At 04:02 AM 5/23/2005, Dave Ketchum wrote:
This time I see "variable voting" introduced as if it is a new concept to
be added.
Going back to the beginning of this thread, I had specified "Each
proxy has as many votes as they represent, directly or indirectly; a
voter with no proxy would have one vote."
Seems clear that the new phrase is not a new idea.
The original concept exists in all proposed bodies. It is qualified
with a limit in any body to prevent a single member acquiring
unacceptable power.
I think that Mr. Ketchum is responding to what may have been a
misunderstanding of mine, somehow it seemed at one point to me that he was
referring to a body with members who would have one vote each. It's not
worth it to me at this point to try to figure out how that misunderstanding
came about. Suffice it to say that we are talking about proxy voting, where
one person may exercise more than one vote, the additional votes having
been entrusted to him or her.
This time I see reference to a "Town Meeting town" - I did not intend to
force the proxies I propose on any government that had something that
worked well. Instead, the goal here is to offer better representation when
the best competitive method is PR.
Town Meeting works well. However, it could work much better. For example,
I've lived in this town for about three years and I just attended my first
Town Meeting. I've wanted to go before, but something always came up. I had
to stay home with my daughter, or we were travelling, or is was sick, or
whatever. That's a problem with Town Meeting. If you can't go to the
meeting, you are not represented at it. Proxy voting could make this work
better. There are other problems, too, which could be ameliorated.
The essential problem is that, even though this small town is a direct
democracy, people still feel, quite often, alienated from the government.
I've written about the fact that sometimes Town Meeting votes one way on an
issue that Massachusetts law requires be submitted for secret ballot, i.e.,
in a regular election, and the town votes differently. Quite a bit
differently sometimes. One person claimed that this was because people
didn't want to express their true feelings in public. I don't think so. I
think that most voters don't go to Town Meeting, but they do vote. (There
is always higher turnout in elections than there is for Town Meeting.) And
the communication between the voters and the Town Meeting is obviously
sometimes not as good as could be. A delegable proxy system could
accomplish this communication.
And, indeed, it could do it without any change to laws or existing
institutions. But that's another story, that's the Free Association part
that Mr. Ketchum would prefer kept apart from this particular discussion.
We argue over loops, which I declare must be forbidden. To clarify that:
Members of bodies are each the top proxy in a chain of proxies.
Not necessarily. If you assume that, yes, loops are a problem and must be
forbidden. But what if, as only one example, there is a proxy tree within
the body. One member is at the top of this tree. That top member designates
as proxy another member as his proxy, one of those who, directly or
indirectly has chosen the top member as proxy. This creates a loop. And,
within the loop, there is no longer any top proxy, at least not from the
simplest analysis. Rather, if any member is not present, all members of the
loop remain represented.
A loop has no top proxy, since each points "up" to another voter in
the loop - so all the voters in the loop have deprived themselves of
representation in the governing body.
As I've pointed out, this is not necessarily true. Only if no member of the
loop does not qualify as a member of the body would it be true. A proxy is
simply the assignment of trust from one member to another, to act in the
absence of the assigning member. Generally, a member of the electorate may
assign proxy to any other member. The receiving member, prior to the
assignment, may not be holding as many proxies as the assigning member,
that is, may not be as high in the tree. However, after receiving the
proxy, the receiving member is now at a higher level than the giver, unless
there is a loop. If there is a loop, both are at the same level.
I've been writing, off-list, a description of a delegable proxy election,
designed for situations where security or other concerns require that most
voters be able to assign proxy secretly. Essentially, prior to balloting,
persons willing to be chosen as proxies so announce, they become registered
proxies. Then there is balloting; in the balloting, a means is provided for
voters to name their proxies. This is really like an ordinary election
where vote counts are tabulated for each candidate; but the number of
candidates might be quite large. I won't deal with the technical problems
of ballot construction here, I think they could rather easily be solved.
The outcome of the balloting and counting process is that registered
proxies now have a number of votes assigned to them. Neither they nor
anyone else knows who these proxy-givers are, only that they were voters.
(This is not how I'd prefer to see delegable proxy work, for it eliminates
an essential communication aspect of the system, the personal relationship
between representative and the one represented, but this is a design for
difficult circumstances, or as a replacement for an ordinary election.)
The result of the election is that there is now a body of voters, the
registered proxies, who collectively represent all voters, including
themselves. Some of them might only represent themselves. (Registered
proxies would not be allowed to vote in the secret ballot; they exercise
their own vote in the subsequent process.)
