Could “fuzzing” voting, election, and judicial process improve decisionmaking and democratic outcomes?

... Hands down the most fascinating article I’ve read over the past decade is Michael Schulson’s “How to choose? When your reasons are worse than useless, sometimes the most rational choice is a random stab in the dark”, in Aeon. The essay mostly concerns decisions under uncertainty and of the risk of bad decisions. It seems to me that it also applies to periods of extreme political partisanship and division. An unlikely but possible circumstance, I’m sure…

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/489ae7e00d710139fb1b002590d8e506

(Archive: https://archive.ph/AFb5t)

#Sortition #ElectionReform #VotingReform #politics #democracy #voting #ParliamentaryProcedure

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@dredmorbius This link is dead but I'm really interested in this subject! Can you point me to it some other direction?

@swcollings I'd archived very nearly all my Joindiaspora posts at both the Internet Archive and Achive.Today. The latter captures discussions:

https://archive.ph/AFb5t

The post is based significantly off of Michael Schulson's "How to choose? When your reasons are worse than useless, sometimes the most rational choice is a random stab in the dark":

https://archive.ph/o/AFb5t/https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-randomly

I consider that the single most illuminating article I read in the past decade.

I'd be delighted to hear your own thoughts / references / criticisms.

#MichaelSchulson #HowToChoose #Sortition

archive.ph

@dredmorbius This is right up my alley! I'm an engineer with background in digital signal processing, and what I concluded several years ago is that elections are DSP systems. This has lots of implications, but one of them is that dithering can fix a lot of problems by injecting randomness.

I wrote up my work here.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1liNMcOWwVSRLHesoYCfjs4GH0QLBGCjB/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=114516458166061722132&rtpof=true&sd=true

It may be a little dense, but would love your thoughts.

#sortition #electiondesign #StochasticElections

Elections and DSP submission v4.docx

Abstract Elections are presented as analogous to digital signal processing systems, sampling continuous-time analog inputs at regular intervals and processing them into a discrete-time quantized signal. Due to how quickly the preferences of voters can change relative to how often elections are he...

Google Docs

@dredmorbius To summarize: the red/blue winner-take-all dichotomy is equivalent to taking a grayscale image and converting it to only black and white. Some level of error is inevitable, but by injecting randomness that error can be made less impactful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither

This is approximately equivalent to lottery voting, except with a minimum support threshold for a candidate to actually win.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_ballot

So it's not #sortition, but the inverse. #StochasticElections

Dither - Wikipedia

@swcollings Still looking at this, though if I'd be more general in criticism:

The questions in voting and elections are not just assessing the Will of the Voter, or some General Electoral State. There are additional concerns.

Also, DSP of itself doesn't concern a problem domain in which the extracted signal itself feeds back to the input, at least not in any particular direct manner. It's an open, rather than a closed loop.

In governance, governing is a chief concern, and that itself has multiple components.

There's reflecting actual will or intent, which is notoriously difficult. See Arrow's Impossibility Theorem for one classic example.

There's achieving good and relevant decisionmaking. Athens' citizens may very well have meant and wanted to put Socrates to death in the moment, but may also have regretted that decision later. (See any number of similar decisions.) Does the voting system itself affect such outcomes.

There are the inherent corruption and control questions. Schulson's essay addresses these at length, in various dimensions. Selection-by-lot in particular renders manipulation to achieve narrow first-past-the-post legislative, executive, judicial, or separated-powers governmental control far more difficult.

There's sensitivity and susceptibility to short-term informational or media manipulation, or various forms of decision bias, as with the Kantu’ augury Schulson mentions.

And there are other approaches to governmental organisation and process --- multiple branches (as in the US), multiple parties, proportional representation, different voting schemes (first-past-the-post, ranked-choice, straw polles, ...), and manipulation (voting procedures and practices, registration requirements, Gerrymandering, legislature size (the US House would have over 11,000 members if apportioned at the original 1 per 30,000 constituents stated in the Constitution).

Which your analysis seems to largely omit.