A speech addressed to the United States Congress:
What will be heard in this speech is both optimistic and skeptical. Optimistic, in that what I will present can be an overall good for democracy, and skeptical, because it requires our active participation. That’s not to say we cannot achieve it; I draw the opposite conclusion. But if we hold a historical perspective; if we look at the many commentators on democracy and what it requires, there are both plausible and good reasons to be pessimistic. Nevertheless, there are times, as the psychologist William James would say, when believing something despite its potential for error is the best option because of the fruit it may bear in the future. And that democracy can take a step toward progress is such an instance.
I’m here today to present the Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure, or MACI for short; a voting system with certain properties that can improve the nation’s democratic process, and is a use case of blockchain technology. I will explain each of the pieces in due time to understand the conclusion I draw, which is that MACI, as a secure, anti-collusion voting platform, promotes, through what is called Quadratic Voting, or QV, the competition between diverse ideas, opinions, and beliefs that is necessary for a well-functioning democracy. But first I will look to Ancient Athens to understand why democracy has been criticized historically and to see how aspects of the system, such as majority rule, can constrain active participation in the democratic process. After that, I will explain how blockchain, MACI, and QV operate and address the problems that obstruct democratic progress.
At the end of the sixth century BC, the Athenian leader Cleisthenes established demokrotia, or democracy, in ancient Athens, and the ‘will of the people’ became sovereign and ruled for just under two hundred years. Rather than a representative form, as in most democracies today, where the citizens vote for an elected official to represent their interests, the Greeks had a direct one. Citizens themselves would gather at the ekklesia, or Assembly, to debate and vote on legislation and policy; they would be summoned to serve on the boule, or Council of Five Hundred, where those serving would decide what would go before the Assembly; and there was the dikasteria, or the courts, where jurors would be called to vote by majority rule whether accused citizens were guilty or not.
In 399 BC, before a jury of five hundred and one fellow citizens, a short, stub-nosed, bare-foot man named Socrates was faced with the impossible task of convincing the present majority of his innocence. If he failed, he would be put to death. What made this task so difficult is that the majority had already been convinced beforehand of Socrates’ guilt, and no matter how innocent he was, if he did not beg and plead and ask for forgiveness, his condemnation was certain. Charged with impiety and corrupting the youth, he combated these charges with his inimitable style, demonstrating that his accusers, who were primarily prominent people of Athens like poets, politicians, and craftsmen, were far from concerned with the actual good of the city and its youth and only with taking vengeance upon a man who questioned their claims to knowledge of wisdom and virtue. Not because he wanted to embarrass them in front of the Athenian youth who followed and took joy in Socrates’ questioning, or to reveal to his fellow citizens in the marketplace that their leaders may not be as wise as they say, but because, if they possessed what they purported to, he wanted to know it himself. And Socrates would not take appearances for reality; if they couldn’t demonstrate their knowledge; if they said justice or wisdom or courage was one thing and then another, never caring to be consistent, he would relentlessly question them until they realized they did not know what they had claimed to. And because, for Socrates, knowledge of virtue and wisdom are the principal goods in life, everything else being subservient toward these ends, he upbraided those he questioned for believing they are wise when they are ignorant, virtuous when base, and treating what is most serious as trivial. But by relentlessly questioning those held in esteem in Athens, he garnered deep resentment and his accusers began to slander him, convincing others of his false crimes. At his trial, before the final vote convicting him, he was offered the opportunity to live, but only if he renounced the life he had been living. He refused, saying “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and was sentenced to death.
What drove Socrates’ on this path was that the Oracle of Delphi, a priestess at the temple of Apollo in Ancient Greece, told him that he was the wisest among his people. Baffled by this and believing himself entirely ignorant, he set about discovering whether he actually was the wisest. Thus he went about questioning anyone who claimed to be wise and, learning that those who did possessed only the ability to deceive others into thinking they were, he realized his wisdom consisted in knowing his ignorance, which allowed him to discern that the Athenian democracy was in dire need of reorienting itself toward caring for what he discovered to be essential to its welfare. Without this bedrock of active participation and concern for cultivating a higher good, Athenian society would grow idle and collapse.
The problem outlined here takes part in what is known as the tyranny of the majority, and many philosophers have concluded from a case like Socrates’ that democracy, where citizens, equal under the democratic law, vote and conclude based on majority rule, is doomed to fail. Plato, whose philosophy can almost be seen as a shadow cast by Socrates’ pursuit and the Athenian reaction to it, saw democracy as a form of government that allows reason to be dominated by human ambition and appetitive self-interest. It’s as if being on a ship with a captain who has all the knowledge of the sea, of how to navigate through storm and peril, who knows the stars’ patterns, the changing seasons and currents; but due to majority rule, is voted off the ship by others who know little to nothing of what the captain does, and who are concerned only with doing as they please and not with what is best, which is revealed through reason and reflection. Democracy, according to Plato, allows what is worse to seem best and can lead to tragedies like Socrates’ death. He therefore rejected it as an inadequate form of government.
