Mathl. Comput. Modelling Vol. 16, No. 819, pp. 59-65, 1992 Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved

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COMPUTERIZING POLITICS

GORDON TULLOCK

Department of Economics and Political Science

University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, U.S.A.

Abstract-A political proposal for changing OUT voting procedures by use of computers is presented. Individuals would be able to cast direct votes on laws if they wish, or designate congressmen to cast their votes. Individual congressmen would have different numbers of votes depending on who was backing of them at that particular point in time. The procedure would raise various problems which are discussed at length.

In this essay, I would like to discuss the integration of computers into our political decision-making procedure. Let me begin with a proposal which was made long ago [Tullock, 19671 which, when first proposed, would have put some strains on computer technology but today would basically be easy. It would require a routine but sizeable redesign of some of our hardware. Basically, this system would permit the populace to not only select political representatives, but to do so in a highly differentiated way and, from time to time, to change their representatives or decide that they themselves will vote directly. Perhaps it is easiest to outline the scheme quickly and then deal with the various technical and political difficulties which might arise.

We begin by observing that almost everybody has access to a telephone and that the coun- try is almost as thoroughly wired for cable TV. Using these electronic networks instead of the traditional system of ballots or the more recent system of voting machines does not seem in any way difficult. There are already interactive systems which permit TV watchers to communicate with the stations [Pollack, 19901. Th e commercial value of the systems is still in doubt, but the technical possibility is clear.

The fact that many people are on cable does not a priori seem relevant for communication with the central computer, but there was an experiment in which individuals using cable TV were permitted to communicate with the network. It was a commercial failure, but there were no significant technical difficulties.

I propose, then, that using a similar system, each individual would be permitted (whenever he/she felt like it) to cast his votes, either for a representative or directly on the bills that are being debated in, let us say, the lower house of Congress. We will discuss later the system in which some of the people are permitted to cast more heavily weighted votes than others as is true today for the Senate. At the moment, let us simply take everyone as having the same weight.

The system would be fairly simple. I could call up a central computer and express my opinion that Joe Smith was the man I wanted to have as my representative. He, then, when a matter came to a vote, would cast not a single vote as a representative does now, but let us say 178,531 votes, or how many votes happened to be in his account at that time. If I were unhappy I could take the vote away from him and give it to someone else. I could also, if I felt like it, cast it directly myself while watching the proceedings on TV. Who could speak in Congress will be discussed below.

I would assume that a good many people who had nothing much else to do-a retired couple, for example-would in fact watch the proceedings of Congress and cast votes from time to time directly rather than appointing representatives. ’ There would be nothing to prevent me from taking my vote away from my representative at 1:00 in the afternoon, watching the program

‘Retired people today make much of the audience for C-Span.

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from then till 5:00, casting two votes during the process, and then at 5:00 returning my vote to whatever congressman I wished.

It would be a little more difficult but not by any means impossible to differentiate my vote. I could, for example, instruct the computer that Smith will cast my vote on matters referring to national defense but Jones will vote on agricultural matters. Alternatively, I could tell the computer that I want Smith to cast my votes on most matters, but that the computer is to tally me as voting “no” on all agricultural subsidies. The only problem is that somebody would have to decide which categories a given motion falls in. If I was unhappy about that process I could always simply make my own decision, not a great problem.

Further, I would be permitted to cast deferred votes, that is, suppose a debate is going on regarding the military budget and I have strong feelings about it, but not strong enough so that I will skip a dinner party. I could leave suitable voting instructions in the computer.

There would be no reason why I would have to give my vote to someone who had been formally nominated by one of the parties. During the latter part of her life, my mother was largely confined to her home in Florida, a pleasant house’and neighborhood, but nevertheless a little dull. I am fairly confident that she would have enjoyed watching congress-she had been a member of the League of Women Voters most of her life-and voting. Further, I am sure my sister, her husband and I would have been perfectly willing to designate her as our representatives so she could cast four votes.

Presumably, this kind of thing would happen a good deal, but the total amount of votes involved would not be large. It is likely, however, that individual congressmen would have, at any given point in time, quite radically different numbers of votes. In fact, we would anticipate a Poisson distribution.2

If we continue our present custom of having a large room in the Capitol where congressmen are occasionally present, we would have to make some kind of limitation on the number of the representatives who’d be there. But it should be emphasized this is by no means necessary. There is no reason with modern electronic devices why all of the congressmen should be assembled anywhere even in the rather sporadic way that in fact they do assemble in the US Congress. The congressman who now sits in his office most of the time and just dashes down occasionally to cast his vote would be given a little more convenience if it were not necessary for him to leave his office to cast his vote. He already can watch the proceedings on TV.

