On Aug 29, 2008, at 15:51 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
One more approach to semi-computerized voting. A computer
displays the personal alternatives and then prints a ballot.
This solution hides the personalized nature of the ballot and
still avoids the problem of voter voting for candidates that he/
she should not vote.
One could augment the semi-computerized voting by making it print
all candidates
That could be thousands, so maybe a subset in many cases.
Just enough to hide the data. One could print out to the nearest
candidate that's, say, a tenth of the population away from the voter.
Here I say that a candidate is N voters away from a voter if it's
not possible to make a compact region that includes both the voter
and the candidate, yet has fewer than N voters in it. For
simplicity, the region might be a circle.
One should maybe avoid the possibility of someone deriving the
location of the voter based on the distribution of all the candidates
on the ballot. (Also picking fully random candidates may reveal the
location since there will be one concentration of nearby candidates.)
If you allow me I'd like to advertise trees once more. Trees (=
hierarchical open lists) can be seen as very truncated ranked
votes. Bullet vote to one candidate is inherited by his/her
nearest group and so on. When the tree is formed one can expect
all common thinking patterns to get their own branch in the tree.
If there are lots of people who are green and also somewhat right
wing and also a little bit feminist there would probably be such a
branch in the tree with few candidates to choose from.
Adding the ability to rank three of the candidates of the
surrounding small group would offer a pretty good vocabulary of
typical green/right/feminist opinions. And since the three would
be from a relatively small set (maybe 5 out of 100) the number of
combinations might still be safe (reduce the allowed number of
ranked candidates to two or one if needed).
Assume that a voter votes for the green wing of the social democrat
party. Would you then have LocalGreen > LocalOtherSocialDemocrat >
FarawayGreen, or LocalGreen > FarawayGreen >
LocalOtherSocialDemocrat ?
I guess the statement that political proportionality is more
important than geographical proportionality would force the second
ballot.
Yes, that is the first assumption (simple and natural). If people
feel strongly about locality they may establish a branch for local
matters. Then voters can express their feelings and support local
candidates by giving their vote to this branch. This way locality
became a political topic (and got more priority). If there is support
for any topic there may also be a branch for this topic.
Also, how would you get parties to cooperate in making a tree? The
party may say that party unity is too important and therefore pass
an internal rule that no member may create a subgroup. This is kind
of like the problem when a party is in majority and that power is
contingent upon closed list PR; then the party won't want to change
to open list PR. However, in that case, opinion shifts could cause
the party to lose its grip on power, but the party always has power
over its own organization.
Yes, these are central questions - how to keep the tree structure
rich enough, and how to get the idea of trees accepted in the first
place.
One trick (for the first case) is to make the list creation rules
such that after one party (or group) has announced its list of
candidates those candidates may freely form and announce smaller
subgroups. Some parties might still try to ban this using party
internal rules but it would be more difficult, both morally and in
terms of being able to stop the process.
One trick is to make the rules such that they favour groupings a bit,
e.g. use d'Hondt. I'd prefer other means though, but if needed one
can boot and boost the process this way.
One brute force solution is to limit the number of candidates that
one flat group can set, or limit the number of seats one flat group
can get.
One fear or hope that the parties may have is that it would be easy
for a green social democrat to move to pink greens, or the other way
around. In many political systems of today this feature may however
make the system better. Note also that these two groups are close to
each others, so the absolute change is not radical. And further, it
is also possible that voters that are not happy with the actions of
the party only move to another (formerly weak) branch of the party to
change the policy, and not out of the party.
Parties may benefit of allowing their voters to give feedback and
influence the policy of the party. Party officials and central
figures may lose some control of the policy, but maybe they can also
stay in power as neutral figures and just let the voters decide the
political direction (= relative size of different branches within the
party).
If some party has a strict internal discipline then it is still
possible to set rules that all party members must vote together (but
still allow party internal branches to exist). Some parties are
actually proud of having a lively internal debate.
If there are parties that allow voters to express their opinion by
using branches and others that do not allow this, then the voters
might vote with their feet (not sure though).
People might get interested if the new political system allows them
to influence more. Many politicians are worried about the low
interest level among the citizens. Many citizens feel that the
parties just continue on their old tracks no matter how one votes.
With party internal branches the ability of the voters to influence
the political direction of the party increases significantly.
Juho
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