Messages From Democracy's Ghosts

There's a widespread belief in the tech world, inspired perhaps by the growing interaction between technology and politics, that citizens ought to vote, even in an elitist, irrational system they feel disconnected from. This point has been made to me lots of times this past week. Yet two-thirds of Americans disenfranchised themselves four years ago. Since non-voters never get on Washington talk shows, we aren't sure what they think, but their messages may be the most important ones. If you've got such a message, here's a place to put it, and check out an inspiring e-mail from a tech-spawned pol of the future.

There's a strong and historic impulse -- a reflex maybe -- that insists that citizens ought to vote, because it's an important duty (which is true), because it might make a difference (less clear), because it's simply the right thing.

"Just wanted to drop my 2 cents in and say that maybe those who are thinking of sitting out the election should vote Nader," e-mailed Wade."If enough people vote for another party, maybe, just maybe, someone might take notice, and in the next election things could be different. Seems vaguely familiar to me. I think I went through this when I switched OSes...."

Byron Albert wrote that "in the next four years 3 Supreme Court justices will retire. This means that the new president will get to appoint them. These justices will be a major factor in the upcoming years when most of the intellectual property laws and many other things that will impact us (the open source and free software community)."

Scott wrote that he used to think that the individual voter didn't matter too much in the grand scheme of things. "But then I realized that the grand scheme of things was made up of individual voters. It is imperative that every single person vote. If none of the candidates appeal to your personal politics, then write someone -- anyone -- in. If you don't vote, you aren't counted. If you do vote, then you are counted."

But obviously it isn't that simple for me (and others), for reasons relating primarily to integrity, technology and culture. I have growing problems with the idea that the only way for me to be counted is to vote for "someone" or "anyone." Maybe it's time -- to be metaphoric -- to switch political OSes.

Not voting can be as distinctly a political statement as voting. Elections shouldn't be about choosing which candidate we dislike least, or symbolic and pointless exercises in voting for people who can't possibly win, especially in the Corporate Republic's most corporate election. People would truly count if their political system offered them real choices and options, and gave them genuine ways to participate -- if their views were actually heard.

Democracy can be much more than our current incarnation of it. It was supposed to be much more. It deserves better than we're giving it.

Our two-party political system, no longer representative or legitimate, functions as a closed and proprietary system in an increasingly open culture. It represents the interests of three groups (corporations, politicians and journalists) while individual citizens have little role to play. They are merely asked to offer themselves for manipulation, then to support an unsupportable system by voting.

In the last presidential election, only one-third of eligible voters voted. Pundits tell us the non-voters are morally oblivious, stupid or apathetic, though since we rarely hear from them, we can only guess. The people who run politics and media have succeeded in trivializing non-voters, making them appear repugnant and irresponsible, the opposite of moral and idealistic. They are democracy's ghosts, invisible people.

Perhaps the non-voters are acting more consciously than that, their decisions worthy of more respect and more careful consideration. Gore and Bush will often urge people to vote in this election, but they won't talk much about why so many people don't. They don't dare.

Being a free-thinking individual doesn't mean taking a single position -- like the belief that voting is a moral imperative -- and always adhering to it. In part, it means recommitting to decisions, considering them anew each time.

The current political system doesn't promote democracy by encouraging debate and diversity. It stifles debate and diversity by limiting the participants to two people from two parties who espouse only slightly different versions of two ideologies: liberalism and conservatism, both to my mind equally discredited and outdated.

It operates by character assassination; it uses technology to promote negative and distorted imagery. Its elemental ideology is marketing, not morals. It's become possible to discuss ideas and solutions in the mediasphere. One day, perhaps, the Net will offer a new kind of space for a different brand of politics. I believe it will. But it doesn't yet.

People e-mail me that they'll vote for one candidate or another because of particular issues like abortion, gun control or legislation affecting the environment. That makes perfect sense, but that rationale is a far cry from the original ideas of the people who created the political process. Jefferson would have thrown himself into the Potomac if he thought that this would be the justification for participating in participatory democracy.

This election especially highlights an ugly truth about American politics, argue mathematicians and voting theorists Donald Saari of the University of California at Irvine and Steven Brams of New York University. In a Discover Magazine article called "May The Best Man Lose," Saari and Brams contend that the voting protocol used in America is fundamentally flawed.

The problem, the mathematicians say, lies in the voting system itself, and the way it thwarts the popular will. Voting theorists have recognized the weakness of the plurality system for centuries, argue the authors. Although few Americans learn this in their high school civics classes, there are many alternative voting systems in the world. And they tend to attract a much higher percentage of voters.

