[EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 09:36 AM 4/25/2007, Howard Swerdfeger wrote:
>Ultimately I believe the best answer is to educate the entire population
>well in advance of the decision that needs to be made. So that
>correlation between "best" and preferred action approaches 1.

I think it is fairly simple to prove that this is *not* the best answer:

The best answer is never an impossible one.

However, the *electorate* can be made a fairly small and much more 
educable subset. This is what Asset Voting does. It is also what 
representative democracy attempts to do in general. Delegable Proxy 
similarly does this, to perfection, making the educable subset one 
which is explicitly chosen by the total population, without 
constraint beyond the natural one that the ultimate set of proxies is 
relative small (relative to the general population!).

Asset used for multiwinner elections forces the reduction to a 
specific number. DP, as we have formulated it, allows anyone to 
remain in the set of electors. So, in the end, who decides who is 
qualified? Each and every voter decides this for himself or herself. 
Nobody else forces a choice, you can delegate your vote or exercise 
it directly. But there are huge advantages to delegating it, so great 
that I suspect the biggest problem in DP is finding people willing to serve!

This is the one problem of DP that Demoex uncovered. They found that 
DP led to a very small group of people who were proxies for nearly 
everyone. They considered that a problem, and so did the proxies!

I think the problem is actually rather easily soluble, to the extent 
that it is a problem at all. But that's another matter.