The actual debate at the moment, as I suppose all of my readers know, is characteristically delivered to the television cameras and perhaps two or three members of Congress who are there on watch.3 In any event, if the Congressmen are not compelled to go to the chamber and vote, which is almost the only reason they ever go to the chamber now,4 there is no obvious reason why we couldn’t permit substantially anybody who had even one vote and was located in Keokuk, Iowa from casting that vote and being a member of the Legislature. Whether he’d be paid, of course, is another matter.

The question of organizing the debates, however, must be faced. The first thing to be said is there is no reason at all why the people giving speeches to the House which are shown on TV should all physically be in the same room. There would, however, have to be some decision as to who could occupy the television channel and for how long.

In a brilliant note, Bertrand de Jouvenel [1961] pointed out that the normal way of dealing with this is for the chairman to select a few people from either side, usually of course politically important people, and ban other people. In England, members of the Queen’s Privy Council, which means anyone who at any time in the past has been in the Cabinet, are automatically

2The problem of one or a few individuals accnmnlating too many votes will be dealt with below. 3Although the British House of Commons has somewhat better attendance between votes than onrs (and, in fact, votes by leaving the chamber and dividing into two groups) the House of Lords has an attendance record roughly the same as onr legislative bodies. It should be said that both the House of Lords and American Congress have dealt with this by providing that the television cameraS must be focused on the speaker and cannot show the

empty benches. Further, the speaker is not permitted either directly or indirectly to refer to the fact that nobody is there. Who’s fooled by this, I don’t know. The House of Commons has insnflicient seating room for all members and the benches permit sprawling, which further conceals the law attendance. ‘Ccca~ionahy some ceremonial occasion like the State of the Nation report attracts a large audience.

Computerizing politics 61

given priority. Since there are a great many of them, it doesn’t solve the problem, although it does in general put a gag on the average member of the House of Commons. In practice, the Speaker is considerably influenced by the internal political structure of the House. The leaders of the parties have great power deciding which members of their parties will in fact be recognized by the Speaker.

There is no reason why this system could not be continued even if the voting is done the way 1

have described. Presumably, only people who held quite a large number of votes would be in fact selected. Possibly, on occasion, someone who had only one vote, his own, but who was thought

by everyone to be an expert on a subject might be permitted to use the television channel. This, of course, gives a great deal of discretion to the Chairman and it is possible to have the Chairman himself replaced by computer if that is desired.

We could give to each representative his share, i.e., the number of votes he has, of the total amount of congressional time, with a priority arrangement under which the one man who had the most unexhausted time could speak first. Individuals would be permitted to transfer their time-for my mother casting her four votes in Florida, this would probably be something on the order of a 100 thousandth of a second-to anyone he or she wished.

This might work better than permitting the Chairman to make the decision. The two could be combined in that the Chairman could make decisions but individuals who had high bankrolls of time could override his decision if they wished to speak. The Chairman in general would select from among the people who had high bankrolls, those whose opinion on the particular subject under discussion he thought was most important.

This naturally raises the subject of pay. We take present-day pay of the House of Representa- tives and observe how much of it is, in essence, equivalent to one voter. The amount is less than a dollar a year. If you take all people eligible to vote rather than those who in fact did vote, it would be very much less than a dollar a year. The payment per voter per day of session is less than a cent. It would be quite possible to compute the number of voters who are backing a given representative and pay him that amount. Of course, it would be a bit tedious. If I chose to withdraw the vote from my representative one afternoon in order to cast it myself the reduction in his pay would be an infinitesimally small amount. Nevertheless, computers are ideally designed to deal with this kind of problem and there is no reason why we couldn’t do it.

The reduction in the pay of the representative, of course, would be a slight saving for the citizenry. I think we could refrain from paying one 10 millionth of a cent to me in for casting my own vote. Some rough rule of thumb, such as that unless your pay is over $100 a year you do not get it probably would deal with the matter, although there is no intrinsic reason that we couldn’t come up with something more elegant if that were desired.

There are several almost instantaneous objections that most people would make to this scheme. Let me try to anticipate them.

The first is that the individual watching TV would not be very well informed on the issues and could hardly cast an informed vote. This is of course true but, after all, it is also true of their selection of congressmen. Further, anybody who has any knowledge of the function of the legislature is aware of the fact that congressmen normally have not read the bills upon which they vote. Indeed, the length of the bills which one way or another get into congress whether they are accepted or not, is so gigantic that it would not be possible for congressmen to read all of them. Of course, they really do not try very hard.