In our system, the winner often amasses only a plurality, not a majority, of the votes. Bill Clinton, for example, won the presidency with 43% of the vote; Jesse Ventura won the Minnesota governorship with 37%. The plurality winner could be everybody else's least favorite candidate. As Saari puts it, "the plurality vote is the only procedure that will elect someone who's despised by almost two thirds of the voters."

This may explain why so many people feel it's pointless to vote. A majority of Americans, for example, have repeatedly supported abortion rights, yet their popular will is continually challenged. The system doesn't, in fact, respond to the majority will, often permitting a plurality to supplant it.

The current process personalizes civics, reducing it to an image-spinning contest between two camps who apparently have few coherent or consistent values, whose candidates' public personae change almost weekly to reflect the latest polls.

Perhaps November will be more meaningful if large numbers of Americans deliberately choose not to participate in this election, and make their reasons known, rather than shrugging and ignoring it. Perhaps then, the Beltway might really buckle a bit.

It would also be admirable if non-voters found alternative means to support a democratic political system -- running for office, supporting a better crop of candidates, founding and supporting alternative political parties, using technology perhaps to do all of the above. The Net certainly offers some new machinery for that, perhaps a real chance to re-democratize democracy. That won't be easy, though. The alienating nature of our politics is deep and destructive.

What's clear is that the two major candidates manipulate a handful of issues -- abortion, the environment and the judiciary come to mind -- to promote the idea that they have substantial differences when, in fact, they have few. Since both parties are dependent on the same sources of funding, read the same market research, both edge closer to the same positions all the time, at least in public.

Mass political marketers, using the latest polling technologies, and dependent on televised and other images, have driven ugly, fat or odd-looking people out of national politics.If you're not blow-dried, you don't make the cut. That means the prettiest people get to run for president, not the smartest or most idealistic. American political candidates all wind up as militant moderates, hewing close to the center. Neither party offers a radically different approach or vision of the future. Neither has any appetite for addressing expensive or complicated social problems, apart from pandering to parental fears about technology or the fears of the vulnerable elderly. What remains is a media popularity contest that focuses on two issues: Is George Bush intellectually unprepared for the job? Is Al Gore smarmy and obnoxious? So far, the answer to all those questions seems to be yes, but that's hardly a rallying cry for democracy. Or a persuasive argument for voting.

Both candidates continually exploit fears about children and promote ignorant, Luddite views about technology and culture. Both candidates and their running mates advance the dishonest idea that technology and culture are endangering the young, undermining values and education. Lieberman is demanding that Hollywood alter the nature of filmmaking and marketing. Gore is advancing the idea of "cultural pollution." Bush has lamented that the Net can turn the heart of a child dark and murderous. Cheney has criticized Lieberman for not being rabid enough in his attacks on popular culture. No one has made an intelligent or coherent statement about a single one of the many increasingly significant issues that revolve around technology. Their economic and other visions and policies and politics seem ill-suited to a virtual, hyper-connected world, the one that's coming.

I once loved going to my neighborhood polling place. I look forward to the day when I will have the chance to vote for a candidate who speaks honestly, who grasps the centrality of technology and culture in our time, and is willing to raise those important issues in a rational way. That person is unlikely to come out of Washington, or the existing political structure, and is more likely to have grown up reading a site like this.

This fantasy candidate will be neither a "liberal" nor a "conservative" but an original thinker, perhaps one who has used technology all his or her life to test ideas, and take advantage of all that liberated information. He will be an enthusiastic free-marketeer, championing environments that reward opportunity, individuality and creativity. He will offer sane and fair-minded solutions, resist religious and political dogma. He wll fight for the equitable distribution of technology and use it to re-democratize democracy. Instead of branding them stupid and offensive, he or she will fight for the mostly younger people who are building the Net and the Web. He will not be in thrall to corporate contributors.

Actually, I think that such a person will pop up, and pretty soon. When he does, he will generate a tide of money and support, and begin to transform politics into something people want to participate in, rather than a dreary duty. Maybe a person like Tristan Eversole, a college student, who e-mailed me his idea about using the Net to re-invent politics:

"In my opinion, the most amazing thing about the Open Source Movement is the fact that a whole bunch of people came together from different locales and voluntarily created something. No profit motive, no political support. The end product is superior. This is unprecedented. That people actually submit code, that that code can be integrated into a cohesive whole, that people voluntarily debug it ... I can't think of any historical parallel."