At this point there is now what could be called the extended electoral
college, which votes in public. Because the point of using delegable proxy
is to obtain a deliberative body, it may be necessary to winnow down the
number of proxies who may have full participation rights in a meeting of
the body. This would be done by the open assignment of proxies. The body
size is fixed at N members maximum. The rank of each elector is determined
by assuming that no other electors are present at the meeting: how many
votes would the elector be holding? That number is the rank of the elector.
Starting at the top rank, electors are admitted to full meeting rights,
until N members have been admitted. If the admission of a block of members
of equal rank would cause N to be exceeded, they are not admitted, and
admission stops at that point. (There are other reasonable procedures, this
is merely a simple one.)
The remainder of electors are regular electors, they still have the right
to vote, but not to enter motions, nor to speak at the meeting absent
permission from the meeting. (For some meetings, it might not be practical
to allow regular electors to vote; in which case those electors may only
exercise their vote by assigning proxy to a qualified member, or, in some
cases, to one who becomes qualified by the act of assignment. I won't
address bumping, where such an assignment causes a qualified member to lose
qualification, other than to mention it.)
Proxy rings or looops are allowed; however, there are two considerations.
First of all, in determining rank, rings require special treatment. I've
written about that in the paper. Some loops will be moot with regard to
qualifying membership; these are rings where all the members qualify
regardless of the loop. (This should be obvious, but members of a loop may
represent other members who are not in the loop, thus loop members may be
of varying rank). Where all members of the loop are not independently
qualified for membership in the "council", the loop members will have to
make a choice as to which one of them is the "primary proxy" for the loop.
That person would then, if of sufficient rank, be admitted to full
membership, and would be encouraged, but not required, to give his or her
proxy to another council member.
Because all members are encouraged to give proxy to someone, to act in
their absence, at least one loop is inevitable. It is as if a superproxy
designates a vice-superproxy, to act in his or her absence. In the absence
of the superproxy, the vice-superproxy, by proxy assignment rules, acts to
exercise the same number of votes as the superproxy, i.e., all of them.
I see no reason to limit the creation of superproxies; however, the rights
of superproxies may be restrained by absolute quorum rules, reconsideration
rules allowing any member whose vote was cast for a motion, directly or
indirectly, to move for reconsideration of the motion, and the like. A
superproxy would be a total consensus president. Not terribly likely. More
likely there would be a number of top-level proxies in a meeting of the
college and each of them would contain a loop, assuming that all top-level
proxies each name a proxy, presumably within their own group. (If they name
a proxy outside their own group, they just merged two groups, with the top
of the second group being the new top-level proxy.)
Note that when a person giving proxy is present, the proxy is inactive. If
voting is allowed by all electors, including those not meeting-qualified, a
vote cast by the non-qualified member reduces the vote count of the
qualified member by one. (This does not affect the rank of the qualified
member, for which presence is irrelevant, just the effective vote cast by
the member).
Then the electoral college proceeds to carry out the election process. It
may use any election method. I'd suggest that it might start with an
approval poll, but my purpose here is not to choose the optimal election
method to be used by the college itself. It would choose that. It's a
deliberative body. But I'd think that one very simple method would be an
Approval Poll, followed by a motion to elect the winner of that poll. The
motion might require a simple majority to pass. However, the college need
not be restricted to any specific method, and the college may develop its
own standing and special rules. It may also recommend overall election
rules (including the first, secret-ballot phase) for referendum.
Secrecy of proxy assignment. I see this as equivalent to voter enrollment
in a political party. Anyway, we need a verifiable record of how many
voters are represented by member X of a body.
We currently have election means of recording how many voters voted for
candidate X. That's enough. It is not necessary to know who those voters
are. (I claim it is generally desirable to know, at least for the proxy to
know whom he or she represents, for the giver of the proxy in any case
knows to whom it is given, but conditions, for a society in general --
Iraq, for example -- or for individuals, may require secrecy, to confine
danger to those who have voluntarily accepted the danger. You should not
have to be willing to accept a danger of retaliation in order to vote. No
voter is required to join a political party, you do not lose your vote in
the actual election if you do not join, only your vote, under some rules,
in party primaries or other party process.
Proxies are not political parties. They do not need to have any platform.
In the system proposed, all they need to do is to be identifiable and
registered. If people don't trust them, they won't vote for them.
