At 04:30 AM 10/3/2011, Michael Allan wrote:
http://zelea.com/project/autonomy/a/fau/fau.xht
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ABSTRACT
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An individual vote has no effect on the formal outcome of the
election; whether the vote is cast or not, the outcome is the same
regardless. This appears to open a structural fault in society
between the individual person and the individual vote. The voter as
such (as a decider) is thus alienated from the means and product of
decision, and thereby disengaged from political power and freedom. I
argue that the sum of these disengagements across the population
amounts to a power vacuum, which, in mid to late Victorian times, led
to the effective collapse of the electoral system and the rise of a
mass party system. Today, the organized parties make the decisions
and exercise the political power that was intended for the individual
voters. I trace this failure back to a technical design flaw in the
electoral system, wherein the elector is physically separated from the
ballot. [QCW]
The flaw is real, and it results from secret ballot voting as a
method of making complex decisions (choice between more than two
alternatives), where the amalgamation process, which in pure
democracy is only the final stage of a complete deliberative process,
a ratification of prior work, becomees the only form of expression of
the voter. The flaw was addressed by Lewis Carroll in about 1883,
with his invention of what was later called Candidate Proxy (several
authors, this list in the 1990s) and Asset Voting (Warren Smith, c.
2002, as I recall).
If Asset Voting is used to create a proportional representation
system, using STV (but probably most voters just listing one
candidate), and the Hare quota (thus allowing one or possibly more
seats to remain vacant pending further process), a system is set up
whereby the norm is that every vote counts, and can be seen to affect
the result. That is, the method, if applied in a certain way, creates
an assembly where every voter made their own personal optimal vote,
and that vote then enabled the election either of a specific seat in
the Assembly, or, in some cases, may have been split to elect more
than one seat, or in relatively rare cases, all or part of the vote
is *suspended*, as it were, pending further process, and the vote,
even then, though not having a "seat," and thus creating a right to
participate in the full assembly deliberative process, may still have
real political power, that is, may be expressed directly in the
Assembly whenever amalgamation takes place.
I'm not aware of any other system that can do this on a large scale.
Asset Voting is really Delegable Proxy with a secret ballot initial
proxy assignment stage. It could make possible the election of very
highly representative assemblies, with no reliance on party systems
being necessary.
Yet it is not a "pure election method," it incorporates a
deliberative phase (negotiation between "candidates" being an aspect
of deliberation). Nevertheless it can produce *results* that allow
the purest imaginable form of democracy even with the scale being enormous.
Every vote is counted and counts. An Asset experiment was done by the
Election Science Foundation, where a three-member steering committee
was elected by 17 voters, such that every winner was either
explicitly approved by every voter, or was approved by the candidate
approved by the voter, within a few days of the "closing of the
polls." To my knowledge, that was an historic result.
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