In my last article I introduced the concept of smart ballots that would automatically vote the opposite of a person of your choosing while maintaining full secrecy of their vote. Many people joined the discussion to critique its failure under a system with more than two choices. Today, I would like to dive deeper into the concept and expose more fallacies of the popular voting theology.
Voting is a Fundamental Human Right
This is the foundation of all democracy and the starting point of any discussion. Unfortunately, this statement doesn’t specify what kind of voting is a fundamental human right. If it is a human right, then where does it come from and why is it our right?
I decided to look into the holy books of voting theology and found some useful definitions from authoritative sources:
The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret ballot or by equivalent free voting procedures. - Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The basis of this right appears to be that the will of the people is the basis of the authority of government. Voting, therefore, is the means by which the people may express their will. Interestingly enough, a person’s expressed will must be kept secret according to the holy scriptures of human suffrage.
A voting system that does not allow the true will of the people to be expressed is one that is violating our fundamental right and therefore there is no basis for the authority of government.
The Right to Consent
The basis of the right to vote is therefore derived from the right to consent (or not) which is clearly the foundation of a free society. Democracy is the belief that all people universally agree to consent to the will of the majority. In other words, if more people consent than not then all people consent.
Ultimately all consent boils down to a simple Yes or No. Given a proposed law that will impact an individual, the will of the people requires a simple Yes or No.
Suppose the government gave the people the option to die by fire or die by ice. This is a false dichotomy under which the will of the people is impossible to express. Suppose we were given the option to nuke China or nuke Russia? The inability of a system to express all possible opinions of will means that a government is deriving its authority to restrict the options from some other source.
Binary Expresses All
All possible expressions of the will of the people can be represented as a body of law, which in turn can be represented as a binary number. A binary number consists of a series of Yes and No bits.
The will of the people can therefore be perfectly measured by doing a direct poll on each bit, with the majority vote on each bit resulting in the consensus will for that bit. Since all opinions can be represented by such a voting system and are directly measured, the will of the people can be known.
From this we can clearly see that any individual’s vote can be fully negated by another individual’s vote. It all boils down to string of Yes/No questions and each individual has the fundamental right to vote the opposite and thus nullify the influence of another individual.
Representative Democracy
Direct democracy is clearly not viable for any number of reasons. It simply doesn’t scale. The masses of people do not have the time, energy, nor intelligence to think about everything and come to a conclusion.
This is why we have “representative democracy”, we elect someone to represent us and then trust they will work with other representatives to reach consensus.
The right to specify someone to represent you is the mirror of the right to specify someone who represents your opposite. By specifying your opposite, you are in effect most accurately representing yourself. Instead of having a choice of a dozen people to represent me, I can have a choice of millions of people who most closely represent my opposite.
Negative Representation is More Accurate and More Scalable
When opposites collide they cancel out. This means that it becomes trivial to express far more of who you are and what your will is. Since your will is part of the public will and is the basis for the legitimacy of government, the right to negate someone else’s vote is a fundamental human right. To deny this right is to infringe on the range of public opinion that is capable of being expressed.
Consequences
Assuming a law was passed that allowed each individual to specify another individual whose vote they would like to cancel (assuming their vote was not already canceled), then the entire system would boil down to a group of voters who did not want to negate someone else's vote and who no one else wanted to negate.
In my prior article I assumed everyone would prefer to negate someone else, but that was me projecting my own bias on everyone else. For each person who chooses to vote rather than negate there exists another person who was not negated. This means that there would still be a large body of voters whose opinions could be polled.
This body of individuals would be the least polarizing group. A group of people whom have been pre-filtered by the masses to be the closest group of representatives that could be found. Everyone that was eliminated was a “polar opposite” of someone else and thus represent the set of least representative. Those that remain are therefore “most representative” and their subsequent votes will be more in line with the masses opinion than any other group of representatives.
