Anybody in Australia these last few months would have inevitably seen people debating the Aboriginal Voice − well, we say “debating”, but unfortunately a tactic that could have easily been anticipated by Labor is that people have resorted to winning arguments by calling each other bad names: one side is racist for making laws that make distinctions based on race, and the other side is racist for not caring about Aboriginal Australians.

Taking a step back though, what’s inherently more important than an Aboriginal Voice is our democracy itself, which the Voice would join. Is the Voice referendum being carried out democratically? Can we gain any insights that could be applied to more elections? These are the questions we’ll explore here.

Are Voters Smart Enough to Vote?

When political debates devolve into name-calling, perhaps the most popular name to throw at an opponent is that they’re an idiot − that they don’t agree with us because they just can’t think.

Poor Old Costello, he’s all tip and no iceberg

This sort of accusation can be hard to prove, and it’s not entirely relevant anyway. Just as a broken clock is right twice a day, it’s possible that this idiot really has made a breakthrough. In Tanzania in 1963 for instance, a 13-year-old student asked a visiting British physicist why warm water freezes faster than cold water. He was initially ridiculed by all in the room, but the physicist later carried out the experiment and confirmed the findings, now known as the Mpemba effect.

In his article How to Disagree, Paul Graham sets out the idea that rather than attacking the person or even their examples, we should be attacking the central point of any argument being made. It’s more intellectually honest; it’s more convincing; and it can bring the argument to a resolution.

How to Disagree by Paul Graham

Calling one’s opponents stupid doesn’t just arise in debates; it also plays out in well-meaning propositions like, “people should need to pass an IQ test to vote”. Sure the candidates should arguably be intelligent, but by spreading the standard further, onto voters, I feel that it’s actually misinterpreting the role of voters in our system − they are not meant only as wise jurors, but as an angry mob. It’s a feature of democracy that if leaders anger the mob, they might be overthrown.

If we upset the voters with unreasonable laws, then they just won’t accept the outcome, and will overthrow the government. It’s why Dogbert’s election strategy wouldn’t work out:

What Happens When People Don’t Vote?

In talking about people’s willingness to overthrow the government, it’s worth mentioning the book Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu & Robinson. Their claim is that nations fail because citizens haven’t sufficiently fought for their rights.

They discuss the Glorious Revolution in England, where King James II suspended parliament and was ruling by personal decree. In response, the politicians and wider society roped in his son-in-law (and nephew) William, to invade. William was already the de facto ruler of the Dutch Republic.

The widespread support for the invasion was so popular that King James fled into exile, and the revolution has been characterised as The Bloodless Revolution.

The Coronation of William and Mary, by Charles Rochussen

The moral of the story was that regents are not above parliament − that they must adhere to the will of the people. The reason we don’t see powerful regents around the world now is not because people simply changed their minds, it’s because the regents were violently forced out.

Acemoglu & Robinson explain how in South America, the invaders repurposed the existing power structures and exploited those, whereas in North America, the sparser population meant that new power structures had to be established by the colonisers: power structures that had to be fairer for free settlers, to entice them to join.

Following Acemoglu & Robinson’s argument, we can make the conclusion that people who don’t pay attention in elections are setting themselves up to be exploited by their rulers. Their lazy attitude to voting makes them traitors to their nation and to their children.

There are always going to be rulers wanting to exploit their power, and to keep them in line, we always need to be questioning authority.

One of the criticisms of the Voice is that the Aboriginal council is going to change Australia Day; that they’re going to take people’s superannuation; or that they’re going to take people’s land. From our discussion now though, we can ask ourselves, could the council ever get so carried away that just like King James II, people decide to overthrow the government?

Let’s explore this notion of removing the king though − who would we replace him with? What is the best strategy for replacing leaders? We wouldn’t want to end up in a situation like Les Misérables:

There was a time we killed the king

We tried to change the world too fast

Now we have got another king

He is no better than the last

Ranked Voting

Australia is phenomenally lucky to have ranked voting as the standard. In fact, the first place it was used for government elections was in Tasmania.

The most naïve approach to voting is what’s typically called “first-past-the-post” (FPTP), as if horses are running past the post at the end of the race. Each voter votes for one candidate, then we add up the votes, and whoever had the most votes is the winner. It’s a bit confusing in that nothing actually happens “first”, unless we perhaps imagine horses powered by their number of votes?

There are a variety of problems with such an arrangement − we could imagine for instance a scenario where we’re voting for our favourite colour. There’s sky blue, pastel blue and orange. We like blue, but hmm, which blue is really the best? If the votes are 30% sky blue, 30% pastel blue and 40% orange, then orange would win a FPTP vote, even though it’s evident that people clearly prefer some variety of blue.

