[EM] Intriguing proposal & musings on strategy and autonomy

[Alex Small]

While surfing voting sites I ran across this Australian site:

http://2mec.freeservers.com/

In brief, they are advocating replacing the current ceremonial head of
state (the British Crown) with a head of state elected in a more democratic
manner.  The manner they propose is very intriguing.

They propose a "2-member electoral college."  Use a PR method to choose 2
electors, who must then agree with one another on whom the President will
be.  This system would elect a President respected by at least 2/3 of the
population.  (We can debate whether that guaranteed broad appeal outweighs
the dangers of giving a minority veto to 34% of the population.)

Something to think about as a problem in strategy:

Electors in the US rarely act as autonomous agents (fortunately).  To be
chosen as an elector, the best strategy is to give the voters as much
information as possible: whom you will support.

Would electors in the proposed method be likely to act as autonomous
agents?  If there are three or more parties it seems to me that each party
has an incentive to find a partner.  They can promise the populace a
specific person, and if he's widely respected they ensure their election.
The horse-trading hence occurs before the election.

If there are only two major parties it doesn't matter when the horse-
trading occurs, since we already know who the electors will be (assume that
each party's two candidates for electors are essentially clones).

Question:  Is it possible to design a method where the electors should make
their decisions after the election?  Clearly this is necessary in
legislative elections, since they have to make many different decisions,
and circumstances change over time.  However, if electors only make a
single decision at a specified time, will they ever have an incentive to
sit on their hands rather than tell the voters whom they'll support?

I'm not eager to see our electoral college go from bad to worse by
asserting its autonomy.  Rather, I'm surprised (and relieved) that people
with such great power and independence normally act as rubber stamps.  Now
I see a proposal whereby even when unanimous consent is required among
agents with different agendas, they still have an incentive to engage in
bargaining before they know whom they'll have to bargain with, in an effort
to secure the best outcome for themselves.

This raises the question of whether in general a group distrustful of
democracy (like our Founders) could ever design a system where groups of
electors chosen by the voters act autonomously.  They tried doing it by
putting the election of Senators in state legislatures, but candidates for
many state legislatures soon started pledging to support a particular
candidate, or pledging to support the winner of a non-binding referendum.
Likewise, even when electors were chosen by state legislatures, the
electors still had an incentive to promise the state legislators whom
they'd support.

The fact that a group of indisputably smart men (smart not always equaling
moral or democratic) couldn't achieve this stated aim makes me wonder if
there is a general principle of strategy involved here.

One counterexample:  In 1960 some Southern states elected unpledged
Democratic electors, who wanted to sit on the fence and not vote for
Kennedy unless they could extract concessions from him (they were
irrelevant, of course, since he had enough electoral votes to get by
without them).  Although the voters knew in general what these electors
were aiming for, the electors made no promises (unlike most electors, whose
make promises, even if the promises aren't binding in all states).  Of
course, from what I know this was a short-lived phenomenon.

Anyway, just a thought.

Alex

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