The Failure of Democracy

We all love democracy, at least in principle. We pride ourselves on our democratic system and have waged wars in the name of educating the "lesser" nations with the gift of democracy.

Dictionary.com has a great definition of democracy.

government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.

YES!!!

Power to the people!

Sounds great, doesn't it? We should all have a voice in our government and the laws enforced on each of us. I don't think many people would disagree with this basic principle, right up until the laws enforced on you disagree with what you believe in. Or even more commonly, the law that you thought you supported actually goes against what you believe in. In practice, there is too much to vote on and that which we can vote on is so complicated that it is nearly impossible to make an informed decision. There is significant cognitive load on each voter. Practically, there is a huge overhead in the democratic system itself. cough Florida cough

Almost every year, some politician demands a revote because they believe there was an error. I have identified these two fundamental reasons why democracy doesn't work.

1. Whoever controls the votes can control the outcome.
2. Cognitive load of the democratic process reduces voter turnout.

I believe the first point is pretty self explanatory. Nearly every election there is an influx of reports of voter fraud and voting machines registering a vote different than what the voter intended. Voters have a fear of this type of fraud regardless of the validity of these fears. Even if the system were completely transparent, the fear would still exist. Blockchains solve this problem. All votes are cryptographically signed and recorded for all eternity. Steem does this when users vote on content. All votes are counted and the result of a vote is part of the consensus logic. There is no need for a recount because all nodes inherently validate the vote simply by playing the chain.

Blockchains do little to address the second point. Why is voter turnout a problem in the first place? The democratic system is based on the basic premise that each vote is equal and has an equal say. We love this logic. However, when voters decide not to vote, they split their power equally among all other voters. If there are 100 voters in a system and one voter decides not to vote, they implicitly give their vote to the 99 remaining voters granting each of them 1 and 1/99th percent stake in the result. If there was an equal chance of each voter deciding not to vote then, on average, the result of a vote would not change.

Ex. 60 voters are for and 40 are against. If there is a 10% of a voter choosing not to vote then we would expect that 6 voters for and 4 against would abstain and result would be 54 for and 36 against, and the result would be the same. This is, of course, the expected outcome and the actual outcome may be different, but the more people involved in the vote, the less likely a false positive result is.

The problem comes when the chance of a voter to abstain is not equal across groups. In the same example, if there was a 50% chance for those for to abstain and a 10% for those against to abstain, then we would expect 30 would vote for and 36 would vote against and those against would get their way, even though they were the minority of the population. This is why grass roots movements tend to be successful because an active minority can easily beat a passive majority. The way to solve this problem is to increase voter participation. The closer to 100% of the population participating in the vote, the greater chance the result of the vote will accurately represent the view of the population.

How does this effect Steem?

In Steem, each account is not treated equally. If each account was given an equal vote then someone could create multiple accounts to increase their vote. The solution Steem employs is to stake weight each vote. Steem Power is long term and non-transferable, thus it is resistant to sybil attacks. This does not prevent an individual from having a voice, but it does create a useful barrier to entry that prevents exploitation. This is analogous to a minimum voting age. Imagine if children could vote. A toddler does not have the cognitive ability to think about long term effects of their decisions and it is unrealistic to expect that kind of forward thinking from them. They would likely vote however their parents told them to. This would create a sybil attack through procreation. Those that had the most young children would have a disproportionately large voice compared to those with few or no children.

Let's assume in Steem that each individual user has the same percent chance to abstain from voting. This would mean that as a per stake percent, whale stake has a much higher percent chance of abstaining from a vote. Because abstaining from a vote equally spreads power to all remaining voters, this gives even more power to the whales that do vote. The cognitive load of the democratic system results in a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of the whales that do vote. The R^2 curve of rewards further exaggerates this effect with very few posts breaking the $1000 barrier, a decent amount making more than $100 and many many more making less. Assuming whales have differing opinions on what is good quality content, a higher voter participation would result a more even spread of rewards to those that create content.

The issue of participation is compounded further by curation rewards because it creates a "fear of missing out" if a whale votes on the wrong content. When, in reality, voting power degrades a such a slow rate that it is difficult for an account to decrease their voting power a meaningful amount. Last night I went through every post that was making between $50 and $100 with an author reputation of at least 50 and gave them a 50% upvote to try and diversify the rewards slightly and barely made a dent in my voting power.

Additionally, because of the impact that a whale vote can have on payout, many whales vote conservatively, not wanting to pay something too much or are afraid of voting on plagiarized content. All of these issues are compounding and result in poor voter turnout.

In my next blog I will look at what strategies we could take to reduce cognitive load on voters and increase voter participation.