Comments on: The Emergent Chaos of the Elections

By: jon

jon — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:37:52 +0000

An important point that I haven't seen covered anywhere: the Obama campaign benefitted greatly from its diversity. I've documented several natural experiments with this in Cognitive diversity and the 2008 US election on Liminal States. A lot of them focus on the One Million Strong for Barack group on Facebook, which is an interesting naturally diverse sample that matches the high-level stereotype of Obama supporters ("looks like Facebook"). Also, don't confuse "chaos" with "coordinating, independetly acting, and self-empowered". The Obama campaign was very clear about articulating their strategies, key metrics ("delegates!"), projections (the spreadsheet) and messages. One full-time Obama volunteer is a moderator of that group and sometimes hangs out but basically we are on our own. And there are bunches of others like it.

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:56:24 +0000

While I’m in favor of anonymous campaign contributions, it seems to me that I can always show the honest politician* a bank statement or canceled cheque.
(*The one that stays bought.)

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:20:32 +0000

@Nicko — yeah. Anybody who can afford to donate their passport number’s worth of dollars probably can buy their way out of jail anyway :^).
I have, however, seen this kind of thing done informally, for example by making on-line donations with a specified number of cents so that the recipient knows they came via a given route.

By: Nicko

Nicko — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:36:45 +0000

@Chris: In order to enforce anonymity to any extent you would probably need to stop the recipient from seeing the details of individual transactions but rather show some quantised periodic total (e.g daily, with only 4 or 5 significant digits, weekly with some more detail). That said, encoding an identity into the value in any even vaguely secure manner would require very large donations indeed!

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:58:24 +0000

Enforcing anonymity seems like it would be hard. One could, for example, encode one’s identity into the amount given.

By: Nicko

Nicko — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:49:10 +0000

It seems to me that campaigns predicated on large numbers of small contributions only stand a chance when there is a high level of voter engagement and high turnouts. When voters are less engaged (or, to put it another way, more apathetic) then the campaigns which rely on smaller numbers of larger donations are going to perform relatively better.
As for the vagaries of campaign contribution limits, it seems to me that most of the problems would be resolved by the simple process of requiring that all contributions are anonymous. Giving a politician $100 means ‘I support you’, but giving a politician $100,000 means ‘I want you to do something for me”, with the sub-text of “potentially to the detriment of your smaller donors”. If the politician is not allowed to know who the donors are then there is much less scope for being bought off.
Of course implementing such a campaign finance system might have interesting implications for money laundering laws :-)

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:59:32 +0000

In related news, Obama's campaign is looking for an InfoSec person.