If this is an election method, what counts is proxies in place at the
time of the election. Proxies might be frozen the day before.
Here the election CONSISTS OF the assignment of proxies, which thus CANNOT
be frozen the day before.
There are two phases, about which I may not have been clear. There is the
secret ballot phase, which assigns proxies which cannot be revoked (until
the next election). This is undesirable, in general, but any person who
desires, who wishes to be able to revoke his or her proxy at any time, may
register as a proxy and thus participate in the second phase. In the second
phase, which takes place publicly and where proxy assignments are public
record, proxies may be revoked at any time, though there might be some
practical limit to this.
Yes, there is the "election" of proxies. The term is a little confusing,
because proxies are not elected. Proxies, in the system described,
volunteer. Their voting power is amplified if they are chosen, and if
enough people choose them in a system which has restricted membership in
the electoral college, they qualify for that college based on the number of
"votes" they receive, directly and indirectly.
I would prefer to leave proxy assignments to be as fluid as possible. When
I wrote of freezing proxy assignments, this would be a concession to
expediency, to be avoided if possible. I cannot possibly anticipate all
conditions!
I see assignments as public, just as party enrollment is public - though
this is election of body members, which is a bit more sensitive.
Indeed. In Iraq, as in many other places in the world, you publicly name
the wrong person as the one you trust, and you can't afford bodyguards, you
are dead. Secret ballot was invented for this.
I'm grateful for this exercise. For some strange reason, having an initial
secret ballot phase, creating an initial set of variable-vote electors, had
not previously occurred to me. This is because most of my thinking has been
about non-electoral systems; I'd worried about how to use delegable proxy
under unsafe conditions, and, before this, I hadn't seen how, except by
imposition of a trusted external authority. Which is problematic, to be
sure. (It is still necessary to some extent. Ballot boxes can be stuffed,
ballot destroyed, voter identities betrayed, etc. Still, secret ballots are
a pretty well-established solution to the problem.)
I've also thought a bit about how to prevent the implied betrayal of a
voter to a proxy who was expecting to get at least one vote.... but I'll
leave describing that for another day.
We can think more on secrecy, but hard to do here without causing more
trouble than it is worth.
I think the secrecy problem is solved, with the exception of the detail
mentioned.
Where do you find an agency that deserves trust?
As I said, it's not easy. But we do it all the time. You do the best you
can. Fully public systems don't have the problem, I'd expect. But they then
have another problem, coercion and intimidation. So which problem is the
more serious one?
I actually think that a secret ballot phase could be a safeguard in any
system....
(Actually, one of the problems with present secret ballot systems is that
votes can't be verified. That could be fixed. But fixing it does provide
an abuse pathway. I think of the enforcer bullying the voter, demanding
to see their vote receipt, or their password. Or simply the spouse....
I CANNOT picture a vote receipt that deserves trust - but that is a
problem for another day.
If you can verify votes, then, as I said, there may be a way to abuse it.
I would turn that around. Considering the quantity of work to be done,
you about need multiple committees - which demands a body of over a half
dozen members.
This assumes that all members of committees are what I've been calling
"fully qualified members." That is not a necessary restriction. You could
have a central council which has a relatively small number of members,
which can debate thoroughly, and a committee system around it which has
representatives, some of who would be of lower level. Acting in committee,
members would not necessarily be exercising proxies. Committees, ideally,
are places where a consensus is developed prior to going for full debate
and vote. So votes need not count in committees as much as they count on
the main floor. Committees, in my view, should never make decisions, they
rather make reports. The decisions are made by the body as a whole.
Also need enough members to permit a reasonable quantity of groups to each
have one or more members.
I'm concerned about what size does to an assembly. It makes it impossible
for every member to be heard, really. A body should be able to create
working committees which include appointed external members, if more hands
are needed, or hired staff.
Proxy trees for each body about have to be independent. The issues
that cause grouping of voters differ for each body and thus mean that the
trees must be created according to those issues. Incidental that a group
of voters MIGHT share interests and lower level proxies for multiple bodies.
Note also that voters in a county proxy tree would often include
voters from multiple villages.
Yes. Of course. However, they might be organized into subtrees, each from
one village.
Mr. Ketchum conceives of proxy democracy being organized around issues. I
conceive of it being organized around relationships of trust. In the
latter, issues are tests, perhaps, but not the actual thing. The standard
for proxy that I would suggest is "Would you trust this person to handle
your affairs -- related to the activity of the organization involved -- in
your absence?"
