Yes, it does bear some resemblance to A.Lomax's proxy ideas. I too have devoted some thought to these ideas.
However, I suspect Lomax's ideas are better and Lanphier's worse. Or I understand neither. Specifically, as far as I understand it, with Lomax's proxies, you can select anybody on the planet to be your proxy. With Lanphier's, you are a member of a group of 6. The membership of that 6-set was not selected by you. It was selected in some undescribed way by the government, perhaps randomly. I may have just misrepresented Lomax or Lanphier or both. We shall continue on blithlely anyway. In fact, to avoid calling them "Lanphier's" and "Lomax's" schemes from now on we shall call them the "Govt's" vs the "People's" selection schemes. Now either way, the scheme continues hierarchically, reducing the population by a factor of 6 (or whatever) each stage, until at the end we have some manaegably small legislature which makes decisions. Now. The problem (I think) with Govt-selection, is (a) it is highly manipulable by some faction that gets control then amplifies their control. This is kind of like gerrymandering. And (b) if the govt-selection is done randomly, then there is no gerrymandering, but it may lead to a horribly effective form of massive-conformity, wherein ideas that are not "mainstream" are systematically reduced each stage, resulting in exponential decrease by the time the top of the hierarchy is reached. It is kind of like the median voter is selected each time to get promoted one hierarchy level, and that causes, in a big hierachy, the extremes of the idea-spectrum to be totally filtered out extremely effectively. (Try a computer sim if you do not believe me. The high levels of the hierarchy will have vastly reduced fraction of extremes.) With, however, people-selection, a bunch of Wackos can get together and promote one of them to the next level, then they try to do so again next level, etc, thus getting Wacko representation even at high levels, and without filtering out Wacko ideas. That is good. On the other hand it might go too far and lead to artificial extremeness-amplification as we go up the hierarchy. Also, note that if each 7-set (here assuming 7X reduction each level) is 4 Wackos and 3 normal people, then we get vastly more Wackos at high levels in the Hierarchy than if each 7-set had been 7 Wackos. This is the effect of "gerrymandering" I was talking about. Such gerrymandering could vastly manipulate things if externally applied. If however people-selection is employed, then the factions that "trick" their members into arranging just the right gerrymandering (i.e. 4 Wackos each stage, and 3 dumb normals who don't understand what is being done to them thanks to a con job) will get exponentially tremendously more power at the high levels. So there is a premium on recruiting dumb people. So people-selection may also lead to problems. But I suspect fewer problems. Warren D Smith http://Rangevoting.org ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info