I'm not sure if people consider this an election method, or more as a method of government. Since it does involve political representation and how citizen's votes are counted, hopefully it is appropriate here. I'm throwing this into the meme pool more as a brainstorming idea than as a serious proposal for national government -- I think it's interesting, but it would take a lot of work to be practical.
Anyway, while looking at ways to simplify congressional elections and make them more competitive, I came up with the following idea (no claims are made for originality, but hey...): Instead of having a separate House, Senate, and Presidency, create a single, unified, binary-tree legislature. By that I mean hold a national election. The candidate that wins is put at the peak (or base, depending on how you look at it) of a binary tree, removed from the list, and the electorate is split into equal halves. The top candidate in each half is connected to the first candidate, their names are removed, and each half is split in half again. Continue this process until you have the number of districts you want. To use the United States during the 2000 election as an example, Al Gore gets the most popular votes so he is elected President and placed at the very peak of the binary tree. Let's assume George W Bush wins the Eastern half of the country (remember, Gore is already off the ballot) and McCain wins the Western half -- you might call them "vice presidents" since they are next in line of succession, but they also have legislative responsibilities. Their names are removed and the regions are cut in half again. Let's say Nader gets the Northwest, Gray Davis gets the Southwest (assuming he ran), Ted Kennedy gets the Northeast, and (to make it interesting) Jeb Bush gets the Southeast. We keep going until we've chopped up the United States into 256 districts, at which point we'll have 2^9-1 or 511 (1+2+4+8+...+256) representatives in the Legislature. For voting, we have the following rules: 1. To be enacted into law, a bill must have at least one unbroken string of yes votes from the smallest district up through the President. If it is decided that this makes it too easy for a bill to be passed (theoretically, only 9 out of 511 votes would be needed using the example above, though this is not as easy as it sounds), then a further requirement may be that at least half the total votes must be "yes" votes. Further restrictions could include requiring at least 1/2 of the votes *on each level of the tree* must be yes votes (in effect, making it a polycameral legislature), or even 3/4ths of the votes on each level plus the votes of the President and two Vice Presidents (for something like constitutional amendments), though this would be incredibly restrictive. Some testing may be needed to find the best ratios. 2. A legislator's vote may be overridden by the contradictory votes of the two legislators immediately below him. To use the example above, let's assume that George W. and McCain wanted a piece of legislation and President Gore didn't. In this case, the two Vice Presidents would prevail -- unless (Nader and Davis), or (Kennedy and Jeb Bush) overrode *their* votes. This rule is recursive, so if all 256 representatives on the bottom of the binary tree voted one way, their votes would propagate up the tree and override everyone else's votes, even the President's. 3. If the representatives of two subdistricts vote differently on a bill, the representative for the parent district may vote as he chooses. For example, if George W. and McCain had differing views on campaign finance refore, then their contrary votes cancel out and Gore can choose as he wants (subject of course to other voting blocks propagating from farther down the tree). I'll give some further thoughts on this in a later post. BTW, I know it's impossible on the national level ("States" would be replaced by "districts" in the federal government, and it would probably take a constitutional convention), but it would be interesting to try on the State level or perhaps in another country. Any other ideas, arguments, concerns, or improvements will be read with interest! Michael Rouse [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em