With delegable proxy, you don't have to know the person who will be a
member, say, of a high-level council. You just have to know someone who
knows someone who....
Yes, there might be different proxy trees for different governmental
levels. But I think it need not be that complex. In the end, people will
make what they want. Proxy democracy will allow them to do that...
It is not enough that ten voters could share a proxy. It only works if
ten voters who share a goal find, and sign up with, a proxy willing to
back their goal.
I think this is backwards, actually. But certainly Mr. Ketchum's view is
the common one. I think of the proxy in a proxy democracy as a leader, not
as a follower. The proxy is not a rubber-stamp for the voter. Rather, the
voter chooses a proxy as one trusted. This includes trusting the proxy to
change his or her mind if convinced by deliberation and debate. It also
includes explaining why, back to the voter.
So when government doesn't do what you think it should, at least you will
know *why*. And it will not be a dead end. If you know why the arguments
used to accept a motion were invalid, you only have to present them to your
proxy. You should choose someone who you would trust to listen to you and
give your ideas a fair hearing.
But part of the job of the proxy is to protect the generality from you,
from all your hare-brained ideas. I mean "me," of course. I really wish I
had a proxy I could present these ideas to, and he or she could tell me why
it is such a bad idea.... But I don't, so I have to keep plugging away.
You cannot go to the top, combining such trees, for their tips have to
end in different bodies.
Ah, but what if a proxy at a level can choose the representative at that
level. This is effectively automatic with delegable proxy.
I see no value in this idea. My proposal is that the tip proxy in a chain
IS the body member representing that chain. Now, assuming a tip proxy did
not wish to be a body member, simple enough to find someone willing to be
a body member and make them the tip proxy.
I'm not sure how Mr. Ketchum could be so sure about "no value." I don't
even know what I was trying to say.... :-)
Yes, if a "tip proxy" doesn't want to participate in a body, but does want
to be represented there, together with all those represented by him or her,
it is only necessary to name someone else as proxy, delegable proxy
automatically transfers all the proxies. Indeed, one can name someone else
and instantly invalidate the assignments, simply by showing up.
This adds up to more rigidity than I propose. The voters in a tree that
defined a village trustee are not necessarily agreed as to which state
legislator they are willing to support.
Sure. But I was not proposing it as a *necessity*, only as a *possibility.*
We could sidestep a lot of this discussion by realizing that it is still
pie in the sky. We'll be lucky to see a Town Meeting adopt delegable proxy,
or even ordinary proxy; I'd really like to see some experiments, and with
these experiments, most of these complex questions are going to be moot.
You *could* have a single political DP organization that managed all the
bodies. (Strictly speaking, the "single" organization is a collection of
mini-organizations, with different tip proxies. I'll define a single
organization, however, as one in which you may, at any time, name one and
only one proxy. Yes, for different organizational purposes, you will need
different organizations. But government might possibly be seen as a single
organizational purpose.... thus it *might* only require one organization,
but with levels, geographically organized. From the collection of proxies
which make up a town council, proxies are given to other persons who form a
county council; from the collection making up the county council, proxies
are given to persons who make up the state legislature, from the collection
of proxies which make up the state legislature, proxies are given to
persons who serve in the national legislature, and beyond to an
international organization.
This system would essentially require that direct proxies be given locally;
however, on reflection, I think Mr. Ketchum may be right, in that if I'm in
a town, I would want to name another person as my proxy to serve on the
town council in my absence (perhaps it is Town Meeting...). If everyone
does this, no proxies leave the town. But it is desirable that everyone do
this. So there must be a separate proxy structure to go above the town
level, that is, proxies which are active on a different level. Essentially,
a separate election for the various "offices".
However, the secret ballot phase need only be one phase, a local one....
Succeeding levels are built from the local phase.
(And, of course, my proposal is to form the fully democratic and
equitable structure independently, which does not require changing any
existing institutions, and *then* to work on existing institutions, which
may or may not take on DP characteristics.)
But, if you make a structure independent from what exists, how does it get
control to accomplish anything?
The independent structure has the power to advise the people who retain the
power, the individual members. The people do have the power in our
societies, but they are not organized. Special interests are organized.
FA/DP is an organizational tool, a means of creating an organization which
can be trusted, and which must continually earn that trust, or it loses
most of its power.
