Hysteresis voting

Our founders held this as an axiom: government should reflect the will of the people. A government which does not is a tyranny, and should be torn down and replaced. Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

But our founders were also right to be concerned about the tyranny of the mob; in a direct democracy, if you can convince 50.0001% of the people to do break the system, it's broken forever. There have to be limits in place to slow things down, and ways to fix mistakes when they happen. That's why we have a representative democracy instead of a direct one. If the United States had been a direct democracy, then the 9/11 attacks might have resulted in misdirected nuclear retaliation and millions of innocent deaths. It's very possible that only our representative democracy kept that from happening.

But what if there's a terrorist attack two days before an election?

That might change the outcome, right? Perhaps Nathan Petrelli or Donald Trump wins instead of losing, and the course of the country is changed for at least the next several years. Maybe we invade Iraq again. Maybe we do something much worse, something we regret for centuries. And even as the people calm down, there's no chance for years to remove the horrible people we elected.

But if the same attack happened two days after the election? Now Nathan loses, and we go on an entirely different course for the next six years.

What's different between those scenarios? The attack happens identically. The people of the country react identically. They're still being asked the same questions on election day. The only difference is timing. Ask on the wrong day, and you set the course of the country for years to come, with no chance to undo it until the next time you ask the people what they want.

A similar thing happens in cases like Brexit. The way people vote is actually dependent on how they expect the outcome to go. Once people see the outcome of the referendum, they might change their vote (or lack of vote), but now it's too late. People are convinced their votes don't matter, so on the rare occasion they do matter, they're left wanting a second chance. The will of the people suddenly changed, but it only changed after the vote, so the government is left unable to respond to the change.

Signal processing and controls engineers, do you recognize this? It's a sampling problem! The people want the government to behave in a certain way, which changes over time. That's our setpoint we're trying to hit. The setpoint is able to change rapidly (even in response to its own sampling!) but it's only being sampled once every 2-6 years. If you tried to build an actual control system like that, you'd be fired!

Nyquist says that if you're sampling once every six years, the thing you're sampling can't change any faster than every twelve years! Does that describe the will of the people? Especially after something like 9/11? Absolutely not. To avoid getting a government stuck at the extremes, we need a higher sampling rate, to respond more quickly to the will of the people changing.

But that can't be the only change, of course. Having a government that's able to calm down with the people is good, but it also means having one able to get angry with them. Instant response to the momentary will of the people after a terrorist incident would be a disaster! Like in any engineered system, no matter how fast your sample rate is, you still have to have some filtering to slow down response to a reasonable level, or it will go unstable very quickly. The simplest way to achieve this filtering is called hysteresis.

So here's what we do: vote all the time, on everything. Polling stations are open 24/7, with the same set of proposals and candidates on them. Every month the vote totals reset, and everyone can go vote again. This has some immediate effects: any popular vote resolution can be changed at any time, and every elected official is facing a recall election, all the time. That's a recipe for chaos... but here's where the hysteresis comes in!

The catch is that you need a super-majority to affect change. Before an item is put on the ballot, you define some threshold for the change to be executed. Suppose the threshold for changing the mayor is 10%. Every month, you see how many people want a new mayor. Add up the percentage by which that position wins or loses, month by month. If that sum ever gets up to 10%, you get a new mayor.

So if there's one month that the vote is 55/45 for replacing the mayor, you do so immediately, because you got a ten percent difference. But say the outcome is 54/46; you only have eight of your ten required points. You have to wait another month, but that month you only need 51/49 to get that last two percent. This means that the more angry the people are at an elected official, the easier it is to remove them quickly.

But it also means that every month, you have some idea how much closer or further away that recall might be. If the embattled mayor's supporters happened to stay home the first month, maybe they'll come out the second month once they see he's in trouble. Perhaps that second month, the vote is 48/52, four points in favor of keeping him. Now the mayor is six points from being recalled instead of two, and his total will keep changing over succeeding months as more people show up to vote. You have continuously running polling of elected officials, giving a real-time approval rating, with actual consequences!

Now, what about the end of a term? Well, under this system, there doesn't have to be any actual end of term! Instead, you just gradually lower the percentage required to remove someone from office. We design the system with a bias towards change over long periods. The first year, our mayor has to have 10% net disapproval to be replaced. The second year, he only needs 8% net to be replaced. After five years, 50/50 is enough. After ten years, he has to maintain 55% approval all the time to avoid replacement. So if you have someone who's actually consistently popular, they can stay in office for a very long time. But it gets harder and harder every time. You get all the advantages of term limits, without the problem of throwing out perfectly good elected officials arbitrarily.

So there you have hysteresis elections. There are a lot of possible details to be worked out, of course.


Advantages

• Poorly timed disasters and demagogues getting a temporary majority don't break everything
• A small majority of the electorate can't flip things back and forth rapidly
• Voters get warnings about changes before they happen, so more people can get out and vote for what they want
• Increase the value of votes and you increase turnout!
• Regret for voters that sit out is reduced
• It's much harder for the government to suppress voters if voting is happening all the time
• Term limits are handled much more organically

Questions

• Cost. Polling now costs at least 20x what it did previously.
• Or you do mail-in ballots or something, with all the security flaws that entails?
• Do we put less-important things on mail-in ballots, and only require in-person appearances past a certain limit?
• Who sets what's on the ballots and what the hysteresis limits are? If they mayor can set his own removal threshold, that's a problem.
• Are the proposals on the ballot and the thresholds also part of the same voting system?