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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.
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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