Michael Allan wrote:
Hello to the list,
Hello, and welcome.
I'm a software engineer, currently developing an online electoral system. I was in another discussion (link at bottom) and a subscriber recommended this list to me. I have a few questions, if anyone is able to help. A key component of the electoral system (to explain) is what I call a "delegate cascade" voting mechanism. It is intended for use in continuous elections (open to recasting). The overall aim is to support consensus building. In this mechanism: ...a 'delegate' is a participant who both receives votes, like a candidate, and casts a vote of her own, like a voter. But when a delegate casts her vote, it carries with it those received. And so on... Passing from delegate to delegate, the votes flow together and gather in volume - they cascade - like raindrops down the branches of a tree. New voters are not restricted in their choices, but may vote for anyone, their unsolicited votes serving to nominate new candidates and to recruit new participants into the election. http://zelea.com/project/votorola/d/outline.xht I can only cite 3 references for the mechanism (Pivato, Rodriguez et al., and myself) all from 2007. Does anyone know of an earlier source? Is anyone else working with this mechanism? Have there been discussions along similar lines?
That sounds very much like Delegable Proxy, which Abd says was first thought of by Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). In DP, as far as I understand it, voters associate with proxies (delegates in your terminology) and the proxies accumulate votes from those voters. A proxy is then just like any other voter, and may vote directly or pass the ballot bulk (in sum or part) to yet others.
If you remove the ability of proxies to pass the votes on, and instead let the proxies decide upon the composition of a traditional assembly, you get Asset Voting. However, that doesn't go very well with your continuous election idea, since the assembly presumably has to reside for a given period, just like one that would be directly elected by the voters.
There's also the council democracy system that, I think, is used in some unions. There you have local councils that elect among their number to regional councils that elect among their number to national councils.. the number of "levels" is logarithmic with respect to the population, but again that's not very continuous, and unless you use PR, it's possible for a cleverly positioned minority to take control of the system. Consider the case of each council electing a single person to the next level. Then having a majority at the top will let you control the system. Having a majority of the councils required to have a majority at the top will also let you do so, etc, letting a minority of ((floor(k/2)+1)/k)^n, where k is the council size and n is the number of levels, control the system in the worst case.
As for others using Delegable Proxy (or "liquid democracy"), if that's what your scheme is, the Wikipedia page on DP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_voting#Delegated_voting ) states that it's used by a local Swedish party called "Demoex" (Democratic Experiment). Abd has also said that it's used in corporate governance, but I'm unfamiliar with whether that implementation lets proxies transfer votes further.
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