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On this antepenultimate day of election, I've been thinking about how there is too much dark money in almonds. Or really, the dual question from that post, "[W]hy is there so little money in politics?" Naturally, I wonder, if those numbers are rookie numbers, how do we pump those numbers up?
I'd like this comment chain to primarily be a house for other people's whacky ideas to increase the amount of money in politics, in a way that is most productive, least damaging, etc. This is somewhat self-serving, because I'm also going to throw out a half-baked, whacky idea of my own, and I'd prefer if all the comments aren't solely beating up on my terrible idea. Spread the love; make it a target-rich environment; help by offering up your own whacky idea, so that at least some number of comments are beating up on your whacky idea rather than 100% of the comments just beating up on my whacky idea.
Some general thoughts that I'm trying to work with along the way. First, the idea of having money in politics isn't necessarily automatically 100% bad. I've seen a variety of defenses over the years that it is actually somewhat good to value the opinions of more economically-productive folks over others. Obviously, there are also plenty of criticisms of how this could go poorly, but I don't think it's completely incoherent to vaguely think that there could be value in getting political opinions from people with a proven track record of providing economic value, who have an economic stake in getting the outcomes right, and by making them put their money where their mouth is.
People have definitely proposed what were once very whacky ideas to channel money to some specific purpose. Prediction markets are very much that. Scott joked about just putting prediction markets in control of elections and how it could go horribly wrong. This is the kind of whacky ideas I'm wanting, even if I'm going to try to make my own much more moderate/measured.
A second general thought is that people probably do get a bit too hysterical about the results of elections. I know, I know, there are real differences; there are real choices; we can all point to specific examples of how things could or did get significantly better/worse depending on who was ultimately selected, but in many cases, the actual election process already has some level of stochasticity built-in, and we already accept this non-perfection, even though it could give the "wrong" result and end up with a worse president who does bad things. I can't find the Scott Post now, but I vaguely recall him saying something at some time about how an election outcome could be flipped if it happens to rain on election day in this county of Pennsylvania rather than rain in that county, where it is assumed that rain depresses voter turnout by some single-digit percentage.
To some extent, what I've somewhat extended this to mean is that, especially with a race that appears to be a dead heat (as this one is), since some level of randomness very well may come into play anyway, and we're fine with it, from the perspective of building electoral processes, how much does it really matter, anyway? Both candidates seem to have significant support from wide swaths of the country, and since this is after many months or years of public vetting, we've probably already cut out a good chunk of the really pathological cases if we're thinking about making relatively minor changes to the system. I'll come back to this point later.
I'm also thinking about tech. We've talked a bit before about digital elections. I know, I know, many people are against them. Hopelessly insecure, they say. But, I think, bitcoin seems mostly secure, right? At least good enough that a random search tells me that people have put something like $1.3T worth of economic value into it. I will hypothesize some extensions of tech that don't actually exist now, and perhaps there are true barriers to them existing. I'm kind of okay with pointing them out, but I'd prefer if it's not all complaints that the tech is impossible. I've already accepted that I'm probably further toward the side of "it is probably possible for us to build tech systems that at least mostly work well enough to do what we want, even if there are theoretical (or even practical) security issues along the way, at least to the level of insecurity that we generally accept from banks, bitcoin, current elections, etc." than most people in these communities. So, the objections will be noted, but I may not be all that interested in engaging at this time.
Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't bring up secrecy in voting. I've made a big deal about this in the past. I do think it's a big deal. And a big part of what's going in to my half-baked thoughts is to ask, "If we can use tech to allow us to inject dark money directly into politics, but ensuring that this money truly is dark, like really truly secret/anonymous, can we possibly leverage that for good?!"