This group of voters, being much smaller, would have far more flexible voting systems available to them. Systems that don’t scale to millions of people may scale to those who remain after all of the negative representatives have been removed.
If you believe that voting is a fundamental right derived from our human nature, then you must also hold that negative voting is the most expressive means of casting a ballot and representing yourself.
All other definitions of the “right to vote” are a statutory right or privilege granted to a person or group by a government. However, this definition is in contradiction to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that government authority comes from voting. Therefore, government cannot have authority to define the source of its own authority. If you believe government gets to set rules on voting, then you believe voting isn’t a human right, but a government granted privilege that can be revoked. In other words, you believe that government authority is derived from some other source than the will of the people expressed through voting.
Let's restore the right to vote by allowing people to express their anti-representative and negate their vote.
Yes, exactly! And it shows that no democracy exists.
Isn't it better to educate virtuous man and let him make the decision?
The problem is that modern "science" doesn't know how to create virtuous people. But it's the only solution, really. Like it or not, government is always some leader. Decisions are made by the leader. The problem of the present society is in bad leaders.
Sounds strange and illogical idea that if you combine 10 bad leaders in the council, they will begin to make good decisions. Isn't it stupid? How is it that they will begin to make good decisions? Will they become smarter and better together? What is this strange logic? Of course they will make bad decisions.
So why is society doing this pointless task - to collect the bad leaders in the group and expect them to make good decisions?
It may be better to focus on raising good leaders?
Hmm... This sounds a little bit too complex. I'd like to keep things as simple as possible.
I'm also skeptical if political philosophy is a good way to think about this. Blockchain governance and subjective proof of work might require totally new systems. Which one works well can be found out only by trying several different systems. Some of them will work and some of them won't – for reasons which are hard to see before system is actually in use.
We have to remember that there will be many subgroups in Steem in the future. There will be different languages and a lot of people who don't speak English. Some subgroups never communicate with each other and have no idea what others are doing. How does the voting system work in that situation?
Btw, if somebody is interested in democracy, Bryan Caplan's book The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies is a must-read.
In essence, democracy means that if you combine the 10 fools, they will take a good decision. Nonsense.
My upvote expresses my appreciation of your writing and your ideas and not my agreement with your argument.
I'm no bot. Why you downvoted my post? I have reputation 51, but now -3. What did I do?
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was spearheaded by Eleanore Roosevelt and modeled ,in large part, after the US Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence.
Just remember that . One has the right to vote but not the right to abuse that vote. With every right comes its responsibilities. What you do has an impact on others especially when it comes to voting so make sure you do it right.
Sorry but this is meaningless. Most people are 100% convinced they are doing it right by default, because how can they think they might be wrong? It's always the Others that are wrong.
and that is where societies main problem lies. We always think we are in the right even when doing things wrong
If a person believes that he cannot make a mistake, he's crazy. Only a complete fool is absolutely sure he is always right. Why give the fools freedom? It's like that to give freedom to the criminal. Is it a good idea?
oh yeah awesome shirt :)
In nearly all of the U.S., nonviolent, victimless felons are denied the right to vote. Drug offenders go to prison, are stripped of their guns, and then get their right to vote stripped. One of Nixon's advisors came out saying this was the point of the drug war - to imprison, disenfranchise, and disrupt the anti-war activists and black communities. Although I think democracy is a bad way to run and maintain a free society, it's what we've got to deal with. Voting absolutely has to be guaranteed for every citizen of a country, and under no circumstances should voting be taken away. There's too much potential for abuse of that power, as we've seen with the success of the culture-targeting legislation and enforcement behind the war on drugs. This is why we need to recognize that our rights are fundamental, and that any denial of rights outside of compensating victims for crimes, is dangerous as well as morally wrong. In other words, we cannot let a government "grant" us our rights.
