Fred Gohlke wrote:
Good Morning, Kristofer
This portion of our discussion has been about using the inherent
bidirectionality of the Practical Democracy process. The process is
designed to select the best of our people to represent us in our
elective offices, whether in a Congressional or Parliamentary system, or
in a city council. The basic thesis is that, by exercising greater care
in selecting our representatives, we will have less need to monitor them
after they are elected. Even so, some degree of public supervision of
our elected officials is necessary and we are discussing that aspect of
the process.
I will use the term 'pyramid' to indicate the members of the electorate
who participated in the selection of a public official. 'Pyramids' are
defined from the elected official, downward, and every person that
participated in an official's selection is a member of that official's
'pyramid'. Hence, everyone in the electorate is a member of multiple
'pyramids', one for each person they put in public office.
In terms of initiating a recall or suggesting a course of action or
change of position, my suggestion is that every member of the electorate
have the right to petition (i.e., submit questions, comments or
proposals to) their elected officials. They do so by submitting their
petition to the body that maintains the electoral database and that body
must transmit the petition to the official and to all the other people
in the official's 'pyramid'. The petition need only name the public
official, the database will identify the members of that official's
'pyramid'.
When other members of the 'pyramid' receive such petitions they may
support them or discard them, as they see fit, If a petition is
supported by a majority of the members of the 'pyramid' it becomes an
instruction to the official. Even if a petition does not achieve a
majority, if it achieves notable support, it will influence any official
not bent on self-destruction. This is infinitely more effective than
the current method of writing letters to officials ... and the
meaningless responses they generate.
I believe, given the repetitive nature of elections, this method will
allow adequate supervision of our elected officials. It will also
encourage the submission and consideration of minority views.
I have little to add here, as it seems sensible, but I'll say that I
still think it would be good for the petition to include information
about the level of the person who originated it. Since the pyramids
exist after election and their composition is known to (at least) the
public officials, this would probably happen anyway as the officials
seek to find out which petition to pay attention first, given that they
cannot respond to all of them instantaneously; still, having it in the
official specification may help. The level information would be merely
indicative, since an official that ignores most petitions may suffer for
it in the next election, no matter where the petitions come from; but
again, it would help them make priorities.
The assumption here is that if someone high up in the pyramid petitions
the official, he has the support of many below him. If that's wrong and
he's using his position in the pyramid for his own ends, then the system
would be weaker (since the level gives much less information about how
many share his views), though. Could that be solved by making the
petition records public? If so, we get "petition buying".. hm. We might
have to consider this further to make it sufficiently solid. My broad
idea is that since the pyramid is exponential in nature, with a fixed
chance of petition from each at the bottom, the number of petitions
would increase exponentially as well, and so in order to sift through
the mass, there has to be some sort of method for finding what's truly
important, some sort of information aggregation and selection.
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