At 01:16 PM 4/3/2007, Jan Kok wrote: > Why not hold an election for all the seats each year? > >The reason for staggering the elections is generally to provide >"continuity". But those who want to continue and are perceived by the >voters as having done well should have no trouble getting re-elected >in a yearly election.
I'll agree. The continuity argument is actually antidemocratic. Continuity is indeed valuable, though. Jan's view that the voters can take this into consideration is probably accurate. What might be done is to phase in a new method of electing the board. Existing terms would be completed. But new members would serve for one year (or perhaps until a target date, when all would be elected for one year). I've written that STV is a decent method for multiwinner, but the assumption was that this was much more than two winners. You can't really have proportional representation with such a small election. Delegable Proxy is, of course, what I'd think of, but that begs the question of the actual election method. (The organization must elect a board, I assume, for legal reasons. Still, there is no legal reason why, if I'm correct, that the board could not be on a short leash, i.e., replacable by the members at any time. If you have Delegable Proxy with the proxy assembly being able to replace the board by majority vote, at any time, you don't really need proportional representation on the board. Rather, you need trusted servants. It actually gets simpler. The board becomes a little more like staff, which is where the real continuity is, anyway. This *could* be brought in, one board member at a time, so there is no need to displace existing board members. I'm not going to explain Delegable Proxy here in detail.... but, as we describe it, it is direct democracy *plus* proxy representation *plus* an assumption of delegability, so that if A names B and B names C, then C represents both A and B. With little fuss, a group of any size can be boiled down to a small group with flexible membership that almost *completely* represents the membership. Call it Proportional Representation on steroids. It's not as radical as it seems. Proxy representation is actually standard in business, but many nonprofits prohibit it. Why? Well, typically, it gives more power to the members and less power to those managing the organization. That's often not desirable to those who write the initial bylaws, they don't want to lose control, and they worry about surprises (Joe shows up at the meeting with a fistful of proxies. when nobody has been using proxies for years.). Those problems can be headed off, but they really don't even think about actually *encouraging* the naming of proxies. If everyone names a proxy, and registers it, valid until revoked, and proxies are delegable, there can't be those surprises. Joe can only prevail if he actually has majority support. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
