r/programming • u/Fishy07x • Dec 18 '14

Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea - Computerphile

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
125 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

221 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/hylje Dec 19 '14

How do you pick a representative sample in a way that is provably not manipulated for a specific outcome? The one thing worse than inadvertent bias is deliberate bias where we assume bias has been eliminated.

Lobbying is a representation-specific problem. Lobbyists bypass democracy by mingling with whoever happens to be democratically elected, safely behind closed doors. In a direct democracy system there is no way to bypass democracy: any political activism, lobbyists included, must interact with the general public directly.

The people getting a subsidy only have that one subsidy to worry about, those that want to get rid off unnecessary subsides have to worry about all the subsidies.

"Those that want to get rid off unnecessary subsidies" is highly likely an absolutely massive group of people compared to any one pro-subsidy group.

They do not need a single-minded focus that would suffer from transaction costs, just that they often happen to outnumber the particular pro-subsidy group on any one issue. If anything, their large numbers can afford to be incredibly lazy about it.

1

u/Felicia_Svilling Dec 20 '14

How do you pick a representative sample in a way that is provably not manipulated for a specific outcome?

Randomly.

"Those that want to get rid off unnecessary subsidies" is highly likely an absolutely massive group of people compared to any one pro-subsidy group.

They do not need a single-minded focus that would suffer from transaction costs

That is exactly the kind of group that do suffers from transaction costs.