Secrecy/anonymity are related in a way. An individual's vote being secret means that when you're looking at the pile of votes, they're all anonymous. One of the reasons why I've pointed out that this is important is because it makes coercion and quid pro quo harder. I won't choose any particular article to link to concerning Elon Musk paying people to sign a pledge, but you can pay people to sign a pledge, they can take your money, sign the pledge, then walk into the voting booth and vote whatever the hell way they want, and there's nothing Elon Musk can do about it. Similarly with corruption going the other way. I can't remember where I heard it, I think it was EconTalk, maybe in their discussion of crony capitalism, but right now, when someone gives money to a politician's campaign, it's important to them that the politician knows that they, specifically, gave that money to the politician's campaign. If the politician couldn't tell who gave money to his campaign, he could be corrupt in many ways, but at least he couldn't act corruptly in the specific way of just looking to the people who gave the most money to his campaign and doing the things they tell him to do.
There are a lot of whacky ideas possible here already, and I vaguely recall thinking along these lines in the past. Maybe someone else will flesh out a more specific idea for how to focus on the campaign contribution part, but I want to keep in mind my second general thought and get even more whacky.
What if we just said, yes, we'd like to give money some amount of say in presidential elections. People can just put their money where their mouth is and directly pay money to affect the election. The not-perfect idea for what to do with that money is to just put it in the government's general fund, because some folks view that as, itself, a politically-undesirable endpoint. I have vague-but-not-great alternative ideas, but would be open to others. But we want a balance of some sort, like how the electoral college tried to balance state-level interests with population-level interests. I don't want to throw away one man one vote or the state-level interests that the electoral college gives us, so let's just make a minor modification to give money some say. Let's just give money some EC votes. Five, ten, twenty, I don't know how many exactly. Enough to make it a thing. Not enough to make it the main thing. If it's able to sway the election, that means the election was close enough that maybe a rainstorm in Pennsylvania could have switched the outcome anyway, so probably either option was okay-ish. At least, probably not catastrophic.
Re-enter the tech. Imagine the tech allows a person to simply allocate some amount of cryptocurrency to this money vote. It does so with all those fancy bits of 'receipt freeness' that the digital election nerds talk about. Maybe it allows you to freely withdraw/switch your money vote later, making it harder for you to prove to a candidate that you money voted for him/her by just showing them your computer when you do it. Maybe go further and make people have to go to an in-person voting booth, after being scanned for electronics so they don't have a camera or whatever, and give their money vote that way. Whatever it is, imagine this tech allows people to just give their money vote, but it's (within a margin of error that will always exist for real systems) completely secret/anonymous.
Do we care how much people give? I don't know that I do. One side has their billionaires; the other side has their own. If those billionaires want to literally give away billions of their own dollars, that seems fine? I imagine they won't be billionaires for much longer if they're dumping significant fractions of their wealth into an election every four years.
...do we even just let foreigners have a money vote? Remember, we're significantly limiting the impact by only giving them a small number of EC votes. Do we care? We still need to have the regular votes of regular US citizens be close enough for this to come into play. Might as well be rain in Pennsylvania. If a foreign government wants to dump billions of dollars directly into the coffers of the US government (or whatever else we decide to do with this fund), maybe this is fine? It's not like they could actually just buy a candidate, anyway, since Russia's billions of dollars are fighting China's billions of dollars, and the candidate literally cannot know who gave what. Besides, the American public was mostly okay with either result, anyway.
Obviously, this is a whacky idea. Obviously, you'd need to hammer out significant technical implementation details and compromises on things like how many EC money votes to have. Obviously, this is a completely whacky hypothetical that isn't actually going to be adopted by the US any time soon. One last thing floating around in my head is that perhaps whacky ideas like this get incorporated in one of those charter city concepts, which are already whacky anyway. Any thoughts? More importantly, any other completely whacky election ideas?
EDIT FOR POSTERITY: Thanks to @haroldbkny for finding the original Scott Post I was remembering about the "rain in Pennsylvania" thing.
I'm not familiar enough with the mechanics, but would crypto elections be pretty riggable? Could you pay miners to only include transactions that had votes for your candidate in their blocks? There are probably ways to avoid that if you design things right, though.
