Raph Frank wrote:
I had a similar though previously.
It was based on a legislature rather than individual voters.
I called it 'consumable votes'.
Here is one example, though there was a fair few versions.
http://listas.apesol.org/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2006-March/017903.html
One problem of a straightforward "every candidate gets p voting money
units at the beginning of each block of time" is that, on one hand, the
situation may be serious enough that one needs to pass more than p
units' worth. In that case, we'll have a problem. On the other hand, it
may be a calm time, in which case less than p units are used, which
would also be a problem except if there's a ceiling to how many voting
units one can hold. But if there's a ceiling, it may inspire frantic
voting near the end of the block of time so as not to waste the voting
units. A better solution to that would be to, if there are q days,
supply p/q (subject to ceiling) every day, or p/(q*24*60) every minute.
That still leaves the former problem, though. Reweighting would escape
it, but the relation to voting money (which is easy to understand) would
be somewhat obscure. In order to prevent dictatorship of the "rich", the
weights would then be reset, for all candidates, to one at the beginning
of each period, or for a continuous variant, the differences would be
smoothed out at a certain rate so that it goes towards equality.
Voting-money or legislative consumable votes/reweighting values might
also give a back-and-forth effect, but I'm not sure how serious that is.
One can observe the oscillation in two-party states, where the first
party spends a lot of its time undoing what the second party passed in
the previous period. Then the second party is elected later on and uses
its time tearing down the efforts of the first party. That's really
wasteful. At least your supermajority clause would help keep this from
happening.
I suppose one possible way of making an intuitive reweighting system is
to allow legislators to go "into the red" as far as they want, but that
the decision is checked by others. Thus the opposition could cancel a
proposal if they've used less voting money in the past, no matter how
much each side has used. There might be unintuitive consequences,
though; for one, it won't have the incentive (on all parties) not to
vote any more than they have to.
My thoughts were to have accounts decay and each voter
would be given a fixed income. This also handles the effect of new
citizens becoming adults and also elections if it is for a legislature.
However, that creates deflation (or at least encourages 'spending now').
Adding up to a ceiling would mitigate this somewhat; as long as the
current amount isn't close to the ceiling, there's no incentive to spend
it now. However, when it gets close, the incentive returns.
b) Can "voting money" really be considered a form of money, and can we
expect it to be linear in individual utilities? My hope is that this is
so because the virtual money is only used to "buy" immediate voting
power and pay with potential later voting power. I think it would not be
necessary that utilities be comparable between different persons. Just
the utilities some fixed person assigns to options in the decision at
hand need be comparable to utilities the same person assigns to options
in a later decision.
It has the advantage that everyone has equal access to it.
This would eliminate the complaint that people with higher
wealth would end up controlling the process.
It might even be constitutional despite the ban on poll taxes.
Depending on your view of utility, it could be considered
just as valid as any other distribution.
However, there could be complaints since people can lose
their voting power. In fact, since in nearly all cases, there would
be no change to vote totals and then suddenly, a large
chunk of people would lose some of their votes and thus
power, there could be major complaints (or riots). Also,
they would have little expectation of increasing their totals again
as it would be a while before another change to the totals.
I think in practice, it would just be treated like a range voting
election and thus changing account totals is like reweighting
people's votes.
It seems to be not only like reweighting, but simply another form of
reweighting. Well, that depends on how it's used. If it's used to "pay"
for a decision, then it's indirect reweighting, but if it's used to
reduce the strength of votes, then it's direct reweighting.
Finally, with a national election, it is unlikely that the results
would be accurate to a single vote, so even if it was balanced,
a recount would probably change things.
c) How would the "exchange rate" of this virtual money be established?
I don't think it should be transferable, or otherwise, you
might as well just use normal money.
If you do want it to be exchangable, then just let the
market decide.
I agree, and I think that having it transferable would be a bad idea.
The corporations would buy votes (at some market-determined exchange
rate) and you'd get even closer to a plutocracy. If a plutocracy is what
you want, why not use normal money indeed? Replace the legislature with
a continuous auction, with money going into the treasury, and have a
presidential auction instead of election.
I think that the only way to remotely salvage that idea would be to have
a very strict taxation policy, out of bounds from the transferable
votes, that's designed to keep wealth inequality as low as possible.
Then people can use their money to vote. But if you do that, you can
just hand out nontransferable voting money to every citizen instead,
since the effect is the same.
One possible option here is that you use budget dollars.
For example, each citizen's account would have a share
of the national budget. They could spend the money on
getting laws passed/electing officers or funding projects.
Every year, their account would be restored by their
share of the tax take.
This possibly works better for a legislature.
However, there would be rules that only public projects can
be funded.
If you're only using budget dollars as an unit and the allocation
doesn't affect the budget, then that's no different from using synthetic
voting money units. If you use real budget dollars, then I think that
could create an incentive to spend. If you're not in office in the next
term, why not use all the money now? Maybe you'll even be remembered for
the grand projects you started.
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