Dear election methods fans, Formally this is a reply to James Green-Armytage's thinking on democratic proxy proposals. Informally this is a "vote for me" request. I have joined a beta-website currently calling itself the Progressive Online Congress. It's front door is here ( http://www.progressivecongress.org ) but in a bit I will be directing you to a back-door for the purpose of registering to vote for me. The back door is free at the moment, whereas the front seeks donations. I will explain.
I have been intrigued with the ideas of Direct Democracy by Delegable Proxy since the late 80's. With the discovery a few years ago of JG-A's paper ( http://fc.antioch.edu/~james_green-armytage/vm/proxy.htm ) on the topic I have regularly refered people there for a pre-written explanation on the topic. When I saw what the Online Progressive Congress was doing I immediately suggested to them the ideas of Delegable Proxy since they have already begun some of functions, namely a system where anyone can run to be a "delegate" to their congress. Now purely by coincidence, I have returned to this forum, after a long absence from an exceedingly short presence when I was here, to ask you to do two things. I say coincidence, becuase what should I see when I arrive, but a fresh set of thoughts on Delegable Proxy by JG-A. Here are my simple requests: One) Join the OPC here -> http://www.progressivecongress.org/dev/signup and select me WEGERJE (Jeff Wegerson) as your representative here -> http://www.progressivecongress.org/dev/candidates and Two) work to make the Online Progressive Congress a real world laboratory for election methods of all sorts. Thank you for listening this shameless self-promotion. Jeff Wegerson SoapBlox/Chicago http://www.soapblox.net/chicago/ -----Original Message----- From: James Green-Armytage [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, February 25, 2006 5:50 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [EM] proxy representation with "dissenting votes" Dear election methods fans, Most of my earlier proxy proposals are for direct issue voting, rather than representation. I recently had a few thoughts about representation by proxy, and I'll try to sketch them out here. Most of my previous proposals are to supplement the legislature with a direct vote venue; now I'm thinking about ways to construct the legislature itself by means of a proxy system. BASIC SYSTEM: Each voter may assign their voting power to a proxy, or representative. Voters may change proxies at any time (although it is not expected that people will change proxies very often on average). If you are chosen as a proxy, you may delegate both your own voting power and that of others to another proxy in turn. Seats in the legislative chamber are held by individuals who hold a large number of proxies. The members of the legislative body do not have equal voting power; their voting power is determined by the number of proxies that they hold. DISSENTING VOTES: Members of the legislature should be empowered to vote in a heterogeneous way. For example, imagine that I am a legislator, and that there is an upcoming yes/no vote. Once a vote has been scheduled, I may announce the vote to my constituency, and indicate that I intend to vote "yes". However, I invite dissenting votes from my constituency. Let's say that I have one million constituents, and one hundred thousand of them indicate to me that they will vote "no". I can then cast 900,000 "yes" votes against confirmation, and 100,000 "no" votes. When an important and controversial issue comes up, there should be a natural procedural break between the announcement of a vote and the vote itself, to give proxies a chance to check in with their constituents, and allow time for dissenting votes to be submitted. It seems that the internet would probably be a useful medium of communication between constituent and representative (although other forms of communication would of course be possible, especially at smaller levels). I suspect that this system would be superior from a security standpoint to a nation-wide internet-based vote, in part because the total number of dissenting votes would be fairly small on average, and thus fairly easy to keep track of. The people who agree with their representative on the issue in question (which should be a large majority) will not need to vote directly, and thus the count process should be less unwieldy. Different representatives could follow different standards of security and anonymity, thus allowing each constituent to have an optimal combination of the two. Representatives could send constituents an e-mail or letter receipt whenever they cast a dissenting vote, which would help to catch most cases of hacker fraud. Proxies will use different media of communication, different security systems... in my estimation, this decentralization effect should limit the severity of any potential fraud. Obviously, representatives have a strong incentive to keep their communications channels secure, since they would be in danger of losing proxies otherwise. SECRET BALLOT OPTION: For those who want so much anonymity that they don't want there to be any records of who their representative is, they could formally designate anonymity, which would give them a ticket to participate in the kind of secret ballots that are now standard in most elections. (If they do this, they might not be able to cast dissenting votes, but that seems like a fair tradeoff to me.) Again, a smaller volume of votes here should have a positive impact on security, plus a negative impact on election cost. THRESHOLDS: Where does a proxy chain end? That is, who is empowered to occupy a seat in the legislative chamber and actually cast votes on legislation? Let's assume that we want all the legislators to be able to fit comfortably in a designated meeting room that is not enormous. Take for example the US House of Representatives, which has 435 members. Assuming that we don't want to find a larger chamber, we would need to limit the number of people who hold seats in the chamber at any given time to 435 (or at most a number not drastically larger than 435). Thus, we would probably need to make use of a threshold. At least two basic types of threshold are possible: One would be to simply give seats to the 435 people who hold the greatest total number of proxies. Another would be to choose a minimum number of proxies held so that the likely population of the chamber is approximately equal to some target number, or that it is very unlikely to exceed some undesirably high number. (As Gordon Tullock suggests, it might make sense to allocate speaking time in proportion to the number of proxies held.) INDEPENDENT VOTING: Let's say that I don't have enough proxies to hold a seat in the legislative chamber. If this feature is implemented, I would still be able to cast a direct vote, provided that I didn't vote by secret ballot in the last election. (I must either be openly represented by a particular proxy, or I must have openly abstained from voting for a proxy.) This way, if I vote independently, and I have designated a representative, the weight of my representative's vote on that issue will not include the weight of my votes (including the votes of my own constituents). If I'm not voting from inside the legislative chamber, where am I voting from? If I accept that my independent vote will be a matter of public record, then security should not be a significant problem, and thus internet voting should be fairly reliable. (Voting my phone and by mail might also be possible, although I'm not familiar with the security issues in phone voting, and in some cases mail voting might be too slow.) That is, anyone who casts an independent vote would be able to check on a public list to make sure that the vote was received as intended. CONCLUSION: The purpose of this system is to create a more seamless, fluid combination of representative democracy and direct democracy. Proposals where the proxy system is used for direct voting, but not used to elect the legislature, are less ambitious, and perhaps more immediately feasible on a large scale, but they create a certain amount of redundancy. Rather than having a separate apparatus for direct voting and representative voting, this proposal aims to combine them so that the best features of each are retained. Sincerely, James Green-Armytage P.S. As usual, I don't know how much of what I'm saying has been said before. Pointing out previous proposals along the same line is actually quite welcome; at some point in the future, I should start trying to catalogue these sources, eventually making a kind of annotated bibliography of proposed proxy methods. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