In practice, of course, it seems likely that most people would choose to leave their votes in the hands of representatives simply because they know they are not well informed and it’s too much work to cast individual votes.

It is also likely that, in general, they would leave their votes at least as concentrated as they are now, i.e., some number of representatives under 435 probably would have so many votes that the other votes would only influence the outcome occasionally on very close decisions. But this raises another problem, and that is the possibility that the votes will be too concentrated. Information about candidates is poor and it might well be that some well-known person would acquire a majority of the total votes unless precautions were taken.

There are two simple solutions to this problem, one of which is to simply put a maximum number of votes-such as two out of 435-that any one person can hold.

62 G. TULLOCK

The other is to have a modified geographic system, something like the proportional representa- tion system generally used in Europe. The equivalent of five or six congressional districts would be stuck together as one district, and an individual could not have votes from more than one of those districts. Either of these methods would eliminate the problem.

It should, of course, be said that it is not that obvious a problem anyway. From about 1900 to the present, England has operated under a system in which, in essence, votes are cast for either the leader of the Conservative Party or the leader of the Labor Party.5 Party discipline means that if Mrs. Thatcher wins she can control the party. It is true that this system is no longer quite SO monolithic as it used to be, but nevertheless, when it was monolithic there is no evidence that it caused any great disaster. Thus permitting individuals to personally acquire a majority of the votes might not be all that bad. Most Americans would not like that system and since it’s rather concealed in England, I have suggested ways of avoiding it.

Finally, let us turn to the pressure groups. It is obvious that the pressure groups would have to totally change their methods with this new type of voting. One aspect here that I think we can depend on is that oratory would become more significant. If the speeches given in Congress are listened to by a large number of ordinary citizens who can cast their votes personally, even if those votes are not in most cases going to change the outcome, giving a very good presentation would be desirable. But this is, after all, primarily an aesthetic matter, not anything very important.

Another problem would be the arrangement of the complex set of vote trades that now are used to get bills through Congress. What we have described would make it necessary to organize these vote trades in quite a different way with the possibility always existing that, let us say next year’s farm subsidy bill will arouse enough public indignation so that a lot of people would vote “no” and it will not pass. I do not want to go through an elaborate chain of reasoning about how log rolling would work under this system. I will offer my own opinion (and I am something of an expert in this field) that there would be less special interest legislation than there is now. I do not mean that there would be none, nor that there would be a great deal less. Just less.

Incidentally, I have not suggested it here, but there is no obvious reason, why the committees engaged in markup of the bills could not function somewhat the same way. Any given voter could, if he wished, select a committee and watch it on TV (we would have to have more channels) with the result that once again the special interested would have to be drastically reorganized. I would anticipate that this particular reform would lead to the individual special interest bills tending to be more extreme, and hence less likely to pass.

We have a system of one man, one vote with everyone counted more or less equally (minor deviations, of course) in the House of Representatives, but in the Senate the individual citizen of Nevada or Alaska has far, far more weight than the citizen of New York or California. If it is thought desirable to keep this weighting system, there is, of course, no difficulty provided only that we are able to make certain that we are dealing with citizens of Nevada rather than citizens of California when someone calls the computer to cast his vote. It is not obvious of course that this radically unequal weighting for voting power is desirable, but then again it is not obvious it isn’t, either (see [Buchanan and Tullock, 19621).

The reader may know I am personally in favor of weighting systems in which individuals are permitted to express the relative intensity of their preferences on different issues by getting different weights. The demand revealing process6 for this particular system would, in any event, require computer voting for large numbers of people. There are other weighting systems that have been suggested from time to time. Neville Schute, in his novel In the Wet, used a voting system in which individuals had between one and eight votes, depending on various things that were thought to be matters of merit.

It has been the tradition in most countries to weight the votes of felons and lunatics at zero, which is obviously not a one man, one vote system. For a long time, there were members in the British House of Commons who represented the alumni of certain selected universities, thus giving those alumni very much more weight than the ordinary voter. The total number of voters in these

‘1 am leaving out the Liberal Party and its more recent avatars because they, in fact, don’t win. ‘There is not a great deal of literature on this subject, however, the reader can perhaps start with the special supplementary issue of Public Choice edited by Nicolaus Tideman (Volume 29-2, Spring 1977). See also [Tideman and Tullock, 19761.

Computerizing politics 63

university constituencies was considerably smaller than those in the regular constituencies and the graduates could also vote for their regular MP. England, to this day, as a matter of deliberate policy, has different numbers of voters in different constituencies giving different weights. All of these things are easy to do with computers if you want to do them. If YOU do not want to do them, of course, it is not necessary to do so.