You can make it pretty clear that you're the one who gave the money if you tell them you're going to give them $648,355.27, and then, lo and behold, someone makes a donation the next day of exactly that amount.
I do think there would be some technical challenges to be solved, but I think we have a lot of really useful pieces that could help solve those problems. I'm not going to pretend that I have a fleshed-out whitepaper with full technical specification or anything, but I can give you some of my general thoughts.
A lot of work has gone into anonymization protocols. They're probably not perfect yet. There are all sorts of timing issues or side channel issues and even just the fundamental problem that metadata is hard. But I think progress is being made. To the extent that one is bullish on the idea that real anonymization is plausible in the not-too-distant future for some form of cryptocurrency, I think they can be bullish on something here, too. Moreover, it's not just cryptocurrency where work is being done on anonymization. TOR was a big leap forward on that front, even if there are still some challenges there, too. Again, to the extent one is bearish/bullish on any hope there, I'd expect them to be likewise bearish/bullish here.
Consider some TOR-like properties. A message can be routed through multiple intermediaries, such that those intermediaries mathematically cannot know the content of the message in question. Those intermediaries aren't even really trusted. They can refuse to pass your message along, but you can realize that it hasn't been passed along by the non-response or inappropriate response you receive. I don't think it's too big of a step to imagine that one can leverage intermediaries, even perhaps untrusted ones, in a way such that those intermediaries are mathematically unable to determine the content of your message (who you're voting for or how much you're spending). Those intermediaries can choose things like random delay times, which can help thwart timing attacks. I agree that timing attacks may pose unique challenges, and again, I haven't solved all of them right off the top of my head, but I think the idea would be to try to show some property that so long as some low percentage of those untrusted intermediaries are observing random delays, we could get in front of those problems.
Tornado Cash gave us a significant step toward anonymity in the transactions, as well. The very basic idea is that you dump a bunch of things into a pot, mix them up, divide them out, and make it significantly more difficult to correlate inputs/outputs. Details here are more complicated; I'd say that it's probably still not perfect, but to the extent that there are lessons to be learned, I think we can learn them and continue to iterate. Again, general bearish/bullish sentiments.
Of course, I'd like to also call back to the 'receipt-freeness' business that the digital election nerds really like. The idea is that they want a way that the the final election tally can be 'published', but in a way that is still specially encrypted. Thus, while people can perform the proper cryptographic operations on the output to determine what the result was, no one can determine from the encrypted, published final tally what any of the individual votes are. Even the people who voted do not have sufficient information to prove how they voted, but they do retain sufficient information to prove that their vote was counted correctly in the final tally. Side note here would be that if you have a system where someone can freely rescind their vote later, even if you had someone watching your computer when you initially voted, and even if they kept that piece of information which could be used to prove that the initial vote was correctly counted, they would not have sufficient information to prove that it was not later rescinded. (There are still tricky choices here, perhaps, and I do think more work would need to be done to decide on every detail.) In any event, this would be another check to make sure that intermediaries couldn't just refuse to include your vote.
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Or you could just buy some schlock "paintings" from the politician's son at absurd prices.
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What about doing things like what Sports betting does with pro sports. If you could form teams and try to bet on their performance in the election, I think it would be a way to get more money in. And the money put in could be used as push polling because if you can change the odds, then I mean you can change the outcome of the actual election.
I definitely had prediction markets in mind. There have been plenty of conversations in rationalist-adjacent spaces about whether or not you can pump money into prediction markets to change the odds and affect the outcome of an election. It's a weird, indirect thing, though. This is a more direct way of trying to use your money to affect the election. Presumably, it would be a partial substitute for that action. If anything, I wonder if it pulls the money that is more interested in affecting the outcome (possibly trying to make money through influencing federal regulation), while leaving the money that is more interested in predicting/making money directly.
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This is a really bad idea.
