You can't write smart contracts based on secret ballots. The dream (well, one dream) is to have governance based on an ecosystem of programs that can vote perhaps hundreds of times a second. A lot of democratic procedure is built to work around the limitations of physical voting; this could qualitatively change the way decision-making works.
I don't think secret voting is as much of an issue as people make it out to be. Vote buying would in theory be a problem with today's usual voting systems, but in practice doesn't seem to be an issue. If we're voting on Proposition 1234 and I really really care but you don't, I should be willing to pay you to vote my way. But we don't see that happening.
You don't see it happening (much) because we have a secret ballot. If I really care about Proposition 1234 I can sell my vote to you, collect the fees, and still vote however I want. There have been cases where someone felt compelled to vote for something they didn't want because they didn't want to be seen voting the other way [their boss would fire them, or such situations], thus we no longer allow anyone to find out how an individual voted.
Ah, I thought this was about another kind of secrecy emphasized in the article:
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. [emphasis theirs]
This is the part I was saying doesn't seem so necessary.
I think that goes along with what the parent mentioned. If someone can prove how they voted, then Person A can buy Person B's vote and request proof that Person B voted that way. However, if Person B can't prove which way they voted and it is just based off trust then Person B can lie and still vote however they'd like.
It's a really nice property to have, though-- often on the path of authoritarianism is being threatened and having to pass various kinds of loyalty/political tests... if you could prove your vote this would just help that along.
Not really. If the vote was against you the entire community knows the majority are united against you and that power in numbers limits what punishment you can do. If the vote was for you then you are punishing your supporters more than your detractors.
Of course size and scale matter. China can still oppress Hong Kong even with a secret ballot because Hong Kong isn't large enough even united. (or are they?). However most cases are at least covered by secret ballots.
Like a vote-trading scheme where I can give you my vote on this issue I don't care about, to buy your support on some other issue you don't care about?
I've contemplated that too, but I'm not sure it leads to better results. I think good results come from amassing voters who are genuinely engaged on an issue, and entrenching a means for them to become well-informed before casting their ballot.
A system to deliver that, blocks the noise of political issues I don't care about (I simply don't participate, which is a good outcome since my participation adds little-to-negative value) and surfaces those I do. It provides me with expert analysis, arguments and counterarguments (something like StackOverflow to bubble the best content to the top?). And it makes more economical and efficient use of my attention.
I'm not advocating for any vote trading or vote buying. I think both would be terrible. I'm saying that both are incentivized in a traditional voting system but we just don't see it happening. Therefore, the fact that they're incentivized in a quadratic system doesn't mean it would actually be a problem. I'd rather be able to verify that I voted yes on prop 1234.
It's not just whether or not vote-trading schemes are a good thing or not, but the unfortunate issue that if voter secrecy is weakened to allow for vote trading, then abuses such as forced voting, blackmail or coercion also become viable.
I don't understand how the n value is even calculated in the first place. It never really said. It seems like a rich person only needs to buy one more vote than the poor person to win. I guess this works if the number of rich people is much much lower than the number of poor people.
This is also interesting mostly in a theoretical sense. The rich would never let any system like this go live.
According to the Austrian school N cannot be calculated. There are too many variables - and the people change their values in real time for various reasons (including irrational reasons).
The rich don't care though, because while they cannot calculate n, they can estimate it, and then go over by a bit just to make sure.
Comments
This post describes a system of voting/payments where you can make multiple votes, depending on how strongly you value your preferred outcome, but each vote costs more than the vote before.
Identity management and collusion are big issues with these systems, as the essay points out.
For programmers, one way to think about this is that each voter has a state, n, that tracks how many of times they've voted. And each vote is more expensive than the last. Eventually you either run out of money or you lack the desire to spend more money on another vote.
But if you can create a new voter account as easily as you can create a new Gmail account, then once n gets sufficiently high, you just switch to a new account to lower the price of your vote.
Or if a really rich voter with a high n-value pays someone with a low-n value to make a vote on their behalf, the system collapses as well.
Enforcing strict identity management (e.g. requiring valid state-issued ID cards) and implementing secret voting can help address these problems, but my guess is that if there is a strong enough incentive, people will try their hardest and come up with novel ways to thwart these safeguards.
This is generally described as a Sybil attack [1].
AFAICT the article discusses these problems:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
Fortunately, there are technological means that can help, combining together zero-knowledge proofs, encryption and other cryptographic technologies to achieve the precise desired set of privacy and verifiability properties.
This is placing too much trust in what is incomprehensible mathematics for 99.999% of the population. Even for those who understand it, they won't have any convincing way of being assured that 1) the maths is perfect and there are no flaws and 2) the voting technology in use is perfectly implemented.
On the other hand, the 'nineteenth century technology' of secret ballots is both obvious and simple. It's a shame that people like Vitalik are so dismissive of it.
