TSSO

32 flashcards · Politics · by Athena Papkouf

1. Dahl's criteria for democracy

   effective participation enlightened understanding control over the agenda voting equality at the decisive stage inclusiveness

2. social influence

   One person, one vote: democracy (nominally) One dollar, one vote: economics, corporate ownership and governance One web page, one vote: PageRank initial condition One reference, one vote: PageRank output condition One joule, one vote: Bitcoin One machine-learning input sample, one vote: governance by AI

3. SEO and mitigations

   link farming extra text in webpages (hidden text, hidden links) optimise presence and frequency of keywords keyword stuffing getting competitors banned mitigations: manual/customised weights complex interactions effort heavy

4. goals/properties of election methods

   voting equality computational efficiency understandability usability/convenience (e.g. not too many rounds) accessibility (e.g. avoid geographic impairments) transparency manipulation resistance avoid paradoxes, e.g. spoiler effect avoid gerrymandering, political manipulation trust of voters determinism

5. formal properties of election methods

   majority rule: if 50% of voters are aligned, they win universality: for all inputs, must yield some decision determinism: if inputs are unchanged, results must be unchanged condorcet criterion: if A beats all others in pairwise competitions, A wind non-manipulability: resistant to strategic voting monotonicity: adding 1 vote to A shouldn't hurt their chances arrows theorem: impossible to satisfy no dictator if every voter prefers X to Y, then group prefers X over Y if every voter's preference b…

6. voting methods: single winner, 2-choice

   majority rule (universal, deterministic)

7. voting methods: single winner, multi-choice

   plurality: a candidate, or candidates, who poll more than any other counterpart are elected. runoff elections: second election, held if the top vote-getting candidate in a first election did not achieve the minimum percentage of votes required. instant runoff voting: rank the candidates in order of preference. Ballots are initially counted for each voter's top choice. If a candidate has more than half of the vote based on first-choices, that candidate wins. If not, then the candidate with the f…

8. voting methods: multi-winner, multi-choice

   single winner by district (potential gerrymandering issues) party list proportional representation (dependent on internal party decisions, simple) single transferable vote (complex, many choices): Multi-winner version of instant runoff voting Takes ranked-choice ballots from voters Runs multiple rounds just as computation to decide results In each round, elect candidate(s) who meet a quota If no candidate meets quota, eliminate weakest candidate Repeat until all seats filled

9. voting paradoxes

   condorcet paradox: circular pairwise preferences absolute majority paradox: ranked first by majority, loses absolute loser paradox: ranked last by majority, but wins

10. blockchain consensus categories

    permissioned: assumes a committee established closed group small permissionless: proof of work: invest work to join proof of storage: invest in storage to join proof of stake: invest in existing coin

11. liquid democracy

    Liquid Democracy combines the advantages of Direct Democracy and Representative Democracy and creates a truly democratic voting system that empowers voters to either vote on issues directly, or to delegate ones voting power to a trusted party.

12. voter-delegate interaction in liquid democracy

    Ideal: shift from distant “celebrity” representative to social advisor Delegate acquires more voting weight, but must “answer for” it direct or transitive delegation single choice or multi-choice delegation delegation cycles

13. issues with liquid democracy

    bad scalability (too many delegates) super delegates/ accidental dictators privacy vs transparency and accountability Secure and trustworthy implementations, centralized vs decentralized

14. randomness in democracy, examples and issues

    juries athenian democracy public opinion polling issues: technical challenges to trustworthy random sampling biases in supposed "random" selections (Vietnam draft controversy)

15. market-based decentralised coordination mechanisms

    crowdfunding prediction markets quadratic voting

16. crowdfunding: purpose, upsides, downsides

    purpose: raise funds for "public good" upsides: disperse risk and cost among many no strings attached gauge market interest more democratic? downsides: usually no community ownership marketing/publicity driven limited to no accountability perhaps good only for the (rich/affluent) few

17. prediction markets: purpose, upsides, downsides

    purpose: predict future events upsides: revealing accurate information as a public good rewarding people for collecting and exposing information downsides: gambling/ addiction and legal/ethical issues may be highly vulnerable to non-transparent “insider trading” prediction may not be accurate if good information is rare

18. quadratic voting, purpose, upsides, downsides

    each voter has the same voting token cost to the voter = (number of votes)2 upsides: Protection of minority interests: minority who cares a lot can outvote majority who doesn’t care much or at all reveals how much people care downsides: vulnerability to “under-the-table” fraud, coercion, vote-buying self-fulfilling prophecies, “terrorist markets” information asymmetries, majority may be unaware how much they should care

19. sybil attacks

    stuff ballots in online votes amplify opinion unfairly fake news sock puppets DDOS personal harassment spam/scams buying followers/likes/reviews

20. good sybils

    pseudonymity well behaved bots

21. sybil defenses

    terms of use detection, flagging, blocking, banning captchas weak identity verification IP addresses email addresses phone numbers postal addresses strong identity verification passport/ID trusted hardware (smart cards) biometrics, e.g. photo ID, fingerprints, iris scan, dna

22. anonymity benefits

    freedom of expression freedom of association avoid release of non essential information avoid harassment censorship resistance improve inclusion separate roles

23. anonymity problems

    lack of accountability limited recognition abuse identity theft, scamming

24. ways to balance anonymity vs identity

    pseudonymity traceability accountability moderation

25. weak identity proxies

    self declared identities/ accounts single sign on with social media IP address, email address, mobile phone captchas

26. strong identity technologies

    institution/ government single sign on PGP biometric identity self-sovereign identity

27. online polarisation

    self-selecting friend/follower communities recommendation systems eyeball time maximising algorithms extreme content stands out and therefore promoted more

28. mitigating polarisation

    broader newsfeeds social connection and interaction with those holding different viewpoints reducing sense of anonymity labelling information (Helps people take detached/skeptical perspective, evaluate sources) algorithmic approach: increase diversity through random sampling, etc.

29. in-person voting technologies

    count faster/more efficiently make participation easier help people who have trouble with paper ballots validate ballots

30. remote voting benefits

    convenience (vote from home, from abroad, etc.) inclusion and accessibility (e-voting) avoid delays of postal voting

31. remote voting risks and challenges

    vote buying/selling, coercion transparency integrity (are ballots correct? has the voting device been compromised?) privacy

32. mitigations to remote voting problems

    cryptographic approaches to ensure privacy and integrity re-voting to address coercion