This particular scenario is perhaps the motivation for runoff elections or primaries. In the US for instance, they’re locked into elections where there are really only two parties as viable contenders (thanks to game theory), but at least people can have a say on who will be put forward as the presidential candidate within their party − this part is the primary vote.

Since you have no say on the other party’s candidate, it’s totally possible that they’ll pick the least appealing person for you. Maybe you would’ve liked pink or red instead of orange, but bad luck, you chose to be part of the bluish party.

Photo by John Minchillo, Associated Press

With the possibility of choosing candidates who are hated by the other side, it’s no wonder that US politics is so obnoxiously polarising and draining.

It’s perhaps also worth noting that these primary votes are not necessarily binding − the party might decide a candidate who didn’t actually win the vote.

In the ranked voting system of eg Australia, voters can choose multiple candidates: 1,2,3, …. If their 1st choice doesn’t get many votes, that candidate gets eliminated and the vote is instead applied to the voter’s 2nd choice, at the same strength as if this person had been their 1st choice. So, even if your favourite person doesn’t win, you still have your 2nd and 3rd choices − you can still tilt things towards candidates you sort-of like.

Americans talk about “throwing away votes” by voting for any party other than the major two − indeed, if you were to vote for the Greens Party and they scored 3rd, then your vote would provide no influence over which of the remaining 2 parties end up winning.

The major parties know this: they know that they only need to be better than the other major party, because people are too fearful of wasting their vote on a 3rd party. Logically, they would only ever introduce ranked voting if they felt that there was a threat of them becoming the 3rd party and beginning a long period in obscurity. Either that, or the US populace eventually overthrows their government. The low chance of this happening is why we are so lucky in Australia, that we happened to start out with a good system.

Misleading the Public

Since the US is locked into this system of two parties only having to be less bad than each other, it gives them more liberty to make up any opinion and pass it off as relevant. If the public were to respond, “I don’t care about pineapple on pizza; what an irrelevant party”, then they couldn’t really be relegated to obscurity, because there’s nobody else to fill the void.

So US parties can throw mud at the wall and see what sticks. Should trans people be banned from bathrooms? Well how many trans people are there anyway? How often do you personally see them in a bathroom? How did this become a pressing issue that needs to be resolved by parliament, when the world is on the brink of WW3 and when Antarctic sea ice is 6 standard deviations below expectations:

Apologies in advance for not explaining this in any way, but here are the daily standard deviations for Antarctic sea ice extent for every day, 1989-2023, based on the 1991-2020 mean. Each blue line represents the SD's for a full year. Lighter is more recent.

2023 is in red. pic.twitter.com/C4lLug9mlL

— Prof. Eliot Jacobson (@EliotJacobson) July 24, 2023

The media has the power to run with the irrelevant mud being dreamed up, and can turn it into an issue that people care about. There have now been violent altercations at council meetings in Australia, debating whether drag queens should be allowed to read books to children. When the meetings turn violent, this inevitably creates more media coverage, and Drag Queen Story Time gains further relevance as a pressing political issue.

State-funded media is meant to be one way of ensuring that citizens can be informed about issues that actually matter, but for whatever reason (the viewers certainly aren’t asking for it!), the ABC has taken the path of competing with breakfast TV gossip.

Discussing picnic food on ABC News Breakfast

In web2, since anybody can now spread information, then the government could consider sponsoring user-created content that’s getting clicks. What if we could use language models to distil each article and see what arguments it’s making? Articles making the same points as each other would have to share in the revenue, then novel articles could collect funds from an extra pot.

We could also consider language models helping to facilitate debate − after absorbing the content of all current articles, a chatbot could guide a YouTuber through a debate: “Your claim that Aboriginal Australians could have survived untouched has previously been addressed by John Howard, who has said that being colonised by the British (rather than someone else) was the ‘luckiest thing to happen’. Your claim that Ernie Dingo would be on the council has not previously been covered though. What would be wrong with Ernie Dingo? Why would TV personalities be chosen as council members?”

Of course, voters could ask such questions to themselves, but unfortunately, it seems to be a thoroughly under-developed trait in our society.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr on RFK: My father told me when I was a little boy that people in authority lie and the job in a democracy is to remain skeptical. I’ve been science-based since I was a kid. Show me the evidence and I’ll believe you, but I’m not going to take the word of official narratives.

The way you do research is not by asking authoritative figures what they think. Trusting experts is not a feature of science, and it’s not a feature of democracy. It’s a feature of religion and totalitarianism.

Real liberals don’t censor, and he (Biden) has been promoting censorship from the White House. He’s been working with social-media companies to silence his critics, including me.

