[HN Gopher] The complicated business of electing a Doge
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The complicated business of electing a Doge
Author : dr_dshiv
Score : 43 points
Date : 2025-05-04 19:14 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theballotboy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theballotboy.com)
| meew0 wrote:
| Reading about this process always makes me wonder: in a
| particular round, was an elector allowed to choose someone who
| had already been chosen in a previous round? And if yes, to what
| extent was this done in practice?
|
| Depending on this detail, the character of this election process
| changes completely, since if repeats are allowed, it could easily
| degenerate into an oligarchy of ~50 people consistently choosing
| candidates from among their ranks.
| rapht wrote:
| Agreed. Also, could an elector be nominated to the next round?
| (i.e. does becoming an elector prevent you from winning the
| election)
| pie_flavor wrote:
| When fifty decisionmakers are involved, nothing whatsoever
| could occur 'easily'. That is more or less the purpose of the
| system.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Eh, there will be a lot they don't agree on, but they could
| very easily agree on lots of stuff that's detrimental to the
| populace, i.e. mainly agree on who gets the spoils of
| exploiting the government. That's plenty to incentivize them
| to limit their competition to just each other.
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| Here is a fun paper with rigorous analysis of the protocol:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40573814
|
| "Electing the Doge of Venice: analysis of a 13th Century
| protocol"
|
| Also some more discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38598171
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| The generalized term for the use of random selection in
| governance is called "Sortition" and has roots in Ancient Athens:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
| wahern wrote:
| A few Orthodox churches select their patriarch by random
| selection, except it's from a handful of candidates selected by
| other means. The Oriental Coptic Orthodox Church ultimately
| chooses their patriarch using a blindfolded child who pulls a
| name from a chalice.
| parpfish wrote:
| I'm curious if a sortition would work for passing legislation.
|
| Instead of wrangling legislators and trading favors to get
| exactly 50%+1 votes, have the pass/fail determined by a single
| randomly selected voter. It would encourage much more
| cooperation and broad consensus building because a bill that
| gets 50%+1 votes isn't 50/50 pass fail.
|
| (Of course you'd need some sort of rate limiting so you
| couldn't just keep spamming votes until it passes)
| Telemakhos wrote:
| I read through the previous discussions of this, and this article
| and the previous discussions seem to overlook two things that
| could have some power to explain the weirdness.
|
| First, the development of the process: the system described came
| into effect in 1268, because previous systems had failed to
| satisfy fears of factionalism. IA bit earlier in 1229, a simple,
| one-round electoral council of 40 had stalemated, so lots were
| drawn, leading to a feud between the Dandolo family and the
| winner, Giacomo Tiepolo. Giacomo's son Lorenzo Tiepolo was the
| first elected under the 1268 system, which Nicolao Michele seems
| to have devised. Not mentioned in the article or discussions is
| the rule that the men selected were 30 years or older. [0] The
| violent factionalism and feuding preceding the new system,
| however, seems to indicate that oligarchs were fiercely
| competitive. The aristocrats were always going to choose some one
| aristocrat from their own ranks, but they were strongly divided
| against each other as well. I'm not sure there would be a solid
| faction of fifty or so to monopolize the process, especially
| given the random selections.
|
| Secondly, those random selections by lottery, combined with the
| opening of the article ("an official went to pray in St. Mark's
| Basilica, grabbed the first boy he could find in the piazza")
| points to another participant in this process, God. While today
| we tend to think of election protocols in terms of human actors,
| sortition can imply belief in divine providence taking a hand.
| The nomination and approval of candidates (election) at least
| nominally uses human estimation of merit as its input, while
| sortition gives divine knowledge of merit a role. The intertwined
| repetition of the two may have been thought to negotiate a best
| possible outcome from each set of inputs; in practice, against
| the backdrop of feuding and factionalism, it likely also made the
| ultimate 41 electors unpredictable and thus less prone to bribery
| or prior arrangements.
|
| [0] https://origin-
| rh.web.fordham.edu/halsall/source/dogesvenice...
| dang wrote:
| [stub for offtopicness]
| kookamamie wrote:
| [flagged]
| userbinator wrote:
| HN's automatic title case editing made me consider the same.
|
| Of course, the reason this article showed up may be because
| of the pun.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| [flagged]
| hoppp wrote:
| It's not that doge.
| Nezteb wrote:
| TIL what a "Doge" is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_(title)
| crop_rotation wrote:
| Unrelated but I remember reading that the Doge of venice was the
| first person ever to be buried in the Hagia Sophia in
| Constantinople.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Venetians big stunting on the Eastern Christians since the
| Fourth Crusade
| dostick wrote:
| All countries still use electoral systems where people are
| elected to represent the causes and views. And parties to
| organise those people and views. It's ineffective and prone to
| corruption and subjectivity of representatives and money
| interests beginning with influence on elections. Solving of any
| issue can be delayed indefinitely if representatives don't feel
| like it's urgent.
|
| In computer age it's long overdue to have a modern system with
| people directly voting for issues and causes and not represented
| by any middlemen.
| hnbad wrote:
| You're describing direct democracy. For an alternative with
| fewer downsides consider liquid democracy:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
|
| If you like the general idea behind this and would like to see
| it in a bottom-up organizational structure rather than an
| established state, consider democratic confederalism:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_confederalism
| yupitsme123 wrote:
| I think referendums and plebiscites on specific issues are
| always a possibility even without the whole system being a
| direct democracy. I've always wondered why other countries
| have used them but the US never has.
| thayne wrote:
| I don't know of cases where the US federal government uses
| them, but it isn't that uncommon for state or local
| governments to have them. Although the laws around them
| differ between jurisdictions.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| >prone to corruption and subjectivity of representatives
|
| The political assembly of Venice recognized this, which
| influenced their decision to introduce randomness via lotteries
| into the process.
| NemoNobody wrote:
| Thanks for sharing that! I've read a lot about Venice and knew of
| their complicated electoral process but it seems that was quite
| an understatement.
|
| That's absolutely bizarre. I'm sure if we had time to play it out
| a bit, there are ways to game that system easily enough, but it'd
| be really hard to see that from the outside.
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