Interesting. What about opting out of voting. I strongly believe opting out of voting is a strong way to say you do not support either party or either parties laws. For instance I do not vote strictly because the people on either side of the political struggle in my country will keep marijuana illegal and I do not vote because voting would inherently give my consent for this unlawful abuse to carry on. The funniest would be supporting someone like Trump where he just says things like "Because you print the money" like I wrote about here
Pot's nice enough I guess, but for me not enough of an issue to opt out of being an active member of my representative democracy.
And if that council arrests you or a family member for using cannabis as a medicine would you still vote or feel like a member of your party?
I'd pay the ticket just like I'd pay a speeding ticket.
Well you lucky because in some countries it is jail time.
I'm also exploring this option and would be interesting to hear more viewpoints both for and against!
Today's elections:
There is no real choice. But the government (or elite) forget that the true power lies without us. We, the society, give them the power.
I don't want to write much more here because this makes me sick :')
But wait, not writing about it makes it worse! So let us talk about this topic. The first step is done by dan by posting this his. Thank you much for your work. We need more recon
I have allways truy to understand american politics. But newer realy figure it out.
I think maby Trump would get the win on votes. But it could be bad and good. Hillary is not a good choise for Americans. Bernie Sanders is the one that should have be a winer. It is saad that he dont could be a President.
Good thoughts Dan. As I've stepped further away from the statist ideas pounded into my young brain, I've wrestled with these ideas. Voting seems to make sense, on a local level where it's harder to hide and there is a greater opportunity for accountability. On a national level, it's become disastrous and outright wicked.
Democracy: 9 janitors and 1 doctor deciding whether surgery is necessary.
We do not need government. We have computers that do not have the ambition to be rich and have power . We must change government on computers!
It's the right way!
@dantheman ...I don't want to appear to be a 'kiss up'...but this is one of the BEST posts I have read in some time...I'm a Classical Anarchist, so I really have a problem with representative government...I believe in the elimination of the State...the president, congress, & court are intrinsically 'poisoned' by corruption & need to be eventually removed...but you have made an excellent point to me in the fact that direct democracy would be very cumbersome to implement...You are indeed the King here! Please do me a favor & critique my posts(if you have time) @terryrall ...I've only had one that produced steem...& I think I may be tagging them incorrectly...
Isn't democracy just the theory that the majority should hold your life to a higher moral standard because the latter is outnumbered? Sounds like you are endorsing a system of mob rule to me.
But wouldn't this create a culture of HATE? If you vote for x instead of y, it doesn't seem as personal but when you'd opt to "cancel YOUR vote" it just seems very very personal.
And how would it work, you'd chooce between voting for something or negating someone else's vote?
It could be funny though telling you friends you are going to negate them just to be an asshole.
It would be really stable because one you are negated you can stop worrying about politics. You wouldn't have constant battles.
In any case, voting means choosing between the options. If I was given 10 bad choices, the vote still will not give good results. A better way would be 1 good option, and no voting.
Options are created by leaders. And if the leaders are bad, they create bad options. And then what's the point in this voting process? I have not given any good options :)
How about we continue simplifying this platform instead of complicating it further? Shouldn't this place become easier to use and remain newbie friendly instead of stretching the learning curve? :)
This post wasn't about the Steem platform.
Hehe funny ;-)
And this is precisley why democracy is a terrible concept. To claim that 50.1% of any group can give the consent of the other 49.9% to be ruled is an atrocious view of "human rights" or any iteration of legitimate government. If you're going to insist on consent being that which leads to legitimacy, you cannot then ignore or deny the rights of those who explicitly do not consent and claim legitimacy anyway.
Furthermore, if your government is to be based on conventions - via consent and democratic vote - then any associated rules of voting must also be based on conventions in which unanimous consent was granted on at least one occasion. Those are the words of Rousseau himself, the author of The Social Contract. (I actually posted about this exact subject earlier this week, if you want to read it.) So, any way you slice it, if you're going to recognize individual human rights and legitimacy through consent, then consent must be sought by and granted to any legitimate authority. If consent hasn't been granted, then any claim of authority over the individual(s) is an illegitimate claim.
