HIP: 64
title: Official delegation campaign
authors: @clesaege
status: Phase 1
created: 2022-09-11
conflicts with: None
languages: EN
Simple Summary
Have an official campaign to ensure that all humans receive a fair exposure to delegates seeking delegations and increase vote turnout.
Abstract
After registration, users will be proposed a list of delegates. Their order will be determined through weighted shuffle in proportion of delegate voting power.
Motivation
Unfair advantage at the time of onboarding
There has recently been some concerns that people on-boarding new users are getting an unfair advantage in seeking delegations. Indeed, there is currently no “official campaign” for delegations.
For example, in France candidates (who have the money to do so, but that’s another story) can:
Have a leaflet and a ballot put in a mail to all electors.
Post some posters on a specially designed display locations.
They also should get a “fair” speaking time in the TV and radio.
Parties can also have a campaign spot displayed on TV and radio.
This obviously doesn’t prevent candidates with more means of doing more (additional leaflets, door to door campaigning, going to markets and other high traffic areas to campaign).
But at least it gives a small chance for candidates to be seen.
Low turnout
Another problem is that the current abstention is extremely high (97.5% on high turnout votes). This forms an existential risk to the project as someone who would be able farm profiles could easily control more votes than the total active users (last vote had 500 votes expressed directly or indirectly and some votes have been decided by only 4 votes of difference).
Solution
Have an official display of candidates for delegation shown to onboarded users at the time of registration. This will both increase fairness for delegates seeking votes and increase the vote turnout.
In order to give fair chances for each delegate to be displayed, the delegates can be displayed randomly in proportion of their voting power taking inspiration on Gitcoin weighted shuffle for grant display.
Specification
An official delegation candidate display will be shown to users. Delegates will be able to show a small delegation speech and a link to a page of their choice where they can expand on their actions and political positions.
The display order of candidates will be random weighted by amount of delegations the candidate has.
This means that all registrant will see candidates in a different order.
The display process will be as followed:
Draw a candidate randomly in proportion of their voting power. The voting power is the amount of delegations the candidate has on which 1 is added if the candidate is a registered human.
Place it on the first display slot and remove it from the list of candidates.
Then you would just incentivize everyone making delegation speech to increase exposure or the displayed list would be so irrelevant that people wouldn’t even bother looking at it.
Having political forces exposure proportional to their weigh is what is fair.
It is not, it creates a positive feedback loop that incentivize bigger delegates amass even more numbers (how convenient right now), and creating less diversity of opinion. It is by definition the creation of a monolithic power structure. No new actors can provide new ideas and generate pluralism.
Well there would be a whole page of people asking for delegations, in the current setting (like if we just look at the delegation thread) pretty much everyone would be displayed in the first or second page.
Also in the current setting, people who asked delegations first (me) are at an advantage.
This setting would actually give to each political force a fair chance.
Now if you want to make a system where new people get more chances you could do something completely random, but then you can get an advantage by sending a lot of delegates to get better display space.
Maybe that’s something you want.
Actually we could even make a mix of both by either:
Drawing half as random and half weighted.
Having different display modes (like in Gitcoin) where one is weighted shuffle and the other pure shuffle.
me gusta la propuesta de mostrar opciones de delegaciones al momento de realizar el registro, no comparto que se muestren segun el poder el voto ya que los que menos poder de voto tienen se quedarian con menos exposicion. La solucion podria ser ponderar tambien su participacion en las votaciones por ejemplo.
As long as this is not enforced as a part of the delegation process, I’m fine with this.
There is no way to prove that a delegated user has gone through this campaign, it would be very stressful to try to figure that out.
Voters don’t need to be presented a neutral selection of delegates. Getting exposed to a partial truth and deciding whether if you’re being patronized or not is also part of being a voter in democratic systems. It’s fine if the system is hostile and biased, that’s the nature of democracy. The voters need to navigate this feature.
If, as @ludovico keeps claiming, “delegations are permanent in practice”, that implies that:
the human is careless about the system and just delegates to do a favor (which is fine, and already a trait of democracy. If anyone wants to minimize this, they should stop labeling the governance system they want “democracy”, since it would be antithetical to wall off apathetic humans)
the human actually would care about it, but is not given the chance to learn more about the system, which would have produced a different result.
then, why don’t you go and contact these parties with your side of the story, or the whole neutral delegators list?
Also, these claims make the following assumption: that most PoH users will absolutely neglect their voting power. I’m not sure that’s the case. If you, instead, assume that PoH will be a global infrastructure project, many of these users will likely go back and rethink their current delegated votes, and they rediscover they were a part of it.
Subsidize gasless delegations to incentivize users to change their delegations as they see fit and avoid “delegates for life”. It can be done with a similar mechanism as gasless vouches. Compound’s comp.vote offer this feature.