So far I have described a system and have said very little or nothing about why it might be desirable. For those who think that the government in a democracy should as accurately as possible represent the will of the people, clearly the change would be desirable. This is, however, by no means the only theory of democracy. Aristotle thought that an election process would select the best people and they then could decide on policy. He was not, as it happens, very enthusiastic about it but a great many philosophers since his time have thought that the point of representative democracy is not to have the popular opinion represented, but to have the people select good representatives who will then make up their own minds about matters on which the people are ill-informed.

To people who hold this view, the system I have just described would not have any great advantage but it also would have very little in the way of disadvantages. The bulk of the citizens would no doubt choose to entrust their votes to individual representatives. The fact that each representative would literally represent a body of people who had selected him, rather than as in the present situation, a body of people who voted for him and another body of people who voted against him would improve the representativeness of the system even from the standpoint of the second philosophy.

For the people who had this particular philosophy, it would probably be undesirable to permit the individuals to directly vote, although there is no reason they should not be permitted to change their representative at any time they wish. I suppose they would not wish to permit people with very small numbers of votes to count as representatives at all, and there is no obvious reason why the computer could not be so instructed.

There is a much more moderate version of the proposal I have been making above, in which the representatives would have a varying number of votes depending on the number of votes they had received. This could be either on a continuing basis or through periodic elections. People who feel that the voters are able to select well-informed persons should, on the whole, be in favor of those representatives who have attracted a lot of votes having more power than those who attracted only a few votes.

Needless to say, it would not be a good idea to rush whole hog into this thing. But one of the nice features of a federal system is that one can experiment. It was indeed this that made it possible for John Adams to convince Jeremy Bentham, a centralist if there ever was one, that federalism was sensible, because it permitted experiments cheaply. We could try this system on a local government. Even today many municipal councils actually broadcast their proceedings. All of them permit anyone who comes down to the city hall, to watch. If the NSF provided the computer, we could get experimental information very cheaply.

There is here one particular problem-I have said nothing about the terms of office for the representatives. For the person who is casting the vote for himself or the five people who are casting votes for some single person who will not receive any others, this is not a matter of much importance. It might, however, be true that the system would develop a great deal of inertia with the result that people once elected and having a large number of votes would tend over time to retain their “seats.” Whether this inertia would be greater or less than that of the current House of Representatives, I don’t, know, but it might be objected to. It might be desirable to arrange that once every two, four, six or whatever number of years is thought desirable, everyone is automatically deprived of all his votes and has to go out and campaign for more.

This has been a most radical proposal for changing our voting method by using computers. I earlier said that it would require a little bit in the way of new hardware and software and it would. The basic problem would be the possibility that the computers would receive literally millions of simultaneous messages. Under present circumstances, they just aren’t designed for that. I take it, however, that nC, one will argue that it would be impossible to design computers with this capacity. As a matter of fact, it might be necessary to use a battery of computers rather than one.

64 G.TULLOCK

Further, there are many compromises between my scheme and the present system. It could be, for example, that our individuals are only permitted to cast their votes for representatives at designated points in time.

Those who worry about power being too concentrated might prefer to have the representatives cast only the logarithm of the number of votes they have received rather than the absolute number. Federal divisions in which some subjects are dealt with by one group of voters and representatives and other subjects by others would be possible. I have been urging a scheme which in addition to having local governments that deal with geographic areas, we have what I call non-geographic local governments. Some particular topic-let us say family relations- could be dealt with by quite a number of different “governments,” each of which had jurisdiction over the entire United States but only over those people which had chosen its particular system [Tullock, 19851. Th ese are only a few of the radical proposals that could be made here.

We will proceed to another politically important area where computers might be useful, and that is identification. We are all accustomed to identifying ourselves to a computer at our banks and perhaps at various other places, for example, making long distance telephone calls. For the first step, this system could obviously be extended to everyone who wished to vote. That is, you calI the computer either on your phone or your cable TV net and identify yourself by giving a number.

My own bank is a very large one and they use 4digit identification numbers. It must, therefore, be true that there are a considerable number of other customers who have the same identification numbers as I do. The computer compares my name with my identification number. As long as I keep my identification number confidential, the likelihood that somebody else would draw money out using my name and choosing the right number is substantially zero. The voter identification number could work on the same system, although I suppose most people would want a somewhat longer identification number.

Probably it would be sensible to have the computer, instead of asking the person their name, to simply check the number from which they are calling. It is after all a little hard to spell out your name on most telephone dials. Its easy to find out what telephone you’re calling from. Only certain people would be using any given telephone to vote, so a seven digit identification number would be adequate security. Special arrangements would have to be made, as they are today, if you are planning to vote from somewhere other than your home or office.

