# Rules Before Oracles: Auditable, User-Configurable Argument Selection for Deliberative Polling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23979 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23979/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 98 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08155/) (2023)
- [Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13548/) (2023)
- [The Mythos of Model Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03490/) (2016)
- [A Survey on the Explainability of Supervised Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07876/) (2020)
- [Multisided Fairness for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00093/) (2017)
- [Socially Responsible AI Algorithms: Issues, Purposes, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02032/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Fairness: An Interdisciplinary Survey of Critiques of Hegemonic ML Fairness Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04460/) (2022)
- [Proportional Aggregation of Preferences for Sequential Decision Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14858/) (2023)
- [Value Preferences Estimation and Disambiguation in Hybrid Participatory Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16751/) (2024)
- [Election Manipulation on Social Networks: Seeding, Edge Removal, Edge Addition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06198/) (2019)
- [Recommending the Most Encompassing Opposing and Endorsing Arguments in Debates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5416/) (2014)
- [Representative Committees of Peers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07837/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In a deliberative poll, once submissions outnumber what anyone will read, some mechanism chooses which arguments each voter sees, acquiring much of the decision; practice delegates it to opaque learned rankers, so a voter cannot recompute or contest the exposure that shaped their vote. We ask whether it can be a published rule over publicly recomputable evidence with parameters held by the voter, treating legibility as an admissibility condition on usable mechanisms, not an objective traded against accuracy. We formalise a poll over bipolar justification sets, judging a slate by reason coverage, the order it arrives in, and captured endorsement mass; we give seven checkable criteria for a civic recommender and a rule meeting them: a one-hop reversed endorsement flow parameterised by a relation-weight function. An agentic simulator records every slate at every vote, over about 17,000 seed-paired runs. Served slates fall 0.035 short of a label-reading ceiling upper-bounding every selection procedure, opaque ones included: any unconstrained ranker's advantage is bounded and small. On coverage alone, with non-degenerate authoring, the rule is indistinguishable from a random slate, a null due to an order-blind, charity-blind instrument; on the other two it leads at every prefix by a margin widening with adversarial pressure and dominates on mass by a factor of 3.3. Once a realistic fraction of submissions carries no reasons, the coverage margin returns and grows. Label-homogeneous flooding collapses completeness from 0.81 to 0.34 under a flat weight policy, only to 0.44 under author-count normalisation, making the weight function a security control worth 10% of completeness. The choice between ranking arms is a position on a coverage-versus-mass frontier, not a fact, the kind of choice only a legible rule can hand to the person it affects. It maps onto an open-source peer-to-peer platform.