FA structures don't collect money for unappropriated purpose. They don't
have independent income; if they want to do something that requires money,
they must convince their members to contribute to that specific cause. Pure
FAs don't ask members to pay dues or fees which may then be spent contrary
to the member's beliefs or desires; rather FAs to be effective, must
develop internal consensus. However, the FA does not restrain caucuses
within it from acting independently.
Essentially, there is no reason not to join an FA, if you are interested in
what the organization addresses. Yes, it is true that the FA can't, by
itself, do anything. That's the good news!
Hey, you asked! :-)
Corporation shareholders do not have the voting rights you seem to
imagine. They do have some control, but not detailed management - they
have neither time nor skill to become management (though an individual may
prepare to cross the line).
Some shareholders do. There are companies which do nothing but represent
and exercise proxies for large institutional shareholders.
The problem with the corporate system is that shareholders are not
independently organized. FA/DP could reform the whole corporate structure.
All it takes is shareholders forming an organization to facilitate
corporate oversight, to advise the shareholders regarding proxy assignments.
Yes, shareholders at present have very limited voting rights. That's
because they have not asserted their rights. If they were organized, the
rules would allow them to do pretty much whatever they pleased. All it
takes is a majority of proxies. And if they can't do it at one company,
they can sell their stock in that company and move to another. Share
corporations are close to Free Associations of capital. (But they hold
property, so they can't be true FA; the independent shareholder
associations would be, though, that could effectively run the corporations,
not directly, but by controlling the choice of directors.)
They say more than "I want the job". Assuming the body will have some
control over the response to Bush proposals about Social Security, the
candidate promises to support (OR fight against) the Bush proposal.
Which, to me, is not the proxy I would choose. Rather, I would choose a
proxy who, I thought, was able to understand the Bush proposal and what is
right and wrong with it, and able to make better proposals, and able to
make compromises if politically necessary, to generally act with balance
and wisdom.
Some who is eager to make promises, I wouldn't trust. What Mr. Ketchum is
suggesting as a standard for choosing proxies is exactly what we have been
using for two centuries. I'd say that part of democracy hasn't worked very
well....
Delegable proxy is a mechanism to make direct democracy scalable while
remaining deliberative. It is representative democracy without elections,
and it will work best when proxy choices are based on trust, and direct
proxy assignments are made at a low level, person to person, where the
giver knows the receiver and they can have a chat.
I see some more fine tuning, followed by practice runs:
In organizations outside government, and
In smaller government units such as villages and towns.
Yes. And the NGO trials don't require any laws, they only require a few
people deciding to organize on this basis. If it works, it will be imitated.
One of the realizations has been that FA/DP as applied to, say, a small
town, could create an independent organization of town voters. I think this
may actually happen in our town, there is starting to be some interest,
some realization that it need not be complicated, and it need not take a
lot of effort, and yet it could be quite effective in improving
communication between the town and the town citizens, between Town Meeting
and the majority of voters who are unable to attend.
How does all this stop me, with 10,000 proxies, from disconnecting from
the member I had liked, and connecting to the one I now like better?
Nothing. However, the response of those you directly represent might give
you pause. If your decision seems foolish to them, they might decide that
they can't trust you, especially if they don't trust the person to whom
you gave proxy.
Trust is only part of it. Going back to Social Security (or whatever are
our important issues), did my switch please these particular voters.
This concept is one which assumes a maintained distance between voters and
government. But the proxy is a bidirectional communications link. If direct
proxy assignments are generally limited, to communicate to the voters the
reasoning behind a governmental decision only requires that proxies
communicate back to their direct proxy-givers, to explain why they voted as
they did. Then those give the explanation down the tree, each one only
handling a relatively small number of communications. Thus someone you
trust contacts you to explain why the Town Meeting voted to have a tax
override, and why he or she thinks you should support it.
You are still free. Here in Mass, tax overrides must be presented for
secret ballot...
Ignoring the label "media star", the ideas in this paragraph influence
voters in their choice of proxies, plus what I said before about voters
looking for proxies who will advance their goals.
Which, as I've said, is not the best criterion for choosing a proxy. A good
proxy will essentially enhance communication between the member and the
organization, which might or might not advance a preconceived agenda.
However, people will be free to use whatever criteria they choose in
selecting proxies; sometimes I think, however, that direct proxies might be
limited to a certain number. And other times I think this is unnecessary,
and it does limit the freedom of members to make that restriction, so on
principle I'm inclined against it.