I'm a developer with a strong math background, very security-minded, with experience using cryptocurrencies, pgp/gpg, privacy tools, etc.
I still would not be able to evaluate any sort of crypto program and certify its integrity, nor find any (save for the most eggregious) flaws. Even then, I have brought up questions in code reviews of "this seems to be flawed" only to learn "technically yes, but we have to do such gymnastics because of constraints xyz".
I, too, was big on the "blockchain is gonna make e-voting possible! Ra ra ra!" hype train for a while, but eventually wisened up to my own naivety.
I think paper is great because it's both proof of work (it had to be printed/written/modified) and proof of stake (e,g. I possess it and I can attest to its chain of custody), with zero lines of code!
SHA1 "is incomprehensible mathematics for 99.999% of the population", yet we do use it to great success. Same with public key cryptography. It doesn't seem to bother people that can't implement ssh/https from top of their heads, right?
You can't write smart contracts based on secret ballots. The dream (well, one dream) is to have governance based on an ecosystem of programs that can vote perhaps hundreds of times a second. A lot of democratic procedure is built to work around the limitations of physical voting; this could qualitatively change the way decision-making works.
I don't think secret voting is as much of an issue as people make it out to be. Vote buying would in theory be a problem with today's usual voting systems, but in practice doesn't seem to be an issue. If we're voting on Proposition 1234 and I really really care but you don't, I should be willing to pay you to vote my way. But we don't see that happening.
You don't see it happening (much) because we have a secret ballot. If I really care about Proposition 1234 I can sell my vote to you, collect the fees, and still vote however I want. There have been cases where someone felt compelled to vote for something they didn't want because they didn't want to be seen voting the other way [their boss would fire them, or such situations], thus we no longer allow anyone to find out how an individual voted.
Ah, I thought this was about another kind of secrecy emphasized in the article:
This is the part I was saying doesn't seem so necessary.
I think that goes along with what the parent mentioned. If someone can prove how they voted, then Person A can buy Person B's vote and request proof that Person B voted that way. However, if Person B can't prove which way they voted and it is just based off trust then Person B can lie and still vote however they'd like.
You can do that today. You could have sold your vote in the 2016 election. It just doesn't seem to be a thing people do.
How can you do that today? Can you get the equivalent of a receipt from voting?
One possibility that comes to mind is filling out a vote-by-mail ballot and letting them verify and send it in.
It's a really nice property to have, though-- often on the path of authoritarianism is being threatened and having to pass various kinds of loyalty/political tests... if you could prove your vote this would just help that along.
Votes are counted aggregated publicly on some level, so you can punish/reward whole communities.
Not really. If the vote was against you the entire community knows the majority are united against you and that power in numbers limits what punishment you can do. If the vote was for you then you are punishing your supporters more than your detractors.
Of course size and scale matter. China can still oppress Hong Kong even with a secret ballot because Hong Kong isn't large enough even united. (or are they?). However most cases are at least covered by secret ballots.
Like a vote-trading scheme where I can give you my vote on this issue I don't care about, to buy your support on some other issue you don't care about?
I've contemplated that too, but I'm not sure it leads to better results. I think good results come from amassing voters who are genuinely engaged on an issue, and entrenching a means for them to become well-informed before casting their ballot.
A system to deliver that, blocks the noise of political issues I don't care about (I simply don't participate, which is a good outcome since my participation adds little-to-negative value) and surfaces those I do. It provides me with expert analysis, arguments and counterarguments (something like StackOverflow to bubble the best content to the top?). And it makes more economical and efficient use of my attention.
I'm not advocating for any vote trading or vote buying. I think both would be terrible. I'm saying that both are incentivized in a traditional voting system but we just don't see it happening. Therefore, the fact that they're incentivized in a quadratic system doesn't mean it would actually be a problem. I'd rather be able to verify that I voted yes on prop 1234.
It's not just whether or not vote-trading schemes are a good thing or not, but the unfortunate issue that if voter secrecy is weakened to allow for vote trading, then abuses such as forced voting, blackmail or coercion also become viable.
It happens in Russia a lot. It happened in the past in Ukraine. Vote buying is not a theoretical problem.
I don't understand how the n value is even calculated in the first place. It never really said. It seems like a rich person only needs to buy one more vote than the poor person to win. I guess this works if the number of rich people is much much lower than the number of poor people.
This is also interesting mostly in a theoretical sense. The rich would never let any system like this go live.
According to the Austrian school N cannot be calculated. There are too many variables - and the people change their values in real time for various reasons (including irrational reasons).
The rich don't care though, because while they cannot calculate n, they can estimate it, and then go over by a bit just to make sure.
I think he's being deliberately vague because the meaning of "n" depends on the application.