Electing the Doge of Venice: analysis of a 13th Century protocol (2007) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Electing the Doge of Venice: analysis of a 13th Century protocol (2007) [pdf]

hpl.hp.com

Modern voting systems have to defend against process corruption where some small town somewhere goes haywire and fabricates votes. Because the number of participants in the Doge elections was small they don't really have to worry about that so the constraints on their elections were different.

I don't think there is a debate to be had that modern elections are using an optimal process. There are also a lot of good philosophical and practical arguments to giving a majority power. The system that gets the absolute best outcomes probably puts minorities into power some % of the time - but that it too complex to explain to people and the risks when dealing with large numbers of people are too high.

> There are also a lot of good philosophical and practical arguments to giving a majority power.

I'm not sure if the Founding Fathers didn't create the whole electoral college explicitly to prevent this simple rule of the majority, from being a thing? After all "we" know better than "them" - with "we" being whatever group thinks they're morally superior/better/richer/more religously righteous etc. etc.

Between the sarcasm and the double negatives, I don't understand your question or your point.

I had no problem understanding the grandparent's comment. Adding an intermediate layer into elections is a well-known method to introduce bias. If you control the way the vote is partitioned or aggregated, it's easy to rig the output. Two examples in the recent US history: the gerrymandering tradition, and the president that was elected with less votes than his opponent.

By the way, I wondered a bit if there was sarcasm in "I don't think there is a debate to be had that modern elections are using an optimal process." Which kind of modern election? The USA have a plethora of systems, and so do many countries. And some organisations have innovative vote systems, like Debian and its Condorcet method.

> Which kind of modern election?

Funny you should mention that in the same paragraph as Condorcet (doubly funny that the Condorcet method is considered an innovation after 250 years). Basically anything after the French Revolution although most of the interesting research seems to have clustered in the last century (eg, Arrow's Theorem which proved that for a some reasonable definitions an elections can't be optimal - apparently only came up in 1950).

I don't think it's sarcasm, I think his point is that the electoral college might there to avoid a simple 'majority rule' and to correct the majority if mistaken (I think it happened once in the US)

The framers created the electoral college because they were designing a power structure whose goal was to re-weight electoral power relative to population as opposed to voting population (because multiple significant stakeholder states wanted electoral credit for the large numbers of humans they treated as property).

That's not why the electoral college was created. The three fifths compromise was appended to the electoral college system, but it was not the reason for it being created in the first place.

The reason why we have an electoral college system, according to James Madison in the Federalist papers, is because the United States is intended to be a mixture of state-based and population-based government. States within the US are not meant to be mere provinces; they are intended to be mini-countries with their own laws and customs under a broader federal umbrella. The electoral college system allows the states to cast the votes for President, instead of the majority of citizens voting directly.

It's sort of like how an HOA works, where each unit has one vote. The units themselves comprise the voting body, not the individual people living in each unit. The individuals in each unit might have different opinions and preferences, but at the end of the day they must submit a single vote representing their unit. The electoral college system works the same way, with the caveat that the number of votes apportioned to each state is relative to the size of the population.

Is it any surprise that someone who personally owned more than 100 slaves would try to manufacture some other justification?

The justification is far too well-constructed to be a pretense

Try to venture outside the USA, the constitution that your country drafted a few centuries ago isn't considered to be the gold standard of anything related to democracy. And we don't regard your "founding fathers" as messianic creatures, either.

Learning the older meaning of Doge just now made me feel almost young for a split second :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_(title)

The edit history on that page shouldn't surprise you.

Interestingly the history of the Italian version of that page has no mention of the doge meme. However what's a doge (the political title) is common knowledge and it's studied at school. The meme is also common knowledge up to some age classes and it's undoubtedly passed on at school too.

Having spent way too much time on the internet, I can't help thinking:

Such elect! Much lead!

the meme did not come from the venetian title though

Coincidence that the name is Doge, like the cryptocurrency and the paper is about a complex democratic protocol (maybe trust less? I don't understand the paper yet) a bit like Bitcoin. At first look at the title I assumed this was Cryptocurrency Fanlit.