"People have many ideas about how a fair and just society can come to exist and govern itself. Your articles [and the responses] prove that. There is no good reason why we can't integrate, test, and argue these ideas into a coherent political system or public policy ... it should be possible to create a similar site [to Slashdot and other open source sites] dedicated to providing a forum for political debate, distilling the most important news about global problems, putting interested people in contact with experts on particular problems, providing an accurate and objective picture of the state of the world, and slowly creating an archive of really good ideas on how major problems should be dealt with. Many care enough to make such a site viable.

Tristan seems to have an intuitive grasp for big political ideas. He said he'd divide politics into two aspects: the ethical (what should we do about a particular issue in the moral sense), and the technical (how should we implement a rational policy?) This kind of thinking is in shocking contrast to the closed-minded and manipulative posturing that passes for politics in the other world.

"I'd love for there to be a site dedicated to finding the truth about the real state of the world; I'm considering creating one eventually," Tristan wrote.

If he runs, he's got my vote.

Comments

Re:Heinlein may have been onto something...

[Pii]

Suppose I don't want to sit and there and "serve my country" do I become a nobody in society?

As opposed to now?

People that opted out of Federal service weren't persecuted in any way. They owned businesses, held jobs, and were otherwise free to pursue their own endeavors, just like everybody else.

You don't actually think that your vote, in today's political system, is relevant, do you?

Ok admit it how likely do you really think that this would be to actually happen in the US?

Obviously, this is not a change that could be enacted via the legislative process. You'd be hard pressed to find a politician who would make such a proposal, which would need to be a Constitutional amedment by it's nature; further, very few members of the voting masses would support a measure which ensured that it would be the last vote they ever cast.

That's not the point of the discussion.

There are basic liberties that should come without cost. The preservation of one's life, the ability to live without threat, the ability to have some modicum of food, water, shelter, etc. Also since politics are so important voting is in there as well.

There are basic liberties that should come without cost, but the ones you mention have little to do with them.

Liberty was described by John Stuart Mill as "the soul's right to breathe." Jefferson advocated "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," which is a more elegant way of saying Life, Liberty, and Property.

You, as a human being, should be entitled to manage your affairs as you see fit, to seek the betterment of your own condition, and that of your family. It ends there.

You are not entitled to Food, Water, or Shelter. You speak as though the procurement of these things comes without cost. Someone has to harvest that food... Someone has to purify, and bottle that water... And someone has to buy the materials, and provide the labor used in building that shelter. There are few things in life that come without cost, regardless of what the socialist utopians may have told you.

You have no right to demand the means of preservation from the rest of us, just as we have no right to demand sustainance from you.

Herein lies the problem of the unrestricted voting franchise; a problem the Romans found out about. No society can survive for long once the public learns that it can vote itself entitlements from the public coffers.

Look at the state of the nation, and tell me where the Entitlement seekers are leading the rest of us.

One man, one vote and why you feel disenfanchised.

[hey!]

I've been advocating the approval based voting system for years. I prefer it to the Borda count because it is simpler to understand, has useful practical properties and is not based on a mathematical fallacy. This fallacy means that our system often produces unpopular outcomes and effectively disenfranchises people.

Consider the following situation. You have three voters(A B and C) and three candidates (X, Y and Z). A ranks the candidates XYZ, B ranks them YZX and C ranks them ZXY. The Borda system correctly says that in terms of preference, this is a tie.

The problem is that the very idea of preference is nearly meaningless in this situation. The following table shows this.

+____________________+
|___|rank|X>Y|Y>Z|Z>X|
|_A_|XYZ_|_Y_|_Y_|_N_|
|_B_|YZX_|_N_|_Y_|_Y_|
|_C_|ZXY_|_Y_|_N_|_Y_|
+____________________+

Table 1. Voter preferences
(I apologize for the table formatting -- slashcode doesn't accept table tags).

What does this tell us? That if you ask if X>Y, 2/3 will say yes; if you ask if Y > Z, 2/3 will say yes, and if you ask whether Z > X, 2/3 will say yes. What this is is a proof by counter-example that the relationship of public preference is not transitive. Therefore our intuitions about preference which we use when we think of our own, singular personal preferences do not apply to group preferences. I believe that any system which tries to pick out the most preferred candidate, no matter how subtle, is bound to have non-intuitive bugs because lacking the transitivity of the individual opinion, group opinion on this matter is a mathematically and logically different animal. The Borda system is better than plurality voting, because it takes into account second tier preferences, but adding up nonparametric statistics should give any mathematically inclined person a queasy feeling.

