At 05:53 PM 6/15/2005, Araucaria Araucana wrote:
Approval voting is a reasonable first step. But what do you do about
current top-two runoffs, or primaries in general?
In the U.S. top-two runoffs are unusual, if I am correct, most elections
award victory to the plurality winner. We've been complacent about it, I
think, because usually the winner does gain a majority, or is only a little
short of a majority. But the conditions here strongly discourage third parties.
Primaries are a natural consequence of the party system. What is a little
weird to me is that primaries have become publicly regulated elections. It
used to be that political parties chose candidates based on a deliberative
process, but the primary system has tended to create a situation where the
party candidate is decided, through primaries, prior to the convention. The
down side of the deliberative process is that much of it took place behind
closed doors. But deliberative process, if it is open, is one way to move
beyond the limitations of election methods. A primary process can fail to
produce a good compromise candidate, one able to draw significant numbers
of voters from the opposing party in addition to independent voters.
Instead, primaries, I'd think -- I certainly don't consider myself expert
on practical politics -- would in general tend to choose a candidate, if
voters vote sincerely, near the middle of the party, not near the middle of
the political spectrum.
It is center-squeeze prior to the actual election.
(The irreducible problem is that solutions like IRV try to create a virtual
runoff to simulate a real runoff. But a real runoff is like a new election,
and voters in that new election have more information. Asking them to vote
the runoff in advance is asking them to *imagine* an inner process in
advance of actually being faced with it. In a real runoff, voters might pay
much more attention to a candidate than they paid during the initial
election process, they will almost certainly learn more about the two
candidates remaining than they previously knew. A real runoff is closer to
a deliberative process than any single election method could provide
(except for the delegable proxy process which I've described, which is
coming from left field; it is, in itself, really a deliberative process
instead of an election method.)
Most of the highly-regarded single-winner methods discussed here
involve eliminating the primary in addition to changing the ballot and
tally methods.
My own proposals, of course, involve organizing the electorate itself in an
overall structure that is nonpartisan. A subset of the electorate could use
the process, to be sure, and this is likely to happen sooner than any
overall organization. My theory is that once one party adopts a Free
Association/Delegable Proxy structure, it will be so phenomenally
successful that it will attract imitation. And FAs have this
characteristic: they readily merge. All it takes, really, is a few
cross-organization members. While FAs can restrict membership through their
membership definition, it is difficult to enforce, and, in fact, broader
membership is positively useful. By the nature of the structure, it's
impossible to effectively pack the organization, because, not only can FAs
merge easily, they can also split easily; indeed the DP structure
automatically organizes the overall structure into caucuses, which are
completely free to act independently.
The would-be packers could end up talking to themselves, and to others who
know exactly what they are, and there is no central treasury or authority
to co-opt. Even domain names are not terribly important, for all members in
the proxy tree will have the necessary email addresses to reconstruct the
organization if something serious happens. (They only have to have the
addresses of their own proxy, plus the addresses of all those who have
chosen them. But usually, I think, they will have more than that, caucuses
or the "families" of high-level proxies will probably have their own
mailing lists, even though many or most members may be on no-mail status.
The basic definition of membership is the provision of contact information,
and the next level, naming a proxy, cements the contactability.)
Once such a structure is in place, with many or most voters as members (and
in an FA/DP structure, membership involves a minimum of effort; but it also
allows each member to put in as much as they choose, efficiently), a
process becomes possible whereby a recommended candidate can emerge. This
candidate might be the candidate of an existing party, or he or she might
be a dark horse. When the FA/DP organization is relatively small, it would
probably decide to recommend existing candidates, recommending its own
would probably be considered counterproductive.
The FA character of the organization implies that if it can find an
internal consensus, it can act with great power, because FA/DP is
trustworthy by design. If it cannot find some level of consensus, it can
act simply to support existing parties; its overall effect is relatively
neutral -- for FAs don't take, as an organization, positions of
controversy. Rather, they simply report the results of polls taken after
discussion, debate, and negotiation. The results, and the reasons for it,
are taken back to the members through media, probably, but *also* through
the personal contact afforded by the proxies. Each member, in the end, will
likely be contacted in support of the caucus to which the proxy belongs, by
the proxy, who was chosen by the member as trustworthy. The ultimate power
remains with the members, who can then make financial contributions,
volunteer themselves as political workers, and vote, all according to their
capacities. The function of the FA/DP organization is to coordinate all this.
FAs have a motivation to find consensus, because if they can, they can act
with high influence. If they can't, they still act, but mostly to delineate
the issues rather than to decide them.
The FA/DP concept involves making an end run around existing political
structures. It does not oppose them; instead it *uses* them, and
theoretically it should make them tractable. The FA/DP concept came out of
my own frustration with the existing difficulty of getting ideas to a point
where they can either be implemented or known or demonstrated to be
ineffective or harmful. The ironic thing is that if FA/DP existed, it would
be easy to bring it (i.e., something new) into existence -- or,
alternatively, to at least know *why* it was not going to come into
existence. There are a number of election methods that are clearly superior
to what is in standard use in the U.S. The simplest is Approval through the
allowing of overvotes. But I think that readers here will agree that
getting even a very simple reform accomplished can be a major task. Why?
Shouldn't we have a society that is *eager* to consider new ideas and to
find ways to test if they would work or not? I'm not recommending or
seeking drastic change. Just the development of an intelligent process for
considering it. Or, equally well, for acting to preserve what is good about
what we have.
But we won't really know until it is tried. That's what I'm mostly working
on, that is, on developing the structural technology through as wide a
discussion as possible, and encouraging and providing resources to
organizations that want to try it. It is possible that some large
organization would, so to speak, see the light, but it is relatively
unlikely. Existing power structures act to preserve themselves, I've seen
it many, many times. Even very well motivated, charitable structures.
People generally believe that they have a better understanding than most
other people. It can't always be true! But if a person who so believes ends
up with a position of inequitable power, they will see changes that remove
this power from them as being threats to all that is wise and good. And so
they will act to stop the changes. And, by definition, they are in a
position of inequitable power, so they will tend to be effective in
stopping the change.
All-or-nothing assignment of electoral votes in the U.S. is an example of a
clearly inequitable system (with only the weakest of rationalizations being
given for it) that was probably not anticipated by the founders. But
because it always favors the majority party in each state, state by state,
it is preserved, for that party has the power to prevent change. Oddly,
most people focus on the college itself as being the problem, not realizing
that the problem is not the delegation of voting power -- that was actually
an advanced idea, and it still is -- but the deprivation of the minority of
representation on the college.... and, in addition, the defacto stripping
of power from the delegates through promised votes, destroying, with rare
exceptions in U.S. history, the deliberative character of the college.
http://beyondpolitics.org
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