Good Evening, Juho
With regard to my observation ...
"Because our physical needs often dictate the course of our lives, most
of those who would make the best leaders are unaware of their political
talents and are never able to exercise them."
You made three points ...
"Or may think that it is not possible or tempting for them to first
fight their way through the unpleasant jungle to then deliver something
better than that fight through the jungle. Or they may think that the
system is too rotten or too strong opponent for them to even provide
good end results after the fight. Or they may think that those who seem
to be more motivated also have better ideas than they do."
An electoral method that lets everyone participate, at whatever time in
their lives and to whatever extent they are motivated to act, will give
the people an opportunity that is now denied them. Given the
opportunity, I've little doubt they will take an active part. The
intense discussion of political topics on the internet gives us insight
into their eagerness to participate.
re: "I don't think we can "find" them but we can increase the
probability that they will find their way to the top."
That's quibbling. If they find their way to the top, we found them.
re: "Listing the nominators may not be always needed. In some cases
there could be 100 nominators."
Knowing who made the nomination is required. It gives us information
about the candidate.
re: "I guess "public" doesn't necessarily mean that the ballot would not
be a secret/anonymous ballot."
It may be clearer if we change:
* The public votes for the candidate of their choice ...
to
* The people vote for the candidate of their choice ...
re: "Yes, I tried to support this type of targets to meet the needs that
you might have."
We are seeking a method that benefits the people. Whether or not it
suits me is not important. If any of the points I've made are worthy of
consideration, we can blend them into the proposal as we describe it.
re: "In summary, yes, that is what the rules could look like. I'm very
flexible to what kind of set of rules each user would adopt. The rules
also could be much simpler than including all the listed possibilities.
My intention is just to show various paths that could be used to make
the basic random vote method more applicable to the needs."
Such an assertion works against devising a better method. How can the
rules be simpler than listing the possibilities? My purpose in
itemizing what I understood you to say was to allow careful examination
of the elements of the method you suggested. If we do not list the
elements, how can we examine them?
We may be working at cross-purposes here. I feel no compulsion to
discuss a different method, but if you are proposing one that is better
than Active Democracy I want to consider it, carefully and in detail.
I will avoid comment on Direct Democracy and Delegable Proxy unless and
until they can be shown to be more effective in improving the people's
control of their government than Active Democracy.
re: "In cases where the number of candidates is large maybe the list of
candidates could be just a check list of who has accepted / not refused
to be a candidate. If the ballots have a list of candidates it is no
problem if some of them are also ones that do not accept the nomination
(we can skip to the next listed candidate in that case)."
'Maybe' is not a good basis for discussion. Methods must meet specific
needs. In my state, there are well over 5 million voters. If everyone
can nominate a candidate for office, how many nominations will we have?
Several hundred thousand seems conservative. How would I get enough
information to make a rational choice among the people in such a long
list? If some of the people in the list have not accepted the
nomination, how would I know? Will their names be marked with an
asterisk? If so, why not just drop the name?
re: "(It is also possible that the list of candidates nominated for
governor is not that long since we may have some additional criteria
here (since we may want to exclude the possibility of electing a random
John Doe). Some other elections (with less strict requirements) might
have longer lists than this one.)"
What are the additional criteria? It is impossible to evaluate a
concept if we can't describe it's elements in sufficient detail to allow
others to critique our suggestions. No one of us is so knowledgeable we
can craft an electoral method in our own minds. It is only through such
a critique we can hope to devise a workable proposal.
re: I asked, "Does nominating someone for public office suggest a
beneficial interest in that person's election? If so, should we be
concerned?" and you responded, "I'm not sure if I caught the point, but
I don't see a big difference between different candidates here."
The point is that when someone nominates a person for office they may
expect to benefit from that person's election. Parties, for example,
nominate people they can rely on to enact the laws the party's
fund-raisers sold to the vested interests that financed the party's
campaigns. The same thing is likely to be true of any nomination. My
question was whether we should be concerned about this circumstance.
re: "I think it's impossible to avoid all campaigning. Maybe the rules
for campaigning are separate. In many cases I think it would be useful
to limit the amount of campaigning to avoid the one-dollar-one-vote
effect. One could e.g. set a fixed limit on the campaign costs."
We should have learned by now that the need for campaign funds is the
fundamental reason our system is corrupt. You may think it impossible
to avoid campaigning, but I don't. I've outlined a method that does not
involve campaigning and there are probably others. Political
campaigning, by definition, guarantees the supremacy of money over
intellect (and integrity).
re: "My interest when talking about presenting the candidates to the
voters was in avoiding a situation where there are so many candidates
that the voters are not able to analyze the long list of candidates well
enough to understand who would be good and who would be bad. Many votes
could be lost. Or only some public figures would have a chance. In this
way the regular good people would at least be brought to the attention
of their potential voters before the final decision."
Since campaigning is a self-defeating option, we need a method of
examining the candidates and making the results available to the
electorate. Can you suggest a method of doing so?
re: "I presented the proposal as a family of methods that might use
different rules in different ways. In order to go to greater detail
(maybe to lesser amount of details too) one could take some example
situation and example method. We could for example see what kind of
rules could be used in electing ten people of a city to act as trusted
citizens monitoring the criminal interrogations of the police."
Even if we have a 'family of methods', we must examine each one
carefully. In the case of "... electing ten people of a city to act as
trusted citizens monitoring the criminal interrogations of the police.",
if we are to implement such a system, how many nominations should we
accept and who should we accept them from? If we attempt to graft this
method on our existing political structure, the political parties will
reserve to themselves the right to name the 'trusted citizens'.
I like this suggestion, but I question how we can achieve it. When
those with political power write the rules by which that power is
maintained, it is unwise to imagine altruism will be their motivating
force. There are a multitude of situations in my state (and probably
everywhere) where some form of genuine and unbiased civilian oversight
would be beneficial. We already have several such 'boards' and
'authorities' in our state. but they are, without exception, shams. So,
although it's a good idea, implementing it will not be straightforward.
My friend in the U. K. (that I've mentioned before) suggested that,
with the Active Democracy concept, the people who do not advance at the
final level should form a pool of citizens to populate such boards or to
fill vacancies that occur in public offices.
re: "Maybe all volunteers can be expected to have good intentions ..."
I don't believe you mean that.
re: "Maybe we could require some width of support => let's say three
support votes needed. We could allow voters to list e.g. three
candidates. After collecting the ballots (and counting the number of
support votes for each candidate) we would pick random ballots and elect
the first candidate (who has not been elected yet) with at least three
support votes overall from each ballot. If we don't know if someone has
volunteered we could call him and check (and move to the next candidate
or ballot if the answer is negative). If all citizens can be uniquely
identified with good enough probability (in unclear cases the previous
ten elected citizens may interpret the intended meaning of the vote)
there may be no need for a formal nomination process."
An electoral method ought not be based on 'maybe'. I am unable to
comment on this paragraph because it is too vague. You say the method
is 'simple and straight forward' but I'm not sure what you're talking
about and I certainly don't understand how it could be a model for a
better electoral process.
I planned to append the itemized list to this message with a couple of
adjustments. I've decided not to do so because it does not appear to
represent a firm proposal for an electoral method. If it is, please let
me know and I'll post it again so we can work on providing a rationale
for each of its elements.
I'll try to respond to some of the other posts tomorrow.
Fred
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