The political philosopher, John Stuart Mill, who advocated for representative democracy, claimed that some votes within the society should be weighted according to merit and ability. A Socrates, for instance, may have five votes, whereas someone less educated would have one. Unsettled by the possibility of a majority that allows themselves to be governed by irrational desires, Mill attempted to formulate a mechanism to deter it.
The political philosopher and sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville, in his work Democracy in America, expressed a strong worry that democracy may result in only one despot being replaced by many. Believing the tyranny of the majority to be a severe threat, he claimed majority rule may permeate American society to such an extent that individuals and minorities will lose their difference of opinion and belief because of their inability, due to lack of resources and power, to combat what a majority concludes and dictates, and therefore has the potential to devolve into a state where the independence of mind and character, which is so essential to a healthy, well-functioning democracy, will be missing.
Our founding fathers directed a lot of attention toward redressing this issue, and the Federalists - those who supported a national union unifying all the states - concluded that representative democracy, rather than a direct one, could potentially preclude the problem from arising. They argued in Federalist Paper 10 that, by having a representative body consisting of highly qualified and intelligent electorates, the public’s views, opinions, beliefs, and desires would be refined and cultivated more effectively than if acting directly, as the Athenian demokrotia had.
Despite these criticisms, though, democracy is one of the only forms of government that prioritize people’s opportunities to develop and actualize their potential as individuals. Therefore, because such growth is indispensable to our welfare, these problems should be seen as obstacles to overcome rather than defeating reasons. Like the founding fathers and John Stuart Mill, we should seek procedural mechanisms that help achieve this. As Walt Whitman, the great American poet of democracy, says, “Only from [the collective], and from its proper regulation and potency, comes the other, comes the chance of individualism (22),” and the first step toward this proper “regulation” is promoting active, thoughtful participation in political processes. As Socrates’ story suggests, only until citizens engage in a mode of life that seeks to answer fundamental questions about the nature of the good, for instance, or of virtue, can the problems of the majority be dealt with. If individuals passively follow what they’re naturally disposed to believe based on their upbringing, their communities, and their biases, then democracy will not work. It requires a thriving ecosystem of competing ideas and beliefs that encourages members to participate in a process that demands the cultivation of their higher, rational capacities. As I will soon argue, the current voting system obstructs active engagement by squeezing out minority perspectives - as is the case with third-party candidates - that disincentivizes voters to consider ideas, beliefs, opinions, and policy in a way that forces them to question their positions, which effectively constrains diversity of thought. John Stuart Mill expresses the point well in his essay On Liberty:
When [beliefs have] come to be a hereditary creed, and to be received passively, not actively - when the mind is no longer compelled… to exercise its vital powers on the questions which its belief presents to it, there is a progressive tendency to forget all of the belief except the formularies, or to give it a dull and torpid assent, as if accepting it on trust dispensed with the necessity of realizing it in consciousness, or testing it by personal experience, until it almost ceases to connect itself at all with the inner life of the human being. Then are seen the cases… in which the creed remains… outside the mind, incrusting and petrifying against all other influences addressed to the higher parts of our nature; manifesting its power by not suffering any fresh and living conviction to get in, but itself doing nothing for the mind or heart except standing sentinel over them to keep them vacant.
Such is the case with our current political climate, which compels those within it to restrict their opinions and beliefs to one of two boxes, promoting passive rather active engagement on what political view to hold. MACI, in conjunction with Quadratic Voting, is a solution that incentivizes the opposite by allowing voters to vote outside of the major two parties without risking what is known as the spoiler effect. Before explaining this, it’s important to understand how the proposed voting system works and, more logistically, how it would ensure a secure platform.
If we ask, “What ideal properties would ensure a secure voting process?”, what answers should be expected? One should be immutability, meaning, the votes cast cannot be tampered with, changed, or discarded without consensus. And voters need to have access to this record. Transparency then, which means having access to the tallied vote, is also ideal. The process would also ideally be trustworthy. In other words, members trust that the process was done fairly. And lastly, it’s important to ensure voter privacy. With these four properties, voters know the votes cannot be changed, they can check the tally themselves, they can trust the reliability of the results, and the votes are private. But how can these properties be obtained?
Through blockchain. The blockchain used for MACI is effectively a distributed ledger across many nodes or computers on a network consisting of blocks storing information based on smart contracts. Smart Contracts are inscribed with conditions that, when met, execute an agreed-upon transaction. Because the blockchain is distributed among the nodes, any member can check the validity of what occurs along the blocks. Now, each block along the chain has, in essence, a kind of fingerprint that cannot be altered without affecting the blocks adjacent to it and, if tampered with, the tamperer would need to change all the blocks along the chain, which could be done only by getting most users to agree, making the technology highly secure.
