Good Afternoon, Juho
re: "In typical national elections the number of representatives
is much smaller than the number of voters you will have the
problem that candidates are distant to the voters, one way
or another."
Only if you assume present practices are cast in concrete. Once you
open your mind to the idea that we can each choose, from among those we
know, a person we can trust to make choices for us, and that person gets
ample time to examine his competitors for office, we will no longer be
required to vote for people whose ability and integrity we have no way
to validate.
re: "... or maybe they are allowed to elect only representatives
that later elect some higher level representatives, and
again, they will never meet the candidates that will be the
top level representatives."
You're correct. They will not have met them, but each of them are part
of a direct line of individuals that culminates in the people who are
make the later selections. Depending on the way the process is
implemented, they can influence those who make the later choices by
expressing their position and providing whatever evidence they may have,
good or bad, to those who are making the later choices. If the
capability is implemented, they will also have the ability to institute
a recall. Each of them is a link in the electoral chain and have reason
to trust those who make the final selections because they were part of
the process of selecting them.
re: "If we want each candidate to be forced to answer to some key
questions that their fellow candidates might ask them (good
idea), one solution would be to simply force them to do so."
It may not be simple. I'm not sure you can 'force' someone to answer a
question - honestly. Words are cheap. What someone says is much less
revealing than their demeanor when they say it. That's why face-to-face
interaction is so important.
We would also need to decide who will formulate the question(s) or what
the question(s) will be. I haven't thoroughly considered this idea, but
perhaps others can help examine it.
re: "I mean that other candidates (maybe from second level up)
(and maybe also media) would be entitled to ask some
questions from them, and all candidates would have to
present written answers to these questions publicly. (We may
have to limit the number of questions, but that's another
story.) Voters would still be the bottom level voters. I
kept that approach in the described approach to keep the
link between the bottom level voters and the top level
representatives direct (and to provide an alternative to the
chained hierarchical evaluation model (where the elected
elect the next level etc.)). My target was to empower the
bottom level voters as much as possible."
I'm sorry, Juho. I seem to have missed one of your posts. You say, "I
kept that approach in the described approach", but I haven't seen the
approach you described.
re: "... I think no two countries are alike."
No, but people are pretty much the same all over the world. We all love
and hope and dream and fear pretty much the same way. Genius and
repugnance are distributed throughout the human race. Our various
cultures develop at different rates, but our Attilas and our Napoleons
pop-up here and there throughout our existence. If we can conceive a
democratic electoral process, any community can use it when their local
circumstances allow.
Fred
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