In particular, if the situation above is extrapolated to a larger number of voters, it is clear that any preference based system is going to sometimes yield a result that the majority did not want. This is part of the reason why people feel disenfranchised, because the voting system we use is seriously buggy. More of the reason is discussed below.

Messing around with the details of a system that attempts to come up with the "most preferred" candidate means that the specific situations in which a bug emerges will differ. This may be of great practical import, but is not ideal.

Now lets consider the same election, but ask instead the question of whether the candidate can do the job.
+____________________+
|___|rank|_X_|_Y_|_Z_|
|_A_|XYZ_|_Y_|_Y_|_Y_|
| B |YZX_|_N_|_Y_|_Y_|
| C |ZXY_|_N_|_N_|_Y_|
|sum|____|_1_|_2_|_3_|
+____________________+
Table 2. Suitable Candidates

In this case, voter A thinks they're all more or less OK. Voter B and voter C agree that under no circumstances should X get the job. Voter C also thinks that voter B's favorite (Y) is almost as bad as X. So, if you phrase the question differently, it is clear that we don't really have anything like a tie when it comes to voter esteem. Everyone agrees Z is a good candidate, whereas The majority of people think that X, who was tied in the Borda system with Z, is unacceptable.

The approval based voting system corresponds to the last line in table 2. In practical terms you would go into the voting booth and check off every candidate you were willing to live with. The approval system will not produce counterintuitive results, because it is not based on a mathemtical fallacy -- rankings of candidates by breadth of approval is transitive and thus not abiguous.

Furthermore, it corresponds to a basic political principle outlined in our Declaration of Independence, which is that governments rule by the consent of the governed. The approval voting system measure which candidate has the widest consent.

The final issue is that, literally speaking, approval voting is not "one man, one vote". Let's dispense with that right away. "One man one vote" is a very simplistic slogan, which assumes plurality voting as the only possible system. What is really being aimed at is equality of all citizens. Under approval voting, everyone gets the same number of votes, but may choose to withhold them. Furthermore, approval voting goes far to equalizing political power. Political power can be mathematically measured by the number of winning coalitions you can join; share of political power is that number divided by the total number of coalitions.

Under plurality voting, Nader supporters are effectively disenfranchised, since they must vote against their preferences to join a winning coaltion -- they have a power of zero. The "Reagan Democrats" however have a power of two -- they can join Gore or Bush. You can see this in action when you see how much attention is paid to Nader's issues (practically none). Why? because people who care about Nader's issues have a slice of the power pie equal to zero. They can vote, but unless they are willing to join the Gore coalition, their vote is meaningless (at least in the practical sense of influencing the outcome of the election).

Ironically, switching to a system based on getting the widest possible approval would reduce the need to pander to the middle, since you could build a winning coaltion out of a minority of the middle and several minority groups. The media's job would get harder though. Candidates would no longer be obliged to put themselves on the artificial and simplistic left/right spectrum, but could form coalitions out of many different groups whose view of things may be orthagonal to the great organizing principle of liberal/conservative.

I think this would make campaigns more substantive and civil too -- tactics of splitting or polarizing the electorate would be ineffective.

Why I'm voting Nader

[prizog]

This is addressed to people who like most of Nader's politics (I'm not sure anyone likes /all/ of anyone else's politics), and who are afraid of Bush.

My mom told me not to throw away my vote on Nader, and that even if I don't like Gore, I should fear Bush more. I thought about it, and decided on a compromise, which I will impart to Slashdot: If you're not in a swing state (look on the net, you'll find a listing), vote for Nader. If you are in a swing state, trade your vote:

Find someone in a non-swing state who is rational, but pro-Gore. Tell them that you will vote Gore if they vote Nader. They will, of course, accept this, since a vote in a swing state is actually worth something. It's also good for Nader, since all he cares about is the popular vote. Be careful who you pick. This is a classic example of The Prisoner's Dilemma. If you pick someone who is rational, and who knows that you are rational, then you'll be OK - see Metamagical Themas, by Douglas Hofstadter for the reasoning.

ObOnTopic: Why woud Gore appoint people who would be any more anti-IP than Bush? He's owned by the entertainment industry.

Abstinence makes the biparties grow stronger...