Our rights are under assault:

• Freedom of speech; though it’s harder to censor me now that I’m running for president.
• Freedom of worship; they closed churches for a year.
• Freedom of assembly; they created social distancing.
• Private property rights; they closed 3.3 million businesses without due process or just compensation.
• They also shut down the Seventh Amendment right to jury trials.

If voters were able to ask sufficiently intelligent questions about an election, then we could see more relaxation of the rules about who’s allowed to be a candidate. Foreigners for instance could run for Australian parliament, and voters could decide for themselves how much it really matters that this person is Japanese. Are they going to serve Japan’s interests rather than Australia’s? Well what’s to stop any current member accepting bribes and serving Japanese interests?

Why is it that children can’t run for election? It’s easy to imagine Greta Thunberg for instance winning enough votes in 2019 to gain a seat in Australia.

Spokesperson for the Truth

In the upcoming Voice referendum, a pamphlet is being mailed to all households, pitching arguments for and against. Why is such a pamphlet necessary though? We already covered that voters should be able to make wise choices for themselves, and if they don’t put in the effort, then they’re traitors.

Unfortunately though, we live in the real world, and we sometimes have to compromise. The spokespeople for the yes and no pitches in the pamphlet were selected as those MPs voting for or against the bill for the referendum to take place. So at least, they have a publicly-stated interest one way or the other. Whether the commitment is sincere or merely a means of sabotaging the pamphlet, we have no way of knowing.

Maybe the MPs don’t have the most rigorous logic or the most charisma, but they had enough to be chosen as representatives for their electorates 🤷

If voters do decide to do their own research instead of relying on the MP-only fanclub of each side, then there are fears that voters will encounter misinformation. We covered earlier that voters will at least feel they’re needed as a wise jury when making choices for the nation.

If they’re vulnerable to misinformation though; if their wisdom is revealed to be no better than that of a magic 8 ball, how can they continue to tell themselves that they have the mandate to choose the government? They’ll withdraw their involvement, ultimately leading to subjugation. By withdrawing, they’ll concede that they’re powerless and this will logically lead to depression or worse.

If it’s a lone wolf who breaks away and claims that the mob has wisdom no better than a magic 8 ball, then the mob can be framed as a legitimate target for violence:

Instead of arguing for powerlessness and passivity, one should argue that the power of the INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM should be broken, and that this will greatly INCREASE the power and freedom of INDIVIDUALS and SMALL GROUPS.

Until the industrial system has been thoroughly wrecked, the destruction of that system must be the revolutionaries' ONLY goal.

The Book of Revelation

Despite the fact that the yes/no pamphlet is fundamentally prone to being incomplete or unconvincing, let’s acknowledge that it does have some very appealing properties.

First, it’s a great heuristic for a sincere viewpoint. In elections, there have been instances of essentially false flag attacks, people posing as eg the Labor Party then doing something bad. With the yes/no pamphlets, each side can sign off on statements that they endorse, and voters can have faith that it’s indeed this team saying it.

Secondly, the pamphlet can cut through the media noise − even if the media decides that one side of the debate is deplorable and that people advocating for it should be cancelled, this side still gets to make its pitch in the pamphlet that’s widely distributed.

To expand on this point, even if a side isn’t outright cancelled − even if they’re just given less airtime, the pamphlet allows things to be balanced out.

It’s an unfortunate reality that for elections, the media and even Wikipedia will essentially pick the winners in advance, then ignore the other candidates. They will say essentially, “this candidate is not going to win, so let’s write as if they don’t even exist.” People looking for information will absorb this bias that they don’t need to be considered, then the candidate will receive few votes and the biased reporters will say “see, we were right that the candidate wouldn’t win!”

Imagine if the electoral commission were to send out the advertising material for all candidates, in the same way that the yes/no pamphlets are being distributed? What if the advertising material was laminated and stuck to the voting booth too, for easy reference?

Voting success would be less dependent on how much advertising money was available to be spent by each candidate; and less dependent on who could rope in the most volunteers on the day.

Campaigning for votes during the 2023 Aston by-election

If the representatives of the Voice council are to be elected by Indigenous Australians, then suddenly the Commonwealth will be imposing more problems of modern Australia.

These councillors will not necessarily be the clearest thinkers or the most capable leaders; they will simply be those who are the best at getting elected. What an awful curse to place upon these people who have already been oppressed for centuries.

Whether the Voice unites us or intensifies debate, we can say that some good is coming from it: it’s exposing voters to some uncommon mechanisms for how elections might be conducted in the future. Asking whether it’s democratic helps us discover whether our own situation is democratic.

To help support the progress towards fair elections, please endorse the motion for unbiased coverage in Wikipedia.