Ballot secrecy is to protect against intimidation, right? But in a vote-redirection scheme, intimidation is likely to focus on the more popular “nodes”, and all it needs to affect is the public vote. If you can bully someone into changing their public vote and thereby changing the private votes of their multitude of followers, who cares if their single private vote was unchanged?
The meganodes would be public figures which would be difficult to intimidate. Even if you succeed in intimidating one, her followers might realize that and redirect their votes elsewhere.
If you can bully someone into changing their public vote and thereby changing the private votes of their multitude of followers, who cares if their single private vote was unchanged?
If someone is a politician, and a member of a party X, it seems likely that they would vote for the party X. This seems to be analogical to the public vote. Why exactly aren’t we afraid that the politicians would be bullied to join the opposing party?
Probably because most people aren’t politicians, and if you think that after entering politics you could be bullied into joining the party of your enemy, then you have the option of not becoming a politician. And if you don’t even have that option, then the country is probably not a democracy under a meaningful definition.
To preserve this, I’d suggest the public vote to be an exception, not the rule. (Also, it should be okay to vote publicly on one topic, and abstain from voting about other topics.) By default, you didn’t make a public vote. That would probably be enough so that 90% of people will never make one. So you can pretend to be one of them.
But yes, there is a legitimate concern that the easier it is to express one’s political opinion, the easier it is for their employer or their family to pressure them into expressing someone else’s opinion. The barrier against voluntary participation in politics also acts a barrier against such involuntary participation.
Fuck, sometimes I think that it would be best to completely fragment our identities, and pose as completely different people in different context. So there could be a professional!Viliam who doesn’t have opinions about anything else than design patterns in Java, the friendly!Viliam who only posts pictures of cute kittens on social networks, and the political!Viliam who hates religion and irrationality, and no one could connect these three identities together. It would be good to have it done so easily that creating a new identity for a new context would be trivially easy.
Good point. My understanding is that we don’t keep the votes of our elected representative secret, so it doesn’t seem like that much of a loss to have all public votes be public.
Ballot secrecy is to protect against intimidation, right? But in a vote-redirection scheme, intimidation is likely to focus on the more popular “nodes”, and all it needs to affect is the public vote. If you can bully someone into changing their public vote and thereby changing the private votes of their multitude of followers, who cares if their single private vote was unchanged?
The meganodes would be public figures which would be difficult to intimidate. Even if you succeed in intimidating one, her followers might realize that and redirect their votes elsewhere.
If someone is a politician, and a member of a party X, it seems likely that they would vote for the party X. This seems to be analogical to the public vote. Why exactly aren’t we afraid that the politicians would be bullied to join the opposing party?
Probably because most people aren’t politicians, and if you think that after entering politics you could be bullied into joining the party of your enemy, then you have the option of not becoming a politician. And if you don’t even have that option, then the country is probably not a democracy under a meaningful definition.
To preserve this, I’d suggest the public vote to be an exception, not the rule. (Also, it should be okay to vote publicly on one topic, and abstain from voting about other topics.) By default, you didn’t make a public vote. That would probably be enough so that 90% of people will never make one. So you can pretend to be one of them.
But yes, there is a legitimate concern that the easier it is to express one’s political opinion, the easier it is for their employer or their family to pressure them into expressing someone else’s opinion. The barrier against voluntary participation in politics also acts a barrier against such involuntary participation.
Fuck, sometimes I think that it would be best to completely fragment our identities, and pose as completely different people in different context. So there could be a professional!Viliam who doesn’t have opinions about anything else than design patterns in Java, the friendly!Viliam who only posts pictures of cute kittens on social networks, and the political!Viliam who hates religion and irrationality, and no one could connect these three identities together. It would be good to have it done so easily that creating a new identity for a new context would be trivially easy.
Good point. My understanding is that we don’t keep the votes of our elected representative secret, so it doesn’t seem like that much of a loss to have all public votes be public.