Jan Kok's detailed, carefully-thought-out Town E-meeting proposal
deserves a thoughtful response. I regret that this one has to be so
negative, but I believe that for the following two reasons, the
proposal is not a good way to respond to the effort in Fort Collins to
replace plurality voting with IRV. As explained below, I believe there
are better ways.
* Some elements of the proposal, particularly the concept of delegable
proxy (DP), are themselves very controversial, or they would be if
they were to attract very widespread attention and discussion. I, for
one, am not persuaded that DP is is either a very good idea or a very
practical one. I won't detail my concerns with DP here and don't want
(and don't have time) to get into a debate about it. But my guess
(which of course could be wrong) is that the DP concept and possibly
other elements of the proposal would generate controversy that would
seriously interfere with the more important Fort Collins voting method
controversy that the proposal is intended to help resolve.
* In addition to its controversial elements, the proposal is too
complicated and involves too many new ideas to have much hope of being
set up and promoted quickly enough to soon attract many participants,
especially among Fort Collins residents. If the Fort Collins voting
method controversy is at all urgent -- that is, if there is a
possibility that IRV could be adopted very soon, say within the next
year -- the proposed town E-meeting probably can't be set up quickly
enough to have a good chance of playing an influential role in the
controversy (though it could be very valuable as a way to test the
viability of the E-meeting concept and gather data that could help
change the minds of people who are skeptical about DP or other
controversial elements of the proposal).
Here are some alternatives to the town E-meeting proposal as a way to
address the Fort Collins voting method issue.
* Form a local committee or organization aimed at challenging the IRV
initiative and advocating the consideration of alternative voting
methods. It would not need to commit itself to a particular
alternative to IRV and would not need to be adamantly opposed to IRV.
To the contrary, I think such an organization would be most effective
if its main goal were to insure that concerns about IRV and
alternatives to IRV (and concerns about them) be adequately discussed
before IRV or any other new voting method is adopted. This could begin
as an ad hoc Fort Collins committee, but if it goes well, it could
conceivably evolve into a national organization to promote better
voting methods. I for one would be very interested in supporting such
an organization and would welcome it as an alternative to FairVote and
the other aggressively pro-IRV organizations that now overwhelmingly
dominate the discussion of alternative voting methods in the U.S.
* Instead of a town E-meeting, why not a regular town meeting, or a
series of them? Fort Collins is a small enough city (just over
100,000) that in-person meetings aimed at attracting fairly large and
diverse numbers of attendees are much more feasible than they would be
in a much larger city such as Los Angeles, where an effort to get IRV
adopted is also now being made. While town meetings would certainly be
possible in L.A. as well, a much greater and better coordinated effort
would need to be made to promote them and persuade L.A. media to
adequately cover them. Also, while an L.A. town meeting effort
probably would require raising money and hiring paid organizers, it
should be possible to organize town hall meetings in Fort Collins with
volunteers and little or no fund-raising.
* Another good alternative to a town E-meeting would be to organize a
representative "citizens jury" of Fort Collins citizens who would be
asked to carefully consider and make recommendations regarding IRV and
other alternative voting methods. Unlike delegable proxy, there is a
long history, in the U.S. and in many other countries, of
experimentation with the citizens jury concept, and such juries have
had impacts on actual elections and other civic controversies. For
more information, see the following:
Descriptions of the Citizens Jury Process:
http://www.jefferson-center.org/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC={2BD10C3C-90AF-438C-B04F-88682B6393BE}
http://www.thataway.org/exchange/resources.php?action=view&rid=1580
Organizations:
http://www.jefferson-center.org/
Jefferson Center -- an organization that formally experimented with
and conducted citizens juries between 1974 and 2002. The idea has
since been adopted in many other countries but has attracted less
enthusiasm among government officials in the U.S. Because of
insufficient funding and other reasons, the organization had had to
suspend its activities in 2002, but the website still provides a lot
of valuable information, and there is an email address to contact the
center's founder, Ned Crosby, who may be very interested in advising
or even helping set up a Fort Collins citizens jury re the IRV
controversy.
http://www.thataway.org/
National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation -- an organization
that advocates a much wider range of methods (including but not
limited to citizens juries) for achieving the goal, as Jan put it in
his subject line, of "encouraging group intelligence and working
toward consensus".
-Ralph Suter
In a message dated 7/9/08, Jan Kok wrote:
Right now I feel like I've been struck with divine inspiration. Hope I
don't wake up tomorrow feeling like an idiot. :-)
"Town E-meeting" is a way to
- disseminate information about competing proposals
- allow a controlled debate and negotiation among supporters of the
various proposals
- allow/encourage supporters to "present their case" as strongly as
possible, but providing a rebuttal mechanism that encourages honest
arguments and discourages insincere, deceptive arguments
- allow similar proposals without much redundant arguments (because
proposals can refer to each other.)
- allow similar proposals while neither encouraging nor discouraging
their creation
- does all that in a manner that is fair and neutral toward all proposals.
It's similar in some ways to a court trial, where we strive to allow
all parties to be fairly represented and heard. It's an application of
FADP*. It also borrows infrastructure and culture from Wikipedia.