Wouldn't it be interesting to find out? This is another aspect to the FA
proposal. It represents trying out the proxy system in an organization
that doesn't own anything to damage.
If no ability to damage, how much ability to be constructive?
There is the possibility of damage; however, FAs, in order to do much
damage, must convince their members to do the damage, and that conviction
must arise in a process which is constitutionally open to full debate. I
simply think it quite unlikely that FAs will be destructive, unless
destructiveness is a consensus position among members. In which case it is
likely to take place anyway.
What we are missing is a way to coordinate our activity with efficiency and
in such a way as to encourage the development of consensus. FA/DP is an
organizational techology which could do it. And if we can do that, we could
then apply our collective power. It is this power which will accomplish
things; the FA/DP organization is only a means which could make it possible
for that power to be focused.
The word "platform" seems to disturb you - what label would you place on a
potential proxy's positions on Social Security, etc.?
Platform is a collection of fixed positions. Politicians use platforms, as
do political parties. To my mind, platforms simply confuse issues,
especially because they conflate various issues that are not intrinsically
connected. I'm interested in what ideas a candidate has, how they think
about the issues of the day, but I'm not interested in promises. Platforms,
generally, consist of promises. And the norm is that those promises are broken.
And, quite often, the breaking of the promises is the salvation of society.
And that is crazy. We shouldn't push our servants, which is what officials
should be, into making promises. We should insure that they are educated
and prepared for the challenges they will face, we should certainly have
some idea about how they will proceed, but we should not nail them to their
promises. And, as I said, promises carry, for me, a slightly bad taste.
When someone says "I will never lie to you," I start to wonder about
everything they have said.... But there are people that I think will never
lie to me, but they never have to say that. They simply show, again and
again, that they tell the truth, even when it is inconvenient and
uncomfortable and it means admitting error.
Happens the people who wrote the constitution DID RECOGNIZE the
possibility of needing change in the future, DID PROVIDE a mechanism for
making changes, and dozens of such changes have been made.
Dozens of changes have been made in a system which is reeking with
difficulties. I'm not proposing radical and sudden change, which generally
does more harm than good, but the Constitution represented many compromises
made for the conditions of the time, which conditions passed and we are
largely stuck with the consequences.
There is a tension between the need for stability and gradualness in change
and the effective dictatorship of the minority which is created by
supermajority requirements. We have a very quirky system, however, where a
small majority evenly distributed can act as a supermajority. If we fix
that, we are going to run into a problem, it will become much more
difficult to amend the Constitution. That, I think, will not be good....
This is a big issue I'm not even going to begin to address today.
[Dividing the electoral vote]
Exists, to a limited extent in a couple small states, if I remember right.
Yes, I just forget the exact number and which states.
Now, think of New York doing this in a large state that presently expects
all its votes to help Democrats.
New York COULD split its votes between Democrats and Republicans - greatly
pleasing the minority Republicans, and infuriating the majority Democrats.
Can you imagine the New York legislature making such a change?
No. Because the change requires the majority party in every state to
transfer votes in the national election to minority parties. It is against
their interest, or, at least, in the short term it is. Come a shift in
party loyalties, it could help them in the future.
But it is clearly an equitable change, and this was my point. Institutions
resist equitable changes when those changes deflate the artificially
inflated power of a subset of members.
Now, a constitutional amendment doing this in all states could make
sense. How do you sell this, when it is different from what the couple
states have done?
Obviously, it will be a hard sell. Not impossible, but it is not the first
project to tackle. The first project is simply to test delegable proxy (and
the same thing is true for the various election methods; from my point of
view, any application of any of them is a step in the right direction. The
more people realize that there is more than one way to run an election, the
more they will start to consider alternatives. But the basic thing I think
that needs to be taught is the power of consensus. It really is
shortsighted for a mere majority to impose itself on a substantial
minority; absent necessity, it weakens society to some extent whenever even
one person is coerced. When society is weakened, we are all hurt.
(However, I'm generally opposed to rigid supermajority or consensus rules,
for they can result in the tyranny of the minority, which is clearly worse
than the tyranny of the majority. Essentially, the majority must retain the
right of decision; but the process should clearly provide for full hearing
and response to minority views, and for amendment, where possible, to widen
consensus. I.e., Approval Voting, as an example of something that tends in
this direction.)
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