At 04:12 PM 8/16/2005, Paul Kislanko wrote:
I want a solid "chain of evidence" from how my vote was ultimately counted back to what I wrote on my ballot.
Yes. In true delegable proxy, you'd have that. But in secret-ballot Asset Voting, you would not be able to prove that *your* ballot was actually counted, ballots are anonymized for ancient reasons. Get rid of secret ballot (I think there is a way possible) and this might no longer be true. But we aren't there yet, and probably won't be in public organizations for quite some time. I've been promoting DP for NGOs, not for governments, at least not full DP. Secret Ballot DP is quite similar to Asset Voting and I do think both of these are practical in governmental elections; Asset Voting has the best chance, I think, of being accepted.
I couldn't stand proxys when I held stock in specific companies because the "vote for proxy" thing meant any coalition of bad minorities could make my position irrelevant. (See all the shareholder lawsuits against BODs who promoted themselves as proxies if you think I'm the only one who thinks that doesn't work...)
The biggest problem with corporate proxies was that management was allowed to overwhelm true shareholder control by suggesting proxies to shareholders, and enough clueless shareholders simply sign those forms. My suggestion for shareholders of corporations is to form FA/DP organizations, the major function of which would be to create a proxy structure, bottom-up, where you only assign your proxies within the FA to people you know and trust -- or at least you can independently research the person, and you could choose him or her without being solicited; indeed, solicitation of proxies, beyond possibly some bare indication of availability to serve, would be, for me, a warning that the proxy might be corrupt. Then the FA, through its DP structure, could develop consensus positions. With enough members, it could fund independent analysis of company activities, and, in the end, it would make its own recommendations to its members regarding proxy choices.
DP allows initial proxy assignments to be made on a very small scale. Perhaps the FA would encourage occasional local meetings of shareholders in companies. (In principle, there might be an FA for each company, but it might also be practical to have one big independent shareholder FA, with company caucuses; there would then be a great deal of valuable cross-fertilization.) So one path to finding a proxy would be to attend such a meeting or a few such. DP will concentrate communication even if the average proxy only represents one or two other people, at the base level.
There are companies which do nothing but serve large institutional shareholders as proxies.... What I'm proposing would be a "poor man's version," where large numbers of shareholders could decide on coordinated action.
The FA itself would not make the recommendations; rather caucuses of members would make them, back down the proxy tree to their own proxy-givers. You would end up naming a proxy recommended personally to you by the person you chose as trustworthy (or by someone chosen by that person).
All this is basic FA/DP stuff. The shareholder organization would not own property beyond perhaps a domain name. It would need so little for its own operating expenses that tiny contributions would support it. Yes, it could undertake projects that would take more money (such as hiring consultants), but these projects would be legally independent, people would support them if they so chose. The FA primarily exists as a communication device, a way for people to develop trustworthy advice.
The European (Swedish) form of DP calls the proxy the "Advisor," which is half the function....
Any two or three shareholders in a company could start such an organization. If there were three of them, and they were smart, they could make enough of a splash that others would join.... But, let me tell you, finding the three is the hardest part, I think....
beyondpolitics.org exists to support all such efforts by collecting experience as well as by developing the procedures on a theoretical basis. There is precious little DP experience, one political party in Sweden is all I know about. And they abandoned the experiment for technical reasons (they were trying to do things that I really don't think are necessary, and they really did not have the FA concept at all), but I've been told that they plan to re-implement it when they can get to it with better software. It seems that it *did* work.
But DP only becomes truly important when an organization becomes large. Simple informal proxy (i.e, "tell me if there is something I should do, Ralph, some motion that has come up for vote") is enough. But the *concept* of DP should be there from the beginning. If it is not, it will be very difficult to bring it in later. Persistence of inequities, a basic law of political physics.
(Serious software is not necessary for DP, especially in the FA context, but people think it is....)
---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
