Bryan, I applaud you for thinking about, writing about, and promoting a mechanism that encourages grass-roots activism. However, I see a couple of problems with the indrep idea in its present form:
1. Why do you recommend allowing each voter to vote for only one candidate? That's Plurality voting, a method despised by most people who have studied other voting methods. The main problem with Plurality voting when applied to the indrep idea is that most grass-roots activists have to earn a living in the real world and therefore only have time to study and promote one or two issues. So a voter who cares about half a dozen issues may have a hard time finding a candidate who not only takes a position on all the issues of interest to the voter, but also takes a position that is acceptable to the voter. I suggest using Approval Voting, which would let voters vote for one or more advocates for issue A, one or more advocates for issue B, etc. 2. When a candidate takes positions on multiple issues, it becomes difficult to tell what votes for that candidate mean. Did each voter agree with the candidate's position on every one of the issues? Maybe one voter liked the candidate's position on issue A and had no opinion about issue B. Maybe another voter disagreed with the candidate about issue A but felt that the candidate was such a great advocate for issue B that it was worth overlooking the disagreement over issue A. So, I think it would be better to structure the ballots as a series of referendum questions, with the advocates' names associated with the questions. For example, "Do you agree with Jan Kok that Plurality Voting should be replaced with Approval Voting for all public elections in the US that are intended to select a single winner from multiple candidates? Yes() No()" Then voters could agree or disagree with my position on Approval Voting, independent of whether they agree with me about other issues that I might espouse. In order to keep ballots at a reasonable size, candidates could pay for the number of issues they place on ballots and the amount of space they take up on ballots, and be paid for the number of Yes votes they receive. Several candidates could also share the cost and rewards of placing an issue on the ballot. By the way, problem #2 occurs in every political system with any currently used voting method. For example, what do all those votes for GW Bush mean? Do 56 million voters agree with everything that Bush stands for? Of course not. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a much more fine-grained separation of powers in the government, and we could, for example, vote for the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Education, etc.? One obvious problem with that is, suppose the SoD wants to go to war, and SoT doesn't want to fund the war. Who wins? How would that kind of conflict between departments, which most likely arises daily, be resolved? Cheers, - Jan ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