(FADP: Free Association with Delegable Proxy. See
http://beyondpolitics.org for an introduction. There is a FAQ at
http://www.beyondpolitics.org/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=BeyondPolitics,
and a glossary of FADP terms at
http://www.beyondpolitics.org/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=Glossary . The
Glossary is also a mini-tutorial about FADP concepts.)
Town E-meeting was inspired by this current, real-life situation:
There is a movement to try to replace the voting method used for Fort
Collins, CO elections with IRV. (Currently, Fort Collins elections use
single-round Plurality Voting.) I would much rather have Range,
Approval, or ER-Bucklin Voting, rather than IRV. How can I get the
word out about those alternatives? How can I get the alternatives
compared side-by-side in a fair manner? How can I promote multiple
alternatives (proposals) without risking a "vote-splitting" effect
among the alternatives? How can I encourage an honest discussion among
backers of the various alternatives, to try to reach consensus about
which is the best alternative?
My proposed solution is a combination of several elements. I'm calling
this generic solution "Town E-meeting" for now. (Feel free to suggest
other names.)
- Create an FADP. (E.g. the Fort Collins Voting Free Association. It's
purpose would be "To facilitate discussion of alternative proposals
for the future of voting in Fort Collins.")
- Anyone can become a member simply by signing up at a web site. There
are two types of members: local voters, and other interested people.
When polls are taken of the members, the votes of local voters and
others are tallied and reported separately.
- In order to participate in polls, members must agree to have this
info about themselves be published in a publically accessable
membership directory: real name, city/state, registered voter (y/n) in
the city of interest (e.g. Fort Collins), member's proxy, accepting
clients (y/n). (Publishing that information, and holding proxies
accountable for verifying that their clients are real people,
discourages creation of sock puppets.)
- By default, all voting information related to polls conducted within
the FA is public. Anyone can look up any member's voting history on
any or all issues, or list out how each member voted (directly, or by
proxy) on any issue.
- There is a web site for the FA's use, featuring a wiki that is used
for describing various proposals, listing and discussing pros and
cons, etc.
- Certain designated top proxies may edit the wiki. They may also
grant and revoke editing privileges to their clients. Those new
editors may grant and revoke editing privileges to their clients, and
so on. This method of controlling editing privileges creates chains of
accountability and encourages responsible, civilized editing behavior.
- The wiki home page has a list of proposals. (E.g. Approval, Range,
IRV, Top-2 (Delayed) Runoff, Proportional Representation for the city
council seats, NOTA (i.e. keep Plurality Voting)) The proposals are
listed as title and brief description. The titles are links to wiki
pages fully describing the proposals.
- There is an ongoing, real-time poll concerning the proposals. Each
proposal has a poll score listed next to it. (How the score would be
computed is not specified yet.)
- The proposals are listed in the order that they would be chosen by a
proportional representation method. The intent is to present a variety
of proposals among the first few entries; to minimize the incentive to
create clone proposals; and to avoid having any one person (a
"dictator") determine the ordering of the proposals - rather, the
ordering is a group decision based on members' votes.
- In order to avoid favoritism toward either rating- or ranking-based
polls, members can choose whichever they want. Those who choose to use
ratings get the proposals sorted by Reweighted Range Voting (RRV).
Those who choose to use ranking get the proposals sorted by Single
Transferrable Vote (STV). Functions for converting ratings to rankings
and vice versa are needed so that all votes are used by both sorting
methods. (Maybe allow Proportional Approval Voting as a third voting
method option?)
- Each wiki page has an owner who may express a point of view on his
page. Those who wish to provide rebuttal are allowed to do so using
certain formatting and with certain restrictions, to be established.
For example, each "pro" paragraph in the article could be followed by
a rebuttal paragraph, indented and in italics. The inserted rebuttal
paragraphs could be limited to 500 characters, and could be in-line
text, links to other wiki pages, references to footnotes at the bottom
of the current page, or combinations. Rebuttal paragraphs could be
followed by rebuttals to the rebuttals, but limited to 100 characters.
----------------
So, what do you think, folks? I would love to have a Town E-meeting
web site for the Fort Collins Voting Free Association, as soon as
possible. Any volunteers to help with this?
Augustin Masquilier has done some pioneering work on his web site
(minguo.info/usa) by creating some Drupal modules to support a version
of Delegable Proxy. I am very grateful for Augustin's work. However, I
really don't like Drupal itself, very much. For some reason I find
navigation in Drupal sites confusing. I would prefer to use MediaWiki.
I suspect we can find someone who would be willing to provide hosting
for the Fort Collins Voting FA, and provide MediaWiki on the site as
well.
What's mainly missing is some WikiMedia modules to support Delegable
Proxy, RRV, STV and so on to provide the features described above.
Some work is needed to tune up my idea about using PR methods to sort
proposals, to minimize problems with clone proposals, and also to
handle "no opinion" votes which would occur when new proposals are
added.
Some style macros (not sure if that's a proper term for them) might be
useful to support creating rebuttals.
Is there a way to share content between the Fort Collins Voting FA
and, say, an Aspen Voting FA, or other city Voting FA?
Some help with creating content for the Fort Collins Voting FA would be great.
Any volunteers?
Cheers,
- Jan
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