Dear Colin, My brain is slightly scrambled from reading to many E Mails this morning, but I am trying to answer those that I find relevant. You and I have obviously found the concept of voting once every four or five years an inadequate method for expressing our citizenship and participation in the issues of the day. Your organizations focus on "referendums", I must confess to some technical ignorance but one of it's flaws is the same as conventional voting in two ways, one it is an either/or choice on a specific question and two it does not allow for any meaningful discussion after the vote. I am appending an answer I gave to another list in which a percentage voting system was explored by weighting the vote with imaginary dollars and penalizing the voter if he was not on the winning side. I think my answer there will be applicable to the points I am trying to make here. I was one of the five who voted in Arie's Bet vote. Somehow, it did not live up to my expectations and I think my unease was the weighting done by the concept of monetary value. First, I found the instructions somewhat difficult to grasp, in fact, I'm still not sure that I understand the purpose though the concept of evaluating an opinion rather than casting a vote may clarify it a little in my mind. For the general public, I think it is too sophisticated or else everyone will have to be guided through the process several times so that they feel they are expressing exactly what they want to express, I'm not sure that it allowed me to do that. The best strategy (largest expected gain) is to base your bets on your personal estimate of the probability that an option will be the winning one (the one democratically chosen according to this system). It is this phrase, which indicates that I am trying to "win" rather than expressing my honest opinion that I find a little odious. The purpose of voting, in my mind is to express an opinion based on my personal history and thought, not to get on the winning side of an issue. The idea, I think, in a democratic situation is that each person votes according to their personal convictions rather than trying to pick the winning side. My disgust with conventional voting is that yes/no bundled under many issues does not leave me the ability to express a single opinion on a topic, rather I am asked to vote on an agenda or platform. The original thought, when I responded to Arie's original answer in which he answered in percentages was that this system might be developed so that my opinion on a topic or platform could register something other than either end of a continuum and that I like the flexibility of indicating some discomfort without necessarily having to vote a total "no". For example, if I was to vote on my perceived opinion of Arie's system, I would choose 66% as my answer. The overall idea is right, the concept of picking the winning side is wrong. In my way of thinking, I might be offered a series of secondary questions or a line or two to focus my discomfiture. Alternatively, adding up my percentage, along with everyone else's which could vary from 0 to 100% would only indicate which side of the 50/50 split a group of individuals were on a particular question and to what degree. This could lead to reformulating the issue or perhaps rephrasing the question but would not be binding in either a yes or no context unless it was - for example between 0 to 25% or from 75 to 100%. If the final tally was between 25 - 75%, the vote would have to be held again with more clarification or changes in the original question. It would seem to me that a series of multiple votes and the reframing or restructuring of the issue would eventually lead to a consensus while fully exploring all the possibilities. The exploring of other possibilities educates all voters and expands their repertoire and would lead to more consensus, if not to total agreement, at least all parties would be party to expanded information which would sway some who did not have the required information to make a well reasoned decision in their original vote cast. Respectfully, Thomas Lunde If you can make sense of these statements, I would be interested in your response.
