In my last article I introduced the concept of smart ballots that would automatically vote the opposite of a person of your choosing while maintaining full secrecy of their vote. Many people joined the discussion to critique its failure under a system with more than two choices. Today, I would like to dive deeper into the concept and expose more fallacies of the popular voting theology.
Voting is a Fundamental Human Right
This is the foundation of all democracy and the starting point of any discussion. Unfortunately, this statement doesn’t specify what kind of voting is a fundamental human right. If it is a human right, then where does it come from and why is it our right?
I decided to look into the holy books of voting theology and found some useful definitions from authoritative sources:
The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret ballot or by equivalent free voting procedures. - Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The basis of this right appears to be that the will of the people is the basis of the authority of government. Voting, therefore, is the means by which the people may express their will. Interestingly enough, a person’s expressed will must be kept secret according to the holy scriptures of human suffrage.
A voting system that does not allow the true will of the people to be expressed is one that is violating our fundamental right and therefore there is no basis for the authority of government.
The Right to Consent
The basis of the right to vote is therefore derived from the right to consent (or not) which is clearly the foundation of a free society. Democracy is the belief that all people universally agree to consent to the will of the majority. In other words, if more people consent than not then all people consent.
Ultimately all consent boils down to a simple Yes or No. Given a proposed law that will impact an individual, the will of the people requires a simple Yes or No.
Suppose the government gave the people the option to die by fire or die by ice. This is a false dichotomy under which the will of the people is impossible to express. Suppose we were given the option to nuke China or nuke Russia? The inability of a system to express all possible opinions of will means that a government is deriving its authority to restrict the options from some other source.
Binary Expresses All
All possible expressions of the will of the people can be represented as a body of law, which in turn can be represented as a binary number. A binary number consists of a series of Yes and No bits.
The will of the people can therefore be perfectly measured by doing a direct poll on each bit, with the majority vote on each bit resulting in the consensus will for that bit. Since all opinions can be represented by such a voting system and are directly measured, the will of the people can be known.
From this we can clearly see that any individual’s vote can be fully negated by another individual’s vote. It all boils down to string of Yes/No questions and each individual has the fundamental right to vote the opposite and thus nullify the influence of another individual.
Representative Democracy
Direct democracy is clearly not viable for any number of reasons. It simply doesn’t scale. The masses of people do not have the time, energy, nor intelligence to think about everything and come to a conclusion.
This is why we have “representative democracy”, we elect someone to represent us and then trust they will work with other representatives to reach consensus.
The right to specify someone to represent you is the mirror of the right to specify someone who represents your opposite. By specifying your opposite, you are in effect most accurately representing yourself. Instead of having a choice of a dozen people to represent me, I can have a choice of millions of people who most closely represent my opposite.
Negative Representation is More Accurate and More Scalable
When opposites collide they cancel out. This means that it becomes trivial to express far more of who you are and what your will is. Since your will is part of the public will and is the basis for the legitimacy of government, the right to negate someone else’s vote is a fundamental human right. To deny this right is to infringe on the range of public opinion that is capable of being expressed.
Consequences
Assuming a law was passed that allowed each individual to specify another individual whose vote they would like to cancel (assuming their vote was not already canceled), then the entire system would boil down to a group of voters who did not want to negate someone else's vote and who no one else wanted to negate.
In my prior article I assumed everyone would prefer to negate someone else, but that was me projecting my own bias on everyone else. For each person who chooses to vote rather than negate there exists another person who was not negated. This means that there would still be a large body of voters whose opinions could be polled.
This body of individuals would be the least polarizing group. A group of people whom have been pre-filtered by the masses to be the closest group of representatives that could be found. Everyone that was eliminated was a “polar opposite” of someone else and thus represent the set of least representative. Those that remain are therefore “most representative” and their subsequent votes will be more in line with the masses opinion than any other group of representatives.
This group of voters, being much smaller, would have far more flexible voting systems available to them. Systems that don’t scale to millions of people may scale to those who remain after all of the negative representatives have been removed.
If you believe that voting is a fundamental right derived from our human nature, then you must also hold that negative voting is the most expressive means of casting a ballot and representing yourself.
All other definitions of the “right to vote” are a statutory right or privilege granted to a person or group by a government. However, this definition is in contradiction to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that government authority comes from voting. Therefore, government cannot have authority to define the source of its own authority. If you believe government gets to set rules on voting, then you believe voting isn’t a human right, but a government granted privilege that can be revoked. In other words, you believe that government authority is derived from some other source than the will of the people expressed through voting.
Let's restore the right to vote by allowing people to express their anti-representative and negate their vote.