This has brought back many happy memories of Machiavelli the Prince (or Merchant Prince as I believe it was called in the US, where presumably no one does European history), a late 90s DOS game in which you ran trade routes around the world. One of the key parts of the game was political intrigue in Venice, where you could bribe people to vote for you as Doge, giving you the power to hand out (or not) lucrative jobs to other players.

The big plus point for it were the extensive multiplayer options, ranging from taking turns on one computer, through to proper TCP/IP support, and play by email with the save game being passed on after each turn.

If you're interested in old Venice: Ioanna Iordanou has a book "Venice's secret service: Organising intelligence in the renaissance".

Also a paper "The Professionalization of Cryptology in Sixteenth Century Venice".

It is really fascinating how sophosticated and advaced Venice was, from mass manufacturing of ships, policy and government and secret police. There are reason why, despite being geographically small, Venice dominated trade and a significant chunk of the mediteranean at the time.

and it lasts more than 1000 years!

much like the US today, venice did not need to expand much, and it only conquered islands/lands that were useful to them

This seems to be a pattern with naval powers (ancient Athens too), but not with colonial empires

On security theatre:

> However, security theatre has positive aspects too, provided that it is not used as a substitute for actions that would actually improve security. In the context of the election of the Doge, the complexity of the protocol had the effect that all the oligarchs took part in a long, involved ritual in which they demonstrated individually and collectively to each other that they took seriously their responsibility to try to elect a Doge who would act for the good of Venice, and also that they would submit to the rule of the Doge after he was elected. This demonstration was particularly important given the disastrous consequences in other Mediaeval Italian city states of unsuitable rulers or civil strife between different aristocratic factions.

> It would have served, too, as commercial brand-building for Venice, reassuring the oligarchs’ customers and trading partners that the city was likely to remain stable and business-friendly. After the election, the security theatre continued for several days of elaborate processions and parties. There is also some evidence of security theatre outside the election period. A 16th century engraving by Mateo Pagan depicting the lavish parade which took place in Venice each year on Palm Sunday shows the balotino in the parade, in a prominent position—next to the Grand Chancellor—and dressed in what appears to be a special costume.

Highlighted by Schneier:

* https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/security-anal...

This is one of my favorite insane voting systems.

One does have to keep in mind that this is definitely just rich people voting for other rich people - the system is in place to limit corruption for a single rich family, but is a far cry from any kind of democracy.

To be honest, this would optimize for maximal growth of wealth in a country though -- which likely rises all ships (ironic).

It's why a small merchant city was able to survive so many years. It quite literally lasted for >1000 years and was one of the most successful cities / nations on Earth.

Mostly slave ships, in this era of Venice :/

Rich human traffickers voting for other rich human traffickers.

Venice was up to its neck in human trafficking for a pretty long time.

As was everywhere else in the world, while you make a valid point its in no way exclusive to Venice.

To be fair, even current representative democracies are a far cry from Athenian democracy.

We've just decided our system is the same "in spirit".

Well, yes; for a start, in modern ones nearly everyone gets to vote. Only about 10% of Athenian residents could vote.

Things were much better in the good old days. Before the commoners ruined everything /s

What'd they improve?

The guide in the Doge Palace called it rightfully an oligarchy. It was the power of rich Venetian families and keeping it was all they cared about.

Not sure if there’s any insight here, this is more of a shower thought, but the protocol vaguely reminds me of a deep learning network. Pool -> do a calculation -> pool -> … etc.

I can see a real advantage in slowly resolving an election. Rather than a lot of inconsequential drama then one final binding event. drag the event out over a period of time and throw out one person each round. It might keep things human scale rather than meme scale.

At that time the goal of the election was to limit collusion, not some notion of optimality.

In our democratic elections the goal seems to be to create a roughly equal split in the population so that deterrence keeps civil war at bay.

in any case election system is not about optimality

A discord server that I'm in used this when the admin decided to retire and wanted to leave the server in good hands. It worked fantastically, and the server is still going strong to this day.

This is theorycrafting though. What were the real outcomes in five centuries of this system? I guess it can't be too bad, or it wouldn't have survived unchanged so long?

Venetian currency should have been called DogeCoin.

Also, why would computers eldct a leader? Surely they couldn't just vote on everything?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com