Can people buy votes off plattform

[Arjuna144]

How do you manage, that no one can come to me and say: "Let's sit in front of your computer and I'll watch how you vote what I want, and afterwards I'll give you 200 Bucks"?

[afurmanczyk]

I'm not an official member or anything, but I'd think that in a truly open and free system, people would be able to sell their vote if they wanted and if they were being forced they could enter their distress password.

[DarthChowder]

Selling votes isn't ideal, but would still be within the free will of the user. Like @afurmanczyk mentioned, if I am being intimidated or forced to vote one way, I can just input the distress password which will make it appear as if I am voting their way. In truth the system receives a distress that says pretend that you are working but forget what action I am taking in this session.

[jemc]

Just wandering in here (only discovered the project today), but my take is that selling votes shouldn't/couldn't be outlawed on the individual level, but steps could be taken to make it more difficult for the "lobbyist" (for lack of a better term) to discover and communicate with the individuals that they need to bribe.

I think the "proposal filtration system" mentioned on the website comes into play here:

Each proposal is routed randomly to a small group of people. If it doesn’t get enough votes, it dies. If it gets voted down it never goes anywhere. Only If the majority likes it, the proposal passes to the next stages: ever-increasing groups of more and more voters.

If I'm trying to lobby for a proposal, and I wanted to bribe the voters to get it to the next stage, I'd first need to discover who the random pool of voters is before I could communicate with them and attempt to bribe them. If the Cicada platform makes this prohibitively difficult, I can't effective execute the bribes needed to elevate an otherwise unsavory proposal.

Of course, you could try to include the bribe in the text of the proposal (vote for this, then go through this process to make your identity known and confirm your vote, then get the promised money), but if the proposal instance was immutable as it passed through the stages, this would also mean the bribe would be blatantly included in the national vote, at which point you'd probably be unable to pay out a sufficient bribe at that scale. Even if you could pay a sufficient bribe to the entire nation's population, you'd also be banking on a majority (or supermajority, or whatever threshold is required for the proposal to be passed) finding bribery personally acceptable, at which point it is no one's fault but our own (as a culture) and we'd get what we deserved.

[jemc]

However, there's another point on the website that's a bit more troubling in this regard, when talking about "expert panels":

Cicada allows us to call on expert panels. Parallel teams of experts draft legislation that gets fast-tracked to national vote

This would short-circuit the protection I was getting at in my previous comment, allowing lobbyists to target a limited pool of "experts" for bribery. However, this is something we already have a problem with today, so it's not necessarily a step backward in that sense - just maybe not a complete solution.

[BrnLng]

@jemc I read the expert-panel idea as additive to what you said about bigger voting pools each round, but instead of starting small, it could start at middle-sized groups when started by panel.

This could both open door to urgent stuff being discussed or lobbying, but if there will always be people's voice counted, then it should not be a problem at this stage.

Buying a large proportion of the voter's pool is available only through much cost: if it's affordable at this stage, maybe it's affordable at any stage or difficulty (via mass marketing with lots of lobby money)? Imagining a million users group for instance, and it will still happen if voters are prone to voting on the same old grinning face at all outdoors they see.