[plover]

Perhaps November will be more meaningful if large numbers of Americans deliberately choose not to participate in this election, and make their reasons known, rather than shrugging and ignoring it. Perhaps then, the Beltway might really buckle a bit.

And you think that voters staying away in droves will somehow differentiate itself from business as usual in what way? First, the candidates themselves want low voter turnout. Low turnout means less chances for the wild cards. If only the party faithful turn out, no real changes will happen.

Personally, I think the best thing that can happen is that power is fragmented more ways. I live in Minnesota, where the Independant Jesse Ventura controls the executive branch, the Republicans control the senate, and the Democrats control the house. For me, it's perfect. Getting three distinct groups to align is even harder than getting two groups to agree, which means less gets done. In my book, the fewer laws that get passed mean the least amount of damage done.

I personally think the power split we have in the US today is responsible for our country's current political "success story". The executive Democrat at the top prevents the legislative Republicans from implementing their absurd policies, and the Republican congress refuses to support the Democratic president's absurd policies. Nothing gets done, the status quo remains, and the world has a nice, safe, predictable environment to exploit.

Toss in a Green president, give us a Democratic Senate and a Republican House, and Washington will be in for another four-year bowel blockage, while the rest of us continue to prosper.

John

Re:Don't vote unless you've thought about it

[Mad Hughagi]

I was discussing this yesterday when my friend brought up the same point.

How about having an 'abstain' option on your vote card? That way we could truly gauge just how pathetic our candidates are instead of assuming that everyone was lazy. This would also resolve the problem with fining people who won't vote.

There is nothing wrong with not picking - just make sure you let everyone know why, otherwise you will not have done anything for the process.

Not voting...

[Saige]

Not voting can be as distinctly a political statement as voting.

Wrong, Mr. Katz. Not voting is nothing more than a big "I don't care." The only message it sends is that you approve of ANY candidate, and that you approve of them all equally. Why? Because ANY OTHER VIEW can be expressed by voting. If you prefer one of them, you vote for them. If you don't like any, you write-in another name, or just don't select any of them - because going to the polls and not picking one still counts as voting.

Not voting only means that you don't want to put any input into the process.

If you plan on not voting to "protest" the system, then you're going about it all wrong. You're not protesting anything. Protesting something means going out and being active about it, not opting-out. Sitting at home on voting day will accomplish nothing but to perpetuate the system. Don't believe me? What happens if only one person were to go and vote? All those other people lose their voice in the matter, and that one person gets to decide all by themselves. And if it happens again the next time, who are the candidates going to care about? The one person who determines who gets the job, or the rest of the population that has shown they're not going to be bothered to vote? Of course, that one person.

Next time you're with a group of friends, and they're deciding where to go eat/what to do, try just not participating in the process, see if it does anything useful. It won't.

So people, stop saying not voting is USEFUL for anything!
---

Do you know anything about U.S. government?

[Ater]

It's obviously apparent that you and most of the zealous pseudo-radical slashdot readers who so richly denounce our traditions have no clue about it. The fact is, the U.S. government was designed to be ineffecient, and despite the anti-factionalism of George Washington, the two party system has been a mainstay.

Why, you ask? Simple: stability. Aside from the Civil War crisis, the U.S. has always has a pretty stable and functional government. That's not due to heavy bureaucracy, but our well known system of checks and balances. The whole idea is to prevent the damaging effects of foolish blind radicalism by keeping a system which does not deviate from the status quo.

And as for the interest groups and two party system, perhaps you should read James Madison's Federalist 10. In it, he gives a good explaination about factions, but ultimately decrees that people inherently tend to band together in groups and that varying groups nearly balance each other's influence. We're trying to prevent tyranny of the majority, here folks, (or in the psuedo radical Slashdot zealot's mind, tyranny of a tiny minority). And besides, even if the Britney Spears of presidential candidates, Ralph Nader, were to be elected... what could he accomplish? You think a radical Green president could get any of his idealistic proposals through a Congress made up almost exclusively of Republicans and Democrats? Dubious at best. Sorry to break it to you folks, but the U.S. system of government is not broken at all: it was intended to keep radicals like you and Nader far far away from office.

Vote libertarian. You can own a piece of park.

[small_dick]

One of the libertarian parties' goals is to sell the national parks.

They say that "the buyer would own something so beautiful and pristine, that they would have no incentive to damage/ruin/commercialize it".

That brilliant analysis, in a nutshell, is the reason no person should ever vote for a libertarian.