As mentioned, MACI is a use case of blockchain and works in the following way. There are four steps to begin voting on it: First, voters register as part of an e-voting poll. Second, voting begins and each ballot cast is encrypted using a registered voter’s private key, which is sent to a smart contract using a public key encoded with the private one; voters can vote multiple times. Third, when the voting period ends the coordinator collects all the messages, tallies them, and then publishes the final results using zero-knowledge proofs, proving the validity of each vote without revealing the users’ private identities.
With this, the problem of how votes are cast, who counts them, how they’re dealt with, and whether they’re tampered with, is addressed by MACI’s operations, making it a secure system for voting. DoraHacks, for instance, a global hacker movement and Web3 developer incentive platform, held a successful MACI voting round with Quadratic Voting in June 2024 with more than a million registered addresses participating, and there’s no reason to think MACI couldn’t support larger elections as well.
The next step is to understand how Quadratic Voting works. Most US elections, like the presidential, congressional, and senate, use a first-past-the-post, or FPTP, voting system. Voters cast their ballot for the candidate they want to win and whichever candidate receives the most first-preference votes takes the election. This leads to a serious problem plaguing our elections: the spoiler effect. The spoiler effect is when an irrelevant candidate or proposal in a voting poll affects the outcome of the vote, leading to vote splitting, where voter attention is concentrated in a small number of political parties. A classic case is the 2000 presidential election, where democratic presidential candidate, Al Gore, lost the election to republican candidate George Bush, which was due to the presence of a left-wing third-party candidate, Al Nader, who received and siphoned 97,888 votes in Florida from Gore, causing Gore to lose the election to Bush, who had 537 more votes in that state. This creates a dilemma for a portion of the voters. Those who supported Al Nader did so because he aligned with their interests, beliefs, and ideas. However, by voting for him, they contributed to Bush winning the election, who was their least preferred candidate. To avoid this, they would have had to vote for Al Gore, compromising on their primary preference, which they should be able to express in a democratic election. So, either they must compromise on their first preference, or vote in a way that contributes to their least-preferred candidate winning. If voters were instead provided a system that allows for second and third preferences to be expressed, this issue may be resolved.
Rather than having only one vote, imagine a system that allows a certain amount of voting credits, say one hundred, and the voter is asked to vote between several candidates, call them A, B, and C, and can use their credits however they would like. One voter can give fifty percent of their voting points to A, twenty-five percent to B, and the other twenty-five to C, and another voter could give all their points to A and none to B and C. However, instead of the vote credits being spent linearly, where voters could vote for one option one hundred times, the cost of each vote after the first accrues quadratically. The first vote costs one credit, the second one four, the third nine, and so forth, and using all credits toward one candidate would only yield ten votes. This incentivizes the voters to be more strategic, capturing their preference intensity. If a voter cares deeply about a particular candidate, using all their points expresses the depth of their preference. The question is then how does this deal with the spoiler effect?
Take the case of Gore vs Bush again. If the voting was done quadratically, those who voted for Nader could have also spent voting credits on Gore, expressing their second-order preference, and the dilemma imposed on them by FPTP would evaporate. By expressing only first preferences, the interests of minority voting groups are obstructed by the forced concern that their votes are wasted by casting them for third-party candidates. Therefore, FPTP incentivizes the electoral votes to steer toward a two-party system, and voting for a third party is risky behavior. However, under QV, what was previously a risk becomes strategic, and unfair compromise is mitigated.
The great benefit of implementing QV for these reasons, which addresses the problem of the majority, is that, by allowing for the expression of second and third preferences, more competition is created between what is being voted on, whether legislation or candidates. The spoiler effect disincentivizes voting for non-major party items and, by doing so, the diversity among options is reduced to an insufficient degree, and much of the country’s interests are squeezed into one of two options.
QV incentivizes third-party inclined voters to express and pursue their first preference, which allows the diversity amongst plausibly electable candidates to rise. Candidates who are part of major parties are then forced to compete with third-party, minority-representing candidates, driving them to engage with what would be peripheral and ineffective otherwise, and this heightened competition will stimulate a more lively and engaged political ecosystem. A two-party system encourages a great deal of passivity. If one feels discontent with the two political parties and what they offer, there is no voting outlet to express it, causing voters to feel apathetic and disinterested. QV encourages an active role by voters choosing options outside the major parties without being posed with a dilemma.
In closing, what is found in political debates today is politicians entrenched in their positions against the other side, showing little sign of progressing the conversations relevant to the country’s development. Instead, they say what is predictable and what may safely garner votes. If third-party candidates are allowed to compete, to present their ideas, to offer a different perspective; if voters are provided with unfamiliar opinions and beliefs they have to now consider and reckon with, then the dynamics of the country will grow active and will become animated by the excitement of novelty and progress in debate and discussion.