"Electing the Doge of Venice: analysis of a 13th Century protocol"
Also some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38598171
Direct links to PDFs, as in the first of the above submissions, can be annoying to deal with in mobile browsers. Sharing the abstract is a nice gesture and not simply noise.
You can also email a vouch to HN's mods at hn@ycombinator.com. They can remove flags directly, though the email lag response seems to be increasing (give it 24--48 hours), which makes direct vouches all the more valuable.
Instead of wrangling legislators and trading favors to get exactly 50%+1 votes, have the pass/fail determined by a single randomly selected voter. It would encourage much more cooperation and broad consensus building because a bill that gets 50%+1 votes isn’t 50/50 pass fail.
(Of course you’d need some sort of rate limiting so you couldn’t just keep spamming votes until it passes)
And what would you do when someone who wasn't part of that consensus passes crazy legislation?
I've always wanted to see someone experiment with a hybrid. A coin has value because it has two sides (e.g. just one coin face spend very well). So I've always wanted to see sortition and meritocratic elections paired.
Either you use a lottery system to select who can run for office in a given cycle (say 1000 people get the nod to run for State Senator), and then those that wish of that set can run for office in the traditional way.
OR
You use a voting system to select a set of candidates (say 5-10 of them) and then "cast lots" to select the winner.
Either way allows the electorate to steer the process, but also accepts the hand of fate. Marries chaos and order, yin and yang, stability and turbulence.
I've always wished that there was more record of this having been tried out. And respect for the value of a little chaos in the system. Large system designers often use turbelence/randomness in ways that reinforce otherwise ordered systems.
Source: https://www.johnlocke.org/what-was-it-that-buckley-said-abou...
First, the development of the process: the system described came into effect in 1268, because previous systems had failed to satisfy fears of factionalism. IA bit earlier in 1229, a simple, one-round electoral council of 40 had stalemated, so lots were drawn, leading to a feud between the Dandolo family and the winner, Giacomo Tiepolo. Giacomo's son Lorenzo Tiepolo was the first elected under the 1268 system, which Nicolao Michele seems to have devised. Not mentioned in the article or discussions is the rule that the men selected were 30 years or older. [0] The violent factionalism and feuding preceding the new system, however, seems to indicate that oligarchs were fiercely competitive. The aristocrats were always going to choose some one aristocrat from their own ranks, but they were strongly divided against each other as well. I'm not sure there would be a solid faction of fifty or so to monopolize the process, especially given the random selections.
Secondly, those random selections by lottery, combined with the opening of the article ("an official went to pray in St. Mark’s Basilica, grabbed the first boy he could find in the piazza") points to another participant in this process, God. While today we tend to think of election protocols in terms of human actors, sortition can imply belief in divine providence taking a hand. The nomination and approval of candidates (election) at least nominally uses human estimation of merit as its input, while sortition gives divine knowledge of merit a role. The intertwined repetition of the two may have been thought to negotiate a best possible outcome from each set of inputs; in practice, against the backdrop of feuding and factionalism, it likely also made the ultimate 41 electors unpredictable and thus less prone to bribery or prior arrangements.
[0] https://origin-rh.web.fordham.edu/halsall/source/dogesvenice...
Of course, the reason this article showed up may be because of the pun.
Was quite surprised to see the pope mention almost immediately.
In computer age it’s long overdue to have a modern system with people directly voting for issues and causes and not represented by any middlemen.
If you like the general idea behind this and would like to see it in a bottom-up organizational structure rather than an established state, consider democratic confederalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_confederalism
The political assembly of Venice recognized this, which influenced their decision to introduce randomness via sortitions into the process of selecting both the electors and candidates.
“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
That's absolutely bizarre. I'm sure if we had time to play it out a bit, there are ways to game that system easily enough, but it'd be really hard to see that from the outside.
I live in Venice, and most of the few people that are considered expert on the subject, claim that the election system is one of the reasons why it lasted so long. If not for Napoleon, it might still be around.
[0]: https://veneziaautentica.com/history-of-republic-of-venice
As a stamp collector in my youth, I am well acquainted with San Marino. On the subject of its elections, Wikipedia says:
San Marino had the world's first democratically elected communist government – a coalition between the Sammarinese Communist Party and the Sammarinese Socialist Party, which held office between 1945 and 1957.
And as a historical footnote,
The [Communist] government instituted several reforms and, of the industries of San Marino, only nationalized three drugstores.
It reads as if a group of people chooses another group of people from a larger pool to make a smaller pool of people and repeats. Does these pool of peoples change? Can someone be in multiple groups? etc
Are there any more descriptive or animated examples of how this works?
meew0•9mo ago
Depending on this detail, the character of this election process changes completely, since if repeats are allowed, it could easily degenerate into an oligarchy of ~50 people consistently choosing candidates from among their ranks.
rapht•9mo ago
pie_flavor•9mo ago
andrewflnr•9mo ago
pie_flavor•9mo ago
andrewflnr•9mo ago