Democracy - or any version of it and any other forms of government - will be illegitimate so long as those who have granted no consent are subject to the authority of those who have. It's an inescapable fact if we are indeed acknowledging individual human rights.
Thanks Dan right to vote :)
No matter the group one belongs, one should be able to express his/her rights through voting.
Ya! free to vote! We are all human, sometime rational, sometime not. That is why pretty faces get lot of votes.
Kendall Jenner for president !
I think this is a very important point. It sounds like something Lysander Spooner would say. In my opinion, it is the consent of the governed, not the votes of the governed, that gives a government legitimacy. But like you said, democracy cannot scale, especially when the laws are so lengthy and complex that no person can reasonably be expected to dedicate the time or energy to understand all the details of what is really being voted for.
This negative voting issue is very interesting. I've been trying to come to a conclusion on whether or not I should vote, and I know that many people consider this election especially a choice for the lesser of two evils. But even if that's the case, I cannot in good conscious vote for any evil, even if it means opposing a greater evil. However, I could, in good conscious, vote against an evil, if that were possible.
What comes first, the chicken or the vote? ;)
As well you say the vote it is a constitutional law, as the obligation to follow the procedure and the marked laws, is not necessary to put rules to the vote, the vote is free, but there must be a few rules that assure a good use of the vote and a penalty of the evil I use. Personally I believe that not to vote for anything already can be considered to be a negative vote. As when you are going to choose president, your you vote for your candidate, but you cannot vote in negative for the others.
I don't see how voting is an universal right considering that it can be denied based on various factors such as age, mental health status, criminal record and others, depending on the country. Most of these factors are not really based on clear science. Why 18 and not 25? Overall I feel sorry for people who actually think their rights derive from a piece of paper produced by a bureaucracy. Myself, i tend to ignore the UN Declaration.
That being said if we admit people " do not have the time, energy, nor intelligence to think about everything and come to a conclusion." as a failing for direct democracy, it kind of mean these people cannot choose the appropriate representatives either. And that is ignoring the problem that choice is greatly limited in two party systems, you can choose at most one of two people put before you.
I still think most people live in enough of an ideological echo chamber that they would rather vote then negate someones vote - after all they don't know anyone who votes differently. I sometimes wonder if a better system would not be a lottery - from all citizens randomly select congressmen. It could at least be amusing, which is more then you can say of the current system.
Their authority is derived from force and the threat of force, nothing more or less. It certainly is not derived from the will of the people.
This can be clearly seen by looking at what they claim to be able to do vs what any single individual can do.
If they represented the people, they would not be able to do anything that the people themselves could not do on their own.
I don't doubt that negative voting might be a realistic option. I just do not see political voting as being of real use while the following are still true:
Unless the corruption in the system is removed, I believe political voting to be a moot point. Vote with your choices, your actions, and your spending.
Finally, democracy is over rated, especially if it allows people to create laws that take away the rights of the people. I'd rather have crowd funded government.
The Ultimate rulers of our democracy are not our president and senators and congressmen and governement officials, but the voters of this country.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
Unfotunately, sone choose not to vote because they believe that no candidate is worth electing. You are a citizen of this country so you have every right to be heard through your vote. It might be easy to think that your one vote wont be missed and that you can't possibly make a difference. Your one vote could mean the victory of one candidate and the beginning of true change in our country. Our country's future rests in our hands. We're just as responsible for the development as our political leaders are.
I wonder if a market would appear in negating votes. I mean now a party may try to be discreet in buying votes, but thousands of people buying and selling negations could happen. You make a list of people you don't like and you can have online bounties for people negating their votes.
I support buying and selling of votes. One of the tenants of voting is that you are free to express any opinion for any reason. Apparently it is only OK to buy votes with promises to distribute funds stolen from the tax payer. Using your own money to buy votes isn't ok.
