The Probability Broach, chapter 18

The Seventh Continental Congress of the North American Confederacy is about to get underway. Win and Lucy file into the delegates’ chamber, which is half legislative chamber and half stadium, complete with vendors hawking overpriced snack food:

I don’t know what I’d been expecting—the U.N. General Assembly or Flash Gordon’s Bathroom—it was a barn: weathered pine, rough beams, dominated by a huge Telecom screen up front. Somewhere a vendor was crying “Peanuts! Piñons! Fried Grasshoppers!” My belly rumbled and I tasted greasy hamburger. Two walls were stepped into tiers of upholstered benches. Thousands of desks cluttered the football field-sized floor.

“Thousands” of desks in a space the size of a football field? I think L. Neil Smith needs to check his math.

An American football field is 360 feet long by 160 feet wide, or 57,600 square feet. Assuming the delegates’ desks are the size of a standard office cubicle, they’d be 6×6, or 36 square feet. That works out to 1600 desks at most, and that’s making the unrealistic assumption of zero space for aisles.

It turns out Lucy has connections, as much as anyone can have in this anarcho-capitalist society. She’s there in an official capacity as a delegate, so they’re not stuck in the nosebleed seats. They have a reserved desk out on the floor, where the action is.

Her name appeared at the front of the room, among a few others already present, followed by a number: 6076. “My constituency, such as it is, six-thousand-odd people—odd enough t’let me stand for ’em at this quiltin’ bee, anyway. Sure y’won’t have a grasshopper?”

“Ulp!” I shook my head, taking the extra seat. “Lucy, you continue to amaze me. You represent some district in Laporte?”

“No district to it, son. We’re all ‘at large’ here. Though there’s some as shouldn’t be. Anybody can represent anybody else or nobody but themselves. Not even themselves, if they just wanna sit in the gallery and be entertained.”

As Lucy explains to Win, everyone in the NAC is free to attend the Continental Congress, either to participate as a delegate or just to watch. All the proceedings are live-streamed, but only people who are physically present can vote. That’s on purpose, because, as Lucy puts it, “This place is supposed to be inconvenient!”

If you don’t want to attend in person but you do want your voice to be heard, you can assign your vote to someone who is there, and they can cast it on your behalf. There’s no limit to how many proxy votes a single person can have, so any delegate might be only representing themselves, or they might represent a small handful of others, or they might represent thousands or millions. Lucy’s constituents are mostly old friends and fellow veterans whom she fought alongside in the Prussian war.

“Most folks just show up representing friends, neighbors, people in the same trade. Maybe half a dozen are professionals, with a million proxies each.”

“That many?”

“Don’t get sarcastical! Votes don’t amount to much, anyway. It’s what gets said here. Though nothing guarantees anyone’ll listen.” The screen changed again, more delegates arriving, vote-strengths shifting as viewers all over the continent punched in proxies and cancellations. Totals were revised moment by moment; many a politico with thousands of supporters might suddenly discover that, through the miracle of electronics, he was representing no one but himself.

This is the most detailed picture Smith gives of how he thinks government should work, so I want to spend this week discussing it.

Let me start with the good: On paper, I like this idea a lot. It would be tricky to get right, but it has some major advantages.

Organizing government this way would put an end to voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other anti-democratic tactics. Since anyone can show up and vote, there’s no need for expensive campaigns—a chronic flaw of our system that limits political participation to the wealthy. If your representative acts contrary to your interests, you don’t need to impeach them or hold a recall election—just switch your proxy to someone else.

It would mean real choice for voters. You wouldn’t be limited to choosing one of the handful of candidates who are willing to run in your district, nor are you stuck with the person who wins 51% of the minority who vote. No one would be shut out of representation because their preferred candidate loses. Everyone can pick the representative who best shares their views, which would mean a legislature that truly reflects the popular will.

That’s the praise. Now the criticism.

This would never work in the kind of anarchist politics L. Neil Smith favors. It should be screamingly obvious that it would fail catastrophically.

Start with the most obvious problem. Smith tells us that Lucy represents 6,076 people. How do they know that?

Remember, in the North American Confederacy, there’s no census. (In fact, Smith specifically says the people of the NAC would shoot a census taker on sight.) There’s no Social Security list or any other official database of the population. There’s no authoritative record of how many people live in this society, where they live, or what their names are.

So, how do they know that a delegate speaks for the number of people they claim to speak for?

If I show up at this meeting and say I represent a million people, how could anyone prove or disprove that? If I gave them a list of names, how would they know I’m not voting on behalf of dead people, or people who don’t live in the North American Confederacy, or outright inventing people who don’t exist? What records would they consult?

Also, even if I could somehow prove my proxies were real people, how would they verify that those people want me to represent them, and I’m not voting on their behalf without their permission? Smith says it’s all done electronically, but any computer system can be hacked.

There are problems in the other direction too. If I’m a voter who wants to influence the Congress, what stops me from assigning my proxy to multiple delegates to boost my views? Or if I have two Telecom setups at home, can I cast two votes?

You can imagine unethical interest groups setting up bot farms—thousands of servers run by software impersonating real people, automatically casting votes for whoever the person in charge wants. It happens all the time on social media, and you can be sure it would be tried here, where the stakes are higher.

Ironically, this system might work with a centralized authority that maintains a voter registration database. But in an anarchy, it never would.

Smith glosses over all these problems. It’s possible that they never occurred to him. That’s a common blind spot afflicting utopian political theorists of all stripes. They’re so sure that everyone would embrace their system and play fair, they never give any thought to dealing with people who are willing to break the rules.

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Other posts in this series:

• The Probability Broach