At 07:36 AM 7/21/2008, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
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.
Yes. The idea has been independently invented, how, recently, in a half-dozen or so different places around the world, as far as we know. My guess is there are others we don't know about. Dodgeson's idea was to deal with exhausted ballots in STV by allowing candidates ranked first preference to serve, essentially, as proxies for the voters, so the context was simply an STV election for proportional representation, but that little tweak turns standard STV PR into Asset Voting, and Dodgeson used the same metaphor as Warren Smith, later, in 2004 I think it was. (The candidates can treat the votes "as if they were their own property Dodgeson) or their Assets (Smith). A similar idea was called Candidate Proxy, and there are posts to this list or its predecessor, early on, from Mike Ossipoff and I think it was Forest Simmons? My own idea dates back at least twenty years, but, though I talked about it with people, I didn't start publishing until, as I recall at the moment, 2003, I'd have to look at the wayback machine. Dodgeson wrote his comment in 1884. Quite a guy!
But the idea is really a no-brainer, once one sits with it long enough and sets aside all the crap that keeps us from seeing new things. It's not really new! It is actually just standard proxy voting with a slight twist, that was always possible but not, previously, necessary (a standard proxy could generally, before, delegate the right involved, and it's common that they do, but more than one level of delegation would be very rare. Standard proxy was solving a different problem, a smaller-scale problem.
I don't think that Carroll realized the full implications of his idea. But he did get that this would empower ordinary voters, who, he noted, did not generally have sufficient information to rank umpteen candidates, but who would know whom they most trusted, and that is what he mentions.
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.
Actually, no. If the Asset election creates an "electoral college," i.e., a body of public voters whose identities are known, then two things become possible, quite remarkable things, long considered impossible.
(1) Recall of members becomes possible, quickly and easily, by those who gave them votes withdrawing those votes. It's easy to overlook this, because we think of an STV election and assume that an Asset one would be the same except for a few details. But Asset makes a major shift: votes are no longer wasted if cast for some relative unknown, say, your uncle Fred who knows more than politics than you and you trust him. I'd predict that, in fairly short order and quite naturally, direct election by secret ballot votes would become rare, people would realize that they could, almost without limitation, vote for the person they most trust, it doesn't have to be a "candidate" except in a technical sense (the person might have to be registered, and I'd expect there to be a directory of registered candidates available, and it is possible that names would not even be on the ballot, eventually. So while there might be a kind of "term," i.e., the period to the next regular election, the composition of the assembly could shift ad interim. My guess is that such assemblies would be relatively stable, though, and I'd also expect rules that ensured lack of serious volatility, and see the next possibility that makes this possible and harmless.
(2) Direct democracy of a kind becomes possible! Once there is this body of known, identified, electors, it then becomes possible for them to vote on matters before the assembly. Most of them wouldn't do it, I'd predict, but there would come to be a penumbra of active electors who do vote routinely, or who serve as advisors to those whose seats they created. When an elector votes directly, the value of that vote (which has to do with the original election fraction) is substracted from the vote of the seat. My guess is that normally, these fractional votes would be small enough to not shift results, but the fact that they could do so, and would do so if somehow the Assembly lost the trust of the body of electors (who should not be impeachable except for vote fraud, though some might be forced to unconditionally delegate their votes under some conditions, such as incarceration if following debate and voting were no longer practical for them), would shift the sense of relationship between the public and the assembly. An individual voter knows who the voter voted for. And can easily find out where that vote went, what seat (or possibly seats) represent it. And the voter can then contact the elector with concerns, and when the elector contacts the seat holder, the seat holder knows that the elector was literally his or her constituency.
But my work, in fact, is primarily with delegable proxy as a method for negotiation of consensus, *not* for direct political applications. And that's what's interesting about this new discovery, because it mentions that, whereas the others have been political schemes.
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.
The problem with this is, of course, that representation is lost. A group that is a minority in all lower level councils is utterly unrepresented at the top; and, by a well-known effect, because of uneven distribution of the faction, it could actually be a majority. Delegable proxy and Asset Voting totally bypass this problem. Representation is unconditional, uncontested, as it should be. Representation should not be subject to some kind of vote, really. It should be voter *choice.* And that is what a good Asset system would do. I'd use, in fact, the Hare quota, not the Droop quota as Dodgeson selected. This makes it exact, and the dregs can, if they desire, still vote directly even if they have not cobbed together a seat.
But what you get with a seat isn't voting power, it's representation in deliberative process. Electors would not have, as such, the power to introduce a motion, for example. This realization that deliberation and voting (aggregation) could be separated seems to be new, standard political science analysis misses the possibility entirely.
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.
It's unclear, and practice in some corporations may differ from that in others. The original Wikipedia article on Delegable Proxy was rather overenthusiastically expanded with, shall we say, unorthodox sourcing (I didn't touch it except for years ago because of conflict of interest), and when that same user, an very experienced Wikipedian, in fact, proposed Delegable Proxy as a solution to Wikipdia structural problems (it would be, indeed, the situation is crying for it), he was ultimately blocked, the article was deleted, and some tried, but failed, to delete the proposal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Delegable_Proxy.
See, there is this thing that some call the Lomax effect because I've described it so often. If an organization has developed a power structure that assigns power inequitably such that some group has an inequitable excess of power, and a proposal is made to distribute power equitably, the excess power group will oppose it, seeing it as a threat to their control. Often, such people see their control as benefiting the organization; after all, they are the ones who, perhaps, work hardest for it, know the most about it, etc. However, what was actually proposed on Wikipedia did not change policies at all, did not challenge the oligarchy except in the most diffuse possible way.... but the reaction is one I've seen before, it is practically instinctive.
And I know, pretty much, how to move around it, in a safe way, that will fail if it is unjustified. As it should! And I'm doing it. It seems to take about a year for people to start to get DP after they were first exposed to the idea. Only a few get it right away, and even at a year, people simply become a little more open to it. But some of the smartest people I know have essentially signed on. And when there is critical mass of these, we may start to see some fireworks. Pretty fireworks, not destructive ones.
Free Association/Delegable Proxy (FA/DP) is designed to be fail-safe; almost by definition, it can't be destructive. It includes rather than excludes. It doesn't make centralized decisions except about its own process, and it can fission easily, so that limited exception is harmless. And for the same reason that it can fission easily, it can effectively merge in a flash.
Yes, I have some hope for the future, some hope that I'll actually see some serious realization of this stuff before I die. And I have prostate cancer, Stage I (Don't worry, I'm an old guy and will probably die from something else). My point is just that ... twenty years. Could happen much sooner, could start to happen in as little as about a year.
Dear readers, for this point in time, simply notice the idea, think about it when you can, and talk to others when the opportunities present. And if you have some time, join with us. I've got Attention Deficit Disorder (that partly explains why I could see this stuff), and the down side of that is that I have difficulty following through. Web sites need work, a wiki should be transferred from one domain to another, stuff like that. Volunteers needed. And I also need to make some money, so.... never asked for this before, but donors needed as well. Personally, to me (but it could be through a nonprofit of some kind). FA/DP does not need and, in fact, does not want, large amounts of central funds. Alcoholics Anonymous, the model Free Association, was given a jump-start by some grants to Bill Wilson, the major theoretician, for his living expenses while he worked on the organization. Then, he wrote and edited the famous Big Book, "Alcoholics Anonymous," and quite modest royalties from that meant that he never needed to worry about money again, and his wife was left with a small fortune, which, I think, she left to charity.
Fortune isn't what I did this for, but I do have, in spite of being 64, two small children, 5 and 6 years old.... and little income to speak of except for social security. I totally turned away from my own business to do this work.
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