At 11:18 PM 6/23/2008, Howard wrote:
I feel that the need to look for and design a system around
geographic proportionality is a waist of time (except as a sales pitch).
I believe that geographic proportionality would naturally come out
of a truly proportional system (if it was important to the voters)
where the proportionality of all issues important to the voters are
taken into account.
As an example, if a large number of voter care about the number of
pot holes on bank street it is likely that many of these voters live
or work near bank street. and thus would elect at least some
politicians that live near bank street.
Geographic location is a hold over from the days when communication
was limited to a local area is largely irrelevant today.
I agree. It's quite possible to design a system that is, for most
voters, geographically proportional, but, for a few, is politically
proportional, and that is, again for most voters, both geographically
and politically proportional.
I don't see any sign that he realized the possibilities, but Charles
Dodgson first proposed the key concept in about 1884, as a tweak to
Single Transferable Vote.
He suggested that, in lieu of exhausting a ballot with a bullet vote,
the candidate receiving the vote would be able to "spend" the ballot
"as if it were the candidate's personal property." This is the same
metaphor used by Warren Smith in his Asset Voting publication of
(2004?). The method was also called Candidate Proxy by Mike Ossipoff
in a post to this list before 2000. It is related to Delegable Proxy,
my own invention, independently invented by others as well; but the
Asset form is, as proposed, for multiwinner elections, used to create
a peer assembly, which has certain functional advantages over pure
proxy systems for public use.
Consider the simplest Asset system: voters vote for one candidate,
and that candidate becomes their proxy for the purpose of determining
representation. If the candidate gains a quota of votes, the
candidate is automatically elected (or may, at will, elect someone
else), and any leftover votes are then disposable for the purpose of
creating more seats when combined with the votes held by other candidates.
What prior writers did not seem to realize was that such a system
would gravitate toward the voter voting for the single person they
most trust, both to function in the assembly themselves, should that
occur, or for the purpose of choosing who will represent the voter,
ultimately. I would expect direct election in the "primary" to become
increasingly rare, for there will arise very good reasons to vote for
someone you personally know and can reliably communicate with. This
person, who is a public voter, I call an "elector," will be known to
the holder of the seat as the one who directed votes to him or her.
Thus Asset will set up filtered communication channels between voters
and seats, thus resolving an old problem with deliberative and
representative democracy, the problem of scale and communications
breakdown resulting from it.
Now, an elector will have a list of precincts from which his or her
votes came. The elector may have a good idea who these people are,
but that isn't verifiable, votes in the primary remain secret.
However, the elector *may* choose to assign votes, in cooperation
with other electors, so that seats have a maximized relationship with
the precincts from which the votes came. Thus there may be, for a
large population city, a number of seats representing relatively
common different political positions, whereas some seats for small
minority political positions may cover an entire state, and a few
seats may be a kind of catchall seat, likewise drawn from the whole
state, being representatives who have promised, perhaps, to represent
diverse positions in the Assembly. "Represent" here means to ensure
that positions are represented in debate. I'd presume that the seat
would vote the conscience of the seat, which *might* represent, for
example, "far left" or "far right," though, in reality, political
positions are only grossly represented by such categories.
("Libertarian" for example, is in some ways "right," and in some ways
"left." There are, in fact, different axes of polarity.)
What Asset Voting does is to increase, to maximize, "chosen
representation" that doesn't represent the majoritarian compromise;
such majoritarian compromises, when involved in the creation of
seats, tend to take place on grossly oversimplified levels. The
result can be serious loss of representation.
Asset Voting actually would make possible something very close to
direct democracy, without the known problems. It's hybrid
direct/representative democracy, all the more so if electors, who are
now public voters (like seats are), have the right to vote in
Assembly decisions. Not participate in deliberation: they would not
have the right to enter motions or debate on the floor, absent
permission, unlike seats. Seats, then, exist for the purpose of
participation in deliberation, and voting by seats is a convenience.
So convenient, though, that I'd expect the vast majority of votes in
the assembly to be cast by seats, and only electors who maintain
seriously active involvement with Assembly business would vote, and
only when they had a position different from that of their chosen
representative(s).
Asset Voting, implemented like this, would create a cloud, a penumbra
of electors, around the Assembly, intermediate between voters and
seats, and, I expect, the sense of the public that this is "our
Assembly" would grow. It is this possible increase in participation
and sense of public ownership that got me excited, years ago, about
Delegable Proxy.
Direct democracy works very well on a small scale, and on that scale,
nobody even thinks to suggest electing representatives. When the
scale increases, though, meetings become increasingly tedious and,
eventually, direct democracies devolve into representative or other
oligarchical structures. In business, the problem was faced long ago:
corporations are (in concept and sometimes in fact) direct
democracies, obviously so when investments are equal (so every
"owner" has equal voting power). And the problem of scale and
convenience was solved with the institution of the proxy. But, for
reasons which probably have much to do with fear of democracy, this
approach wasn't taken in politics. Robert's Rules, in dismissing
proxy voting, gives, as a reason, that members don't have "ownership
rights." That's correct. And is part of the problem.
It is not "my government," in the sense that I own it and, with
others, aid it, direct it, inform it, and all the rest. In fact, for
most, it is "them." "They" do this and "they" do that, and we don't
have a sense of personal responsibility for it. What's great about
Town Meeting towns is the sense of cooperation, of this being "our
town" and "our government." There is a tendency to seek consensus
greater than mere majority, out of a recognition that it is good for
the town if town decisions have wider support than merely a majority.
But, of course, relatively unimportant decisions get made by majority
vote because that's simply the most efficient way to do it, and few
get exercised about "losing" such votes.
We could have something so close to direct democracy, in the good
ways, that the difference is minor. Asset Voting could do it, without
running afoul of the serious problems that are traditionally
considered to make direct democracy impossible.
And how do we get from here to there? Not being content with simply
building utopian castles in the sky, I realized that if this is,
indeed, a superior method of democratic organization, *it should also
work in nongovernmental organizations, including ones concerned with
politics.* Hence the FA/DP plan to promote delegable proxy in
organizations that aren't biased toward one particular position, thus
simulating, on a smaller scale, or even, possibly, a large scale,
what a truly representative assembly would be, without the risks
involved in trying for immediate implementation in government.
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