Activist rich people like Soros, are bad enough. It isn't true that they are wasting their money. Now you want them to be able to just directly buy votes which will not reduce at all the influence they can exert through other means of funding politicians, journalists, NGOs. Which includes both direct quid pro quo but also attack dogs organizations that influence outcomes by attacking people who don't play along.
My impression with your constant "its fine" is that you rather sympathize with the ideological characteristics and agendas of the people who are most involved in funding politicians who do have some similarities ideologically, and even ethnically (plenty of Jews very highly overepresented among the top republican and democrat donors) and want them to get their way. In observing the results of their agendas, these rich activists are more fanatical, less objective, and reasonable on various issues, like policing, prosecution policies, DEI, relations with Israel, than what a good policy, that is independent, objective and in line with the common good would promote. They have bad ideas of how to change things, and their character is questionable too.
I would rather someone like Sam Bankman Fried who was one of the top donors in last election, to not be deciding things.
They are also more connected with foreign governments too. The negatives of one's goverment becoming subservient to foreign goverment interests are real and it is pretty obvious how this would lead to bad governance against the interests of the actual people but in line with the interests and agendas of foreign governments and billionaires.
These rich activists, do not have an inherent right to rule and in fact such claim for their right to run things can be very fairly interpreted as a form of treason. My wacky idea is that they can in fact be stopped from exercising their current influence, and their NGOs banned, and restricting large donations, giving all candidates a goverment backed x amount of money and a right to get small donations. In so forcing politicians to not have to do what AIPAC, ADL, a shitload of NGOs, or rich donors want them to do. Which will result in representative democracy which is already like many systems, a flawed system and not a perfect formula, to come closer to something that could potentially work.
That and restricting citizenship rights to natives with minor exceptions and restricting numbers of foreigners and deporting where there has been mass migration. Not allowing parties to hack democracy by replacing the electorate with foreign population who has to be loyal and prioritize getting away with replacement, or other benefits. Which is it self constitutes an example of a violation of the inherent rights of a people for their continued existence and service of their common good, since you are replacing them and destroying their nation, and also putting the rights of foreigners above them.
Modern states should take much more seriously the currently huge problem of treason and of the violation of the rights of the people that happen when their rights are disdained and foreign groups are favored. Even if we consider a society to not just be one nation's state that has guests but a multiethnic society, even there the consideration of not screwing the majority ethnic group of its inherent rights, which include cultural/ethnic rights, to perpetuate their ethnicity, instead of having an oppressive negative identity that treats this as evil.
Plenty of constitutions have things written in line of this, but an unwritten constitution has been followed that does the complete opposite. My wacky idea is restore the nation state democracy and enforce it, while restricting the agendas that destroy it. Down with the idea of fake postnationalism oppresses the natives, while allowing nationalism for groups of the progressive intersectional coalition.
The influence of billionaire activists and most NGOs result in a very skewed, harmful direction. With enormous overepresentation of certain identitarian agendas and complete absence of the interests of other groups such as white people in the USA for example. It represents massive agency problems and makes a complete mockery of the idea of democracy. So yeah, my idea and favorite evolution of democracy is one in anti corruption, anti treason, where both laws and elite ideology is against the DEI, replace the natives, multiculturalism (which isn't even genuine multiculturalism but no culturalism for natives and allowing culture and nationalism, and even extreme versions of that, for approved groups), and where such tyrannical agenda is not allowed to run the media, governments, NGOs. Where it is taught as an example of tyranny, oppression, corruption and civilization destruction. It has backlash today where its supporters have marched on institutions and created their influential networks, NGOs. Imagine how much it would be hated if it was encouraged to dislike it.
So under this system there would be much fewer influential active NGOs, while all these state within a state NGOs would be banned and subject to further justice measures where necessary and where they are found to have done other crimes like spying. NGOs should be few and influential NGOs involved in activities that enhance the common good, and not in civilization self destructive criminal agendas. They must operate under a framework that has such restrictions, so you don't get any new ADLs to ever come into existence.
