[EM] Unicameral/Polycameral Legislatures

[Michael Rouse]

I'm not sure if people consider this an election method, or more as a method
of government. Since it does involve political representation and how
citizen's votes are counted, hopefully it is appropriate here. I'm throwing
this into the meme pool more as a brainstorming idea than as a serious
proposal for national government -- I think it's interesting, but it would
take a lot of work to be practical.

Anyway, while looking at ways to simplify congressional elections and make
them more competitive, I came up with the following idea (no claims are made
for originality, but hey...):  Instead of having a separate House, Senate,
and Presidency, create a single, unified, binary-tree legislature.

By that I mean hold a national election. The candidate that wins is put at
the peak (or base, depending on how you look at it) of a binary tree,
removed from the list, and the electorate is split into equal halves. The
top candidate in each half is connected to the first candidate, their names
are removed, and each half is split in half again. Continue this process
until you have the number of districts you want.

To use the United States during the 2000 election as an example, Al Gore
gets the most popular votes so he is elected President and placed at the
very peak of the binary tree. Let's assume George W Bush wins the Eastern
half of the country (remember, Gore is already off the ballot) and McCain
wins the Western half -- you might call them "vice presidents" since they
are next in line of succession, but they also have legislative
responsibilities. Their names are removed and the regions are cut in half
again. Let's say Nader gets the Northwest, Gray Davis gets the Southwest
(assuming he ran), Ted Kennedy gets the Northeast, and (to make it
interesting) Jeb Bush gets the Southeast. We keep going until we've chopped
up the United States into 256 districts, at which point we'll have 2^9-1 or
511 (1+2+4+8+...+256) representatives in the Legislature.

For voting, we have the following rules:

1. To be enacted into law, a bill must have at least one unbroken string of
yes votes from the smallest district up through the President. If it is
decided that this makes it too easy for a bill to be passed (theoretically,
only 9 out of 511 votes would be needed using the example above, though this
is not as easy as it sounds), then a further requirement may be that at
least half the total votes must be "yes" votes. Further restrictions could
include requiring at least 1/2 of the votes *on each level of the tree* must
be yes votes (in effect, making it a polycameral legislature), or even
3/4ths of the votes on each level plus the votes of the President and two
Vice Presidents (for something like constitutional amendments), though this
would be incredibly restrictive. Some testing may be needed to find the best
ratios.

2. A legislator's vote may be overridden by the contradictory votes of the
two legislators immediately below him. To use the example above, let's
assume that George W. and McCain wanted a piece of legislation and President
Gore didn't. In this case, the two Vice Presidents would prevail -- unless
(Nader and Davis), or (Kennedy and Jeb Bush) overrode *their* votes. This
rule is recursive, so if all 256 representatives on the bottom of the binary
tree voted one way, their votes would propagate up the tree and override
everyone else's votes, even the President's.

3. If the representatives of two subdistricts vote differently on a bill,
the representative for the parent district may vote as he chooses. For
example, if George W. and McCain had differing views on campaign finance
refore, then their contrary votes cancel out and Gore can choose as he wants
(subject of course to other voting blocks propagating from farther down the
tree).

I'll give some further thoughts on this in a later post. BTW, I know it's
impossible on the national level ("States" would be replaced by "districts"
in the federal government, and it would probably take a constitutional
convention), but it would be interesting to try on the State level or
perhaps in another country. Any other ideas, arguments, concerns, or
improvements will be read with interest!

Michael Rouse
mrouse at cdsnet.net


----
For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), 
please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em