At 04:22 PM 9/25/2007, Juho wrote: >One more approach would be to give the parties some "veto votes" that >they can use as they wish during the period between elections. If >some party in on the losing side in some vote by 5% margin it could >still veto and use 5 of its veto votes to do that (maybe all losing >parties would use some of their veto votes).
Look, it's possible to have direct/representative democracy, such that no votes are lost or wasted. The system we generally propose for this, in public use, is Asset. Warren Smith proposed Asset, originally, in a fairly complex form, and was not considering at all the implications for direct democracy. I noticed these, however, since forms of direct democracy, made practical on a large scale, are my primary interest, and I realized that Asset was a form of delegable proxy. The key to understanding this is the freedom of the holders of the "assets." They are free agents, chosen and entrusted with a power that really belongs to the voters, which they can exercise according to their own best judgement. Now, you can imagine Candidate List asset, which forces vote reassignments according to lists supplied by candidates, but this loses the real power of Asset, which is this: Voters in Asset, if write-ins are allowed (and that could be made easy) can actually vote for *anyone*. And, most specifically, they can vote for a personal representative to all the subsequent process that might ensue, till the next election! Asset really chooses *electors* who then represent the public in further process, and, because there is no competition, voters can freely choose any eligible person (normally they could choose themselves, for example), the subsequent process can be direct democracy. Any combination of electors resulting in enough votes can create a seat in the assembly, but the voting power of that seat is only a default vote, counted in the absence of any votes from electors. Electors are, necessarily, public voters, their votes are public record. That's what it takes to be an elector, a willingness to vote in public, just as is the case with current elected representatives. But there can be far more electors than we currently choose representatives, and, indeed, anyone can become an elector. It is very much like Delegable Proxy, actually, and DP might be used by electors -- voluntarily! -- to coordinate the assignment of votes to seats, allowing electors with very small votes to still collectively wield their proper proportional vote strength. In such a system, measures of voting power become a bit silly. Everyone at the base level has one vote, period. And then the electors have exactly the voting power given to them by voters, and there need be no compromises at all with this, if it is a system that allows direct voting by the electors. (Because it is public, there are far fewer security issues....) ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info