On May 22, 2008, at 16:00 , Fred Gohlke wrote:
As I said in an earlier post, partisanship is a vital part of
society ... provided it is always a voice and never a power. The
danger is not in partisanship, it is in allowing partisans to
control government.
In my opinion, it is unwise to seek a mathematical relationship
between ideas and legislative bodies. Ideas, by their nature,
cannot be measured or controlled. They are malleable little
balloon-like things that bounce off people, sometimes adjusting
their shape a little as they do so, and occasionally exploding on
the jagged points of reality. Rather than attempt to apportion
ideas, we should strive to select representatives who are receptive
to them.
It's a bit of a digression, but I've been wondering: When
describing Active Democracy for a community the size of New Jersey,
I did not attempt to carry the process to the assignment of
candidates to offices. Our discussion leads me to wonder if, when
a suitable number of candidates has been selected, the people
should make the final election to office by ranking their
preferences of those nominated by the process?
re: "... one can not rule out the possibility of people asking each
others what party/ideology they represent and then making decisions
based on this (rather than always making their decisions based on
"the qualities of the candidates" only)."
I would not want to rule out that possibility; it is such a good
indication of the shallowness of the person asking. Obviously,
since there is no such method extant, I can't prove it, but I
suspect such people will rarely last beyond the second or third
level of the process. As the levels advance, those with the wit
and the will to attain office can be expected to evince a grasp of
affairs far exceeding the facile one-liners of partisanship.
Note that there are also cases where the groupings can not be
hidden. For example two white persons and one black person in a room
might easily elect a white person even if the back person said
nothing about the skin colours and all of them would behave politely
etc.
I also do not have full trust that only good properties of the people
would propagate upwards in the election process. It may also be that
people that are good at fooling other people and hiding their true
(maybe less noble) intentions will reach the top levels more often
than others.
When considering your interest to avoid strong party style groupings
to take control of the political life, and on the other hand your
interest to allow the ordinary people to make the decisions, I came
to think that you might like (in addition to your "groups of three"
method) also the following method.
One can nominate candidates for some office/task freely. In some
cases any nomination and/or volunteering is enough. In some other
cases one might require the candidate to have some education/degree
in some appropriate area. Or one could require the candidate to have
at least 100 listed supporters (or 100 independent emails to the
election coordinator). The need for this kind of additional criteria
depends on if the position in question requires some specific skills,
or some level of trust. But in general the lists of candidates are
collected using this kind of open process that is not controlled by
any parties or other existing bodies. One could also check from the
"nominated" candidates if they volunteer for the task in case they
are elected before their name appears in the candidate list.
After the lists of electable persons (candidates) have been created
we can arrange the election. Winners will be simply picked by random
votes.
One modification. One could include in the criteria of making
someone electable that he/she must have received a certain number of
votes in the election. In this case the voters could give a (maybe
fixed length) list of candidates. All listed candidates get one
support vote for electability. The first candidate on the list that
is electable will be elected. (This rule could allow also write-ins.)
Another modification. Elect that candidate from this voter's list
who has most support overall.
Third modification. Arrange two rounds. First round picks
candidates for the second round. Candidates can be presented to the
voters in more detail before the second round.
Many of the possible rules that I described above take the method
away from pure random vote method towards a method that favours
candidates that are also competent (in addition to being the
favourite of one of the voters) and that have wide support (not just
the support of this one voter). I think it is possible to develop
this type of methods that may freely elect candidates outside of the
incumbent power structure, and candidates that are wanted for the job
rather than candidates that want the job, and that still tend to
elect quite good and competent candidates.
The (electability and election) conditions need to be balanced
carefully if the task really requires that the elected person is not
just anybody but one of the best for the job. For the very top jobs
like the leader of a country one maybe would come quite close to the
traditional methods since the criteria need to be very strong (it
would be e.g. too risky to just give nuclear weapons in the hands of
some randomly elected John Doe). But these cases are exceptions. I
think many elected jobs / representative tasks do not require much
more than a regular honest guy that is generally known to be
competent for the job (he/she may actually be typically better for
the job than e.g. some power hungry politically oriented person).
This method also avoids the need of the candidates to be skilled in
fighting their way up the ladders against other candidates. And it
is reasonably fair towards minorities.
(There are also other methods that are based on a very bottom-up
oriented approach like direct democracy and delegable proxy.)
Juho
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