Much of this, however, would be of very little importance because there would be relatively little motive for anyone attempting to cast your vote for you. The number of votes cast and the small importance of each one would insure that. It would not be like someone who would like to take money out of my bank account.

There is, of course, the prospect that people would be buying votes and hence would want to know how I had voted. For the number of people who vote, however, once again it seems dubious that this would be a real problem. I could, for example, accept the payment for my vote, cast my vote in full view of whoever is paying me, and then after he leaves changing so that that’s only my vote for a period of two hours and another representative gets it for the rest of the year. This would require that the computer keep these matters confidential but looking at our success in keeping income tax and various other things confidential, I don’t think of that as any great problem.

In any event, it is not obvious that we should worry very much about people purchasing votes. The individual vote will be worth very little. Provided only that we enforce the law against buying votes strongly enough so that people cannot engage in public advertising they would be unable to buy enough votes to be worth the trouble. It seems unlikely that anyone would try. Buying 50 or 60 votes would hardly affect the overall totals enough to justify the cost, and buying 50,000 would certainly come to the attention of the authorities.

But the discussion of identity raises a much more important and interesting problem. We have a continuing problem in all societies of determining who people are in a wide variety of situations. They are by no means only political. The front door of my house admits only that limited number of people who have access to keys. It would, of course, be far better if instead of requiring me to carry a key around, the front door were able to recognize my fingerprint, my voice, or my face.

Computerizing politics 65

There does not seem to be any obvious reason why someday this cannot be done, although it is not something we can do right now.

In the early days of computers, there were a number of the dreams of the future in which it was suggested that computers might be placed in public places like airline terminals to survey people passing through and recognize criminals. As a matter of fact, this does not seem impossible, but it clearly is not something we are going to be doing in the near future.

Fingerprints and voice look easier, although there again we cannot do it yet. Again, in the earlier days of computers it was thought to be quite possible to program computers to do the entire job of fingerprint identification. I suspect that eventually we will be able to do so, but at the moment all the computers can do is classify the fingerprints, so that the human who goes through the fingerprint identification process only has to look at a small sample of all fingerprints and not all of them. Computers can do about equally well with voice identification. Improvement in accuracy and reduction in cost would be necessary; fortunately they will come.

Recognition by identity number, of course, is easy for the computer. But congressmen have already demonstrated that ingenious and not terribly honest people can avoid this. The House of Representatives votes by way of a computer with little machines in the back of the room in which each congressman inserts a card and then votes. It is illegal to give your card to someone else and instruct him how to vote, but it is clear that some congressmen are doing so. I doubt any of them would be willing to cut one of their fingers off and give it to the man who’s going to cast the vote, so fingerprint reading computers would provide a better identification.

There are many other areas of this sort. Passports could be checked almost instantly if we had a computer that could read fingerprints. It would be even better if we had this recognition problem for the face that I have mentioned straightened out. ’ Although this discussion of recognition has occurred in an essay on political applications of the computer, it has to be admitted that in this case the political applications are less important than non-political. A cheap device that permitted me, together with others selected by me, to open the doors to my house by simply putting a finger on a sensor would be immensely valuable, but basically non-political. Unfortunately, it’s not feasible now but there seems no reason it could not be feasible in the near future.

The most important aspect of the widespread use of computers in politics is the much greater flexibility it gives us in making political decisions. I have talked only about democracies, but dictatorships would be able to use computers to improve their decision process, too. The reader will pardon me if I do not explain how.

But in any event, democracy could be made “more democratic” and more efficient by imagi- native use of computers. The reader may think I have been too imaginative.

REFERENCES

Buchanan, J. and G. Tullock, C&&s of Consenl, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, (1962). Bulkeley, W.M., Checking photo ID’s on a computer system, Wall Street Journal (June 20, 1990). de Jouvenel, B., The chairman’s problem, The American Political Science Review 55, 368-372 (1961). Pollack, A., New interactive TV threatens the “Bliss of couch potatoes”, New York Times (June 19, 1990). Tideman, N.T. and G. Tullock, A new and superior process for making social choices, Journal of Political

Economy 84, 1145-1160 (1976). Tullock, G., Toward the Mathematics of Politics, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, (1967). Tullock, G., A new proposal for decentralizing government activity, In Rationale irtschajtspolitik in komplexen

Gesellachaften, (Edited by H. Milde and H.G. Monissen), Kohlhammer, Berlin, (1985).

‘There is already available a commercial system for transmitting a simplified picture to the person doing the identifying (see [Bulkley, 19901).

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