Hi All,
Unsure if this sort of post is welcome here but I thought I’d give it a try considering there’s a good appreciation for Liquid Democracy (LD) in pirate parties.
I’m building a new political party called the Neutral Voting Bloc (NVB) and I’d like input and comments if you have any. (Also just to let you know about it, because the Pirate Party will need to decide whether it wants to preference the NVB anyway in the 2016 senate elections)
This party is designed to cannibalize senate seats and basically give people a way to directly interact with the senate through LD-esq voting, and I think it has the game theory to get it there.
A brief introduction: The NVB starts as a party, the elected candidates of which vote in parliament based on the outcome of ballots held online, with votes given to members, non-member voters, and other parties in a weighted fashion. The NVB has no policies of its own. The basic idea is to (ab)use GVTs to get candidates elected. This is done by exchanging preferences for internal votes. The elected senators then vote in such a way to match the proportional yes-no votes from party participants (not all of whom need to be members). I’m planning it to be as free and open as possible so all citizens can become non-member voters.
While direct democracy is an option I think we all appreciate that it’s way too cumbersome and something like LD is a much better option. I’ve implemented (ongoing, but the minimum viable product is done) a voting-client and voting-tallier pair that use a blockchain as the host for votes. A blockchain is the only type of uncensorable database capable of providing the properties I’m looking for, which is the main reason LiquidFeedback is inappropriate. There’s a demo over at vote-explorer.xk.io if you want a quick look.
Now, the (ab)using GVTs part. I call this the Senate Preference Hack, and it mainly works because we force parties to compare all other parties to submit their GVT. By comparing everyone an economic decision is made and so offering an economic incentive can boost preference numbers, theoretically. I’ve gone into more detail here. I’ve also done some simulations and confirmed intuitive predictions, like the more parties the better the hack works, and the less happy people are with major parties the better the hack works. Furthermore, part of making the offer competitive is creating an efficient and fair environment to vote in, so it naturally favours neutral, low participation, high yield systems (like LD).
To give you an idea of how well this can work, my simulation yields the following based on 2013 election data for NSW Senate elections:
With 1% of the primary vote, and a 50% participation from other parties (which means they preference the NVB first) and half participation by default for other parties (which means they preference the NVB randomly), the NVB would have an 85% chance of winning a senate seat if it ran in the 2013 NSW Senate Elections.
There’s more information over at the wiki: http://nvb.wiki (if you want to read more).
Any comments or thoughts are appreciated.
Cheers,
Max