I absolutely agree it is ridiculous when people complain about money in politics when their entire campaign is vote for me and I give you money, just other people's money. And other people's money is the best money.
I think a government should pay people for not voting eliminating those who too easy to bribe with promises. It can be some kind of action that adjusts a payment amount targeting 10-20% of population to prefer money to voting.
I agree val-a.
Interesting analysis, and certainly timely given the two candidates for the U.S. Presidency ;) The trouble is, your system selects this kind of person:
The 'least polarizing group" can be paraphrased by "the group of people who are bland and inoffensive." There's something in the lizard brain of we humans that translates "bland and inoffensive" into "weak." Thanks to that lizard-brain part of us, we'd see the result of that system as "weak leadership."
Given the anger on both sides of the aisle in U.S. politics today, one could argue that the system you illustrate will make politics even more aggravating to the characters who are angry now. To translate into current angry-words, the proposed system would select for "cucks", "RINOs" "sellouts" and "corporate liberals."
If democracy is a way to mollify civil war, then anger (aggression) is very much part of the process - so this downside will crop up. The system would be more vulnerable to (shall we say) other forms of politicking. To be frank, it'd be more vulnerable to the kind of politicized violence calculated to intimidate "the least polarizing group."
It is possible to have a groups of leaders that are "least polarizing" and yet be strong - but this type of leader is almost guaranteed to be a nationalist who displays his strength against folks who are legally barred from voting - e.g., foreigners. Since they can't vote, they can't deter a "non-polarizing" strongman.
Do you mind giving our introduction post a quick read to support SteemitMarketing?
https://steemit.com/steemitmarketing/@steemitmarketing/let-me-introduce-steemitmarketing
The issue I have is that for all the passionate people who take the time and make an informed choice for option A or B, they will be canceled out at a 1:1 ratio by their counter. This leaves the uninitiated, unmotivated, and uninformed with a huge amount of weight as the voting unfolds. Such people are easily motivated and swayed if they think they actually make a difference
It isn't a question of outcome, it is a matter of principle. It about eliminating contradictory beliefs and policies.
Passive people who vote without thinking are dangerous and would be negated by other passive people. Many people would accept a small bribe to "not vote" or to cancel someone else.
To be left standing with no one opposing you would require masterful political skills.
I feel like the oligarchs are pushing the one world government and this will be a challenge to democracy. Also, our votes are useless if the different parties are just the same ideologies and policies . We only have one choice actually.
Isn't the system already stuck in a loop of negation ?
To me this translates to negating an opposition.
It is a basic democratic priciple to also have a voluntary vote.
I can't follow your whole argumentation, but a binary view is the basis of fundamentalism.
The number of facts is infinite; You simply can't govern everything.
That's why a party based arround facts and content is doomed to repeat history.
Maybe this is worth a look:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_PARTEI
leaving only my negative vote (only test) :P
Interesting concept
It is a huge paradox, nobody agreed to democracy in the first place. Why voting? Who is the ultimate authority here?
If the voter has the authority, then there is a problem since you can only vote for limited options, the "no politician" option is never on the ballot.
If the government has the authority, then it's a circular logic, since what gives the government a right to rule over us?
Thanks for changing the "pending payout" to "potential payout", don't know if anyone else said it here earlier, but that is gonna remove a lot of future confusion.
good god I love your posts! keep it up man.
Great work.
That's excellent personal insight. I wish more people could see and admit to their "mistakes" like this.
I hope you find this not off-topic @dantheman ....
https://steemit.com/steemit/@anyx/cheetah-bot-the-fight-against-spam-and-plagiarism-continues#@liondani/re-rockymtnbarkeep-re-anyx-re-rockymtnbarkeep-re-anyx-cheetah-bot-the-fight-against-spam-and-plagiarism-continues-20160721t213857253z
Meh.