I would also add that the system to not become predatory internationally, while should be very adamant and vigilant against foreign subversion, and agendas at the expense of one's own nation and represent a self confident civilization that perpetuates it self and serves its common good and its interests, it should be willing to have genuine win win cooperation with foreign nations were there is a genuine opportunity to do so, rather than being predatory and out to win by screwing over others. Else it isn't a scalable model.
Living in a European country with state financing of political parties, it is utterly alien to me to donate to political campaigns. I know it happens, but I would never do it (aren't you psychologically locked-in after donating to Trump/Harris?) and the amount of effort and time American politicians have to raise funds seem gross.
I looked up how UK does it and they actually harshly restrict political expenses:
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/election-spending-regulated-uk
If the UK (or Canada or Australia or whichever country) is better governed is debatable, at least theoretical raising funds could also be a useful signal in a democracy, but I wonder how an election cycle in the US would look like if Democrats/Republicans (and GreenParty/Libertarian) could only spend $100 Million each?
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I'm confused. Presumably, these would be substitute goods. That is, suppose someone is spending 100 on funding politicians, journalists, and NGOs right now. Then, an alternate means of political influence arises, say, the money vote. It may, in fact, be plausible that they might even want to increase their total spending, but the nature of substitute goods would imply to me that they would even then spend something more like (made up numbers) 70 units on funding politicians, journalists, and NGOs; 60 on the money vote. It seems unlikely that they'd continue spending 100 on funding politicians, journalists, and NGOs... and another 30 on the money vote.
One of the things I actually sort of like about the scheme is that it would be a substitute way of channeling money. Probably one that I'm even a bit more comfortable with than the traditional ways folks use money to buy political influence. We might even get some data about relative values of things, which could help with election design in the future.
Most of the rest of your comment seems almost entirely inapplicable, as it completely ignores the two main features of the proposal - the limited strength of the money vote in comparison to the traditional election, and the strong secrecy. I kinda feel like your response is just sort of irrelevant if it doesn't consider those features.
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Here are two wacky ideas for buying elections:
Start a buisiness in an emerging, not-yet-regulated industry. Do all the textbook Silicon Valley valuation-pumping capital-raising stuff, but shove all the money into as many federal elections as possible. Max out the personal limit for every candidate's official campaign of one party, then find a surrogate to do the same for the other party. Hand pick one or two primary candidates in out-of-the-way races and pump their SuperPAC to the moon. Use your positioning as the politician-favored firm in the industry to raise even more money. Of course, the key is to only use investor capital for this, not customer accounts that you happen to have custody over. This is surprisingly cheap. You could do it for about $100 million.
Buy a major social media company. Gut the employees and bring in your own people. Change the algorithm in clever ways that will shake out to favor ideas of your own preferred politics. Unfortunately, this is much more expensive, estimated to be about $40 billion even in favorable circumstances.
At least as far as (1) goes, I think Scott included PAC spending in his comparison to almonds, so that's not currently pumping our numbers up enough. We have to do better. (2) is more interesting/nuanced/complicated. Definitely a part of what Elon was buying with his $40B was political influence, and it's in a way that would not be captured by Scott's numbers. It's hard to know how expensive it was relative to the political influence it bought.
One of the things I like about my idea is that it gives a direct connection between dollars spent and election outcomes, rather than a fuzzy, "Oh, maybe you're buying political influence by buying Twitter or donating to a left-leaning university/think tank, but we have no idea how to connect those things in a quantitative fashion. I'd actually kind of love a more complicated scheme than what I presented here, one that allowed us to then do some math to estimate things like what the implied marginal values of electoral outcomes are in terms of dollars. But the best idea I had in that direction was to make the money EC votes proportional rather than winner-take-all. I don't super love that for other reasons, but perhaps there's a nice design that could help us make better estimates.
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"Hey Elon, can I copy your homework?"
"Yeah, just change it up a bit so it doesn't look obvious you copied."
"Ok."
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