1. The purest form of democracy (govt by the people) has all of the citizens voting on every issue, which is totally inconvenient, so the people delegate authority to representatives.
2. In the purest form of representative democracy everybody who wants to be a representative is allowed to represent him/herself and all others who delegate their vote to him/her as proxy. This seems to be impractical in any large political body, though some say that the internet now makes it more of a possibility. 3. The next purest form of representative democracy makes a requirement that a person must represent at least x percent of the population before being allowed to serve as proxy for anybody. That way all of the proxies can fit in the same building at the same time, and some of the lunatics are eliminated. This is starting to get more practical, and is a form of PR. 4. Now the point of this message: Why not convene a type three democracy for a few days every four years for the purpose of choosing a president? Call it a "Reformed Electoral College" if you want. Each member of this REC must have the certified backing of at least x percent of the citizens eligible to vote. They might just as well be the presidential candidates themselves. Who else would you rather have as your proxy than the person you think should be president? You designate which candidate you want to act as proxy for you by a lone mark on your standard election ballot. Let's consider the advantages of the REC over the current electoral college: * The REC has perfect proportional representation because each member is a proxy for each voter that supports his/her candidacy, whereas the current EC is highly non-proportional even in the states that do not have a winner takes all rule. * The members of the REC are well known to the public. In the current system most people don't even know the members of the EC. * The current EC members use lone mark plurality (in conjunction with block voting) to determine the winner of the presidential election. The RFC could use a modern sophisticated method like ACMA, because even George W. Bush could vote an unspoiled ballot with the help of some of his friends. Which brings up the fact that there are potential advantages of this RFC over total elimination of any form of proxy in the presidential election: * Good methods that are too sophisticated or inconvenient for Joe Q Public can be employed. * The relative popularity of the candidates is (automatically!) known with high accuracy before they (as proxies) have to start making voting strategy decisions, so it becomes hard to manipulate the election by bogus polls or stone walling candidates by the corporate media, etc. If the method used by the proxies is a form of Approval runoff (not an instant form, but actual repeated approval votes by the proxies) then strategy can be refined at each stage of the runoff based on the new information gleaned from the results of the previous stage. It would be hard indeed to use bogus information to manipulate the outcome under those conditions. The luxury of non-instant elimination methods is not too expensive when only the proxies have to make the repeated trips to the polls. I believe that if the details are crafted properly, this can be made into a practical process as good as any other of similar simplicity, convenience, democratic fairness, Banzhaf power, etc., adapted to this purpose. I have some more ideas along these lines, but first I would like some comments on what I have said so far. Obviously it was Demorep's low tech proxy PR postings that sparked these ideas, though the variants described there had no application to single winner elections. Forest
