Comment by denzil_correa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by denzil_correa | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I think we should go back to first principles to understand the meaning of a representative democracy. The aim is to get a representation of the population. Currently, we get the representation of the people who vote - but this is not the objective. The aim should be to get a representation regardless of vote.

There are different ways to get representation. One way is to force everyone to vote like Brazil or Australia but this might not be practical in a country like India where elections go on for 1.5 months. But, there are other ways - where you draw a representation of the entire population and make them vote aka Sortition [0]. We already use this concept in juries and other aspects of life. It would be worthwhile to give this a serious try for alternative voting systems.

We could perform alternate experiment systems in parallel and then compare their outcomes to current systems - we don't need to adopt them. But, this has to start somewhere. We could have a debate on "HOW" to draw this representative sample but we should acknowledge that the current system rarely achieves the objective of representation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

We could fix some of the barriers like automatically registering people at age 18 or making voting day a national holiday so people aren’t stuck at their jobs unable to vote.

That alone would help.

But every change produces winners and losers, and the losers really don’t want that change to happen.

Automatic voter registration and making voting day a national holiday is such a no-brainer improvement that it's a pity USA can't get it done. As a South Korean voter, this has been standard for decades.

Our system is the way it is for whatever haphazard reasons got us here. My impression is there wasn’t every any real planning outside of Jim Crow laws to keep minorities out of the electorate.

But we can’t automatically register people because young people disproportionately support one of the two major parties, and that would be ‘unfair’.

And we can’t make Election Day a holiday because the people who work so much going voting is a hardship disproportionately support one of the two parties. And it would ‘hurt business’.

On the other end we can’t require IDs to vote people that would disproportionately hur the other party. And we can’t spend the resources to fix that because it would be ‘too expensive’.

Americans are so concerned about how other people vote but why not just vote for who you want if you want to? If you really really want some party to win, then take the day off work somehow, however difficult. If you can't be bothered with that level of effort, then you care about your day at work more than the election, so don't vote and be happy with whoever wins. In my country, for me, voting was complicated so I didn't. Now the winner is doing things I don't like so I've decided to vote next election. I'm not going to go waving banners and insulting people who want to vote for someone else. I'll just privately find a party I like and go vote for them. I don't yet know which party that is! Americans should try that too - research what they actually want and who's likely to do that, instead of voting with their tribe. Once you become locked to a tribe, your vote loses its power because your tribe's party can do anything it wants without losing your vote. If you want election reform, then you'd better not have voted for either other two main parties because it's in their interests not to allow others in.

>making voting day a national holiday so people aren’t stuck at their jobs unable to vote.

early voting? postal ballots?

I'd actually go in the opposite direction, and making voting more difficult.

I'd much prefer a system where you have to "earn" your say in government. This would, I think, show a deeper commitment to the system.

Edit: if you’re downvoting me, irony aside, please detail why making voters more committed to the government they’re informing is a bad idea. Seems fairly reasonable to me.

Yes! We use juries for criminal trials not because they're especially good fact-finders but because they're very resistant to regulatory capture. Similarly, Sortition is the real answer to money in politics problems, because there's no such thing as running for re-election to raise money for. You get nice side effects in representation too - 50% of your legislators will be women, for example, but more significantly 50% of them will come from below-average incomes.

In the US at least, we already have a representative body laying around with super-majoritarian rules and long, overlapping terms where citizen-legislators could build institutional knowledge. Conveniently it has both the most anti-democratic setup right now and one that's already been subject to revision via constitutional amendment. Selecting Senators at random is the simplest fix with the biggest potential impact on our democracy.

And that's just first-order effects, not counting the potential civil society benefits of encouraging every citizen to think of themselves as a future Senator, or having that structure mirrored in micro in smaller jurisdictions.

And 50% of them will have below average intelligence and 50% will be the laziest people in the country. 50% will be the most hateful and 50% will be the most racist.

We should pay people $500 for voting (in the bi-annual national elections). Turnout would be >99% (?). ID and fraud problems would have to be handled correctly, and the people would equate voter fraud with stealing (and thus care about it.) National ID participation would voluntarily increase. This would help with other issues like homelessness, illegal immigration, AWOL soldiers, dead-beat parents, etc... The redistribution of wealth as a direct payment could also serve as the foundation for UBI administration.

Finally, it seems uniquely American to address this problem with money.

I'm not sure about solving the other issues you mentioned, but I've often thought that a ~$100+ payment for voting in a national election would fix the voter turnout problem.

Interestingly, that solution would motivate the rich less than it would motivate the poor.

I have a hunch you'd get better policy results if people were paid to consciously abstain from voting – so that the least-informed, now making their decisions based on last-minute TV ads or mass-mailers with crude messages, voluntarily opt-out – delegating the choice to others.

Sounds fantastic. But I can already see a problem of poor people being disproportionately incentivized not to vote. Maybe the payment would be a tax reduction instead that affects everyone proportionally to their income.

Let's temporarily assume for the sake of argument that 'poor people' could wind up significantly better off under the decisions of a system where low-information, low-motivation voters are discouraged – but not disenfranchised. There'd be fewer (Hugo) Chavez- or Trump- type winners.

If under such a system, the 'voluntary, compensated abstentions' are disproportionately 'poor people', what principle is being violated? Is the option-to-vote or the actuality-of-voting the more important value?

Is maximal voting participation a religious goal, to be pursued even if it delivers poor results, such poor results sometimes including the collapse of democratic-processes entirely? Or is voting just one part of a system to be evaluated based on how well it delivers welfare and protects rights?

I think it's arrogant to assume that you know better than (other) voters. If you believe a demagogue is bad, what happens if he turns out to be just what was needed (Churchill perhaps?). Some people say Trump is good for poor people by wanting to reduce welfare which would pressure more people off their ass and into work. Welfare does have that incentive problem so there is a tradeoff and it's not obvious how much welfare is the optimum amount. If you believe democracy itself is too important to leave up to the will of the people, what happens if that turns out to be wrong? China is doing fine without it, while South Africa is going down the gurgler with it and Egypt fell on its face attempting it.

I would lean a little bit in the direction of actually voting being more important than being able to vote. Anything less than 100% turnout is bound to have some bias in how the non-voters are selected, even if they're self selected.

I too miss the days when only landowners could vote.

Even more American? make it a tax deduction.

People who don't vote generally don't have strong opinions, or don't care at all, or haven't really thought about the issues. Why do we think representing the "meh, whatever" component of the population will help?

Stronger: If you don't care enough to learn about what the issues are and where people stand on them, I'm not sure that I want you to vote. In fact, I think I want you not to. You're going to vote either for a label, or for whoever had the most ads. Neither is a good basis for choosing who to vote for.

Those who do not vote generally skew towards certain groups and classes. These groups are not specifically any less knowledgable than the groups that do vote. This adds a skew to the results in favour of the groups that vote.

Systems like this are described and evaluated in Fishkin, James (2011). When the People Speak. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-960443-2.

Why should the government care about people who don't care enough to vote?

They should because it benefits themselves and the country.

In the long run, the rulers of a country don't condescend to pay attention to voters because it's the right thing to do - rather because it prevents chaos, revolutions and guillotines. Voting is fundamentally an accounting mechanism that is justified by its provision of information about what is best for the country.

It's not so rational for people to participate in voting, because (virtually) no election is ever decided by a single vote. Thus, the electorate, as long as voting is voluntary, is going to inherently be biased towards irrational people motivated by emotion. That's why compulsory voting is a good idea. Voting isn't a privilege, it's a form of feedback that is vital to maintaining a healthy state, and having it be voluntary makes no more sense than voluntary taxes.

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