[EM] non-binding direct democracy system

[James Green-Armytage]

Ernest Prabhakar <drernie at mac.com> writes:
>The one question that seems tricky is, how does one come up with such a 
>ballot?   Usually in California, it is a partisan group that collects 
>the signatures to put them on the ballot -- or the legislature, which 
>is usually as bad. The hard part, IMHO, is coming up with well-defined 
>centrist positions and then getting enough public support behind them 
>to provide a public viewing, since the traditional organizations tend 
>to be bi-polar.

I, James G-A, reply:
	I agree that this is an important problem, and it is one that I have been
concerned with. 
	The most obvious source for generating options on multiple option ballots
is the congress, for example saying that any option should be put on the
ballot if it can gain the support of at least 1/10th or 1/5 of the members
of either house, or whatever. If the congress was based on high-magnitude
STV, I wouldn't be so worried about this, but of course at present it's
plurality-bound and quite badly polarized. It is not impossible to expect
democrats and republicans to come up with appropriate compromise solutions
to social problems, especially as a congressional representative who
initially suggested a solution which turned out to have majority support
might get some good PR. However, there is a real chance that both sides
would have an interest in creating weak or impractical pseudo-centrist
options in lieu of genuine compromises, in hopes of getting their first
choices approved by the popular vote by default. However, in doing so they
would stand an increased risk of having their last choices approved; hence
whichever party felt that their primary proposal was weaker might be
likely to suggest a more centrist alternative. Honestly, I don't know how
it would play out if you left it up to the congress; it might work well,
or it might work poorly.
	A similar concern led me to suggest an agenda-setting vote where a longer
list of petition-backed initiatives is made into a shorter list using Meek
STV or CPO-STV in popular vote (this is in my proposal). That is, I was
concerned that many valuable ideas may be overlooked or ignored by the
congress because the political and ideological limitations it has as a
result of the plurality system, campaign finance system, etc. Hence I
thought that it would be good to allow people to generate ideas in a more
democratic way, hence including a wide range of ideas that wouldn't fit
into the traditional democrat versus republican model.
	Now the next part is, once these ideas have been generated and selected
as vote-worthy, what is the process of selecting viable alternatives to
run against them on the ballot? This is where your question comes in.
Surely a congressional minority of a certain size, as outlined above,
would be one legitimate source of alternatives. The question is whether
that would be sufficient.
	What are some other alternatives?
	Well, one method would be to follow up the agenda-setting vote and
subsequent generation of alternatives by congress with another round of
suggestions from the general public (that is, ideas supported by a certain
number of petition signatures), which would then be narrowed down to a few
by a subsequent vote analogous to the agenda-setting vote. The drawback of
this approach is that it would extend the decision-making process on a
single issue from two public votes to three. Probably this would be just
too unwieldy. 
	Once again, petitions with a certain number of signatures would be
another source.
	Another possibility which I find somewhat interesting would be to create
a sort of shadow government using the DD system. That is, once every year
or two, you could have a popular vote, probably based on Meek STV or
CPO-STV (with no district boundaries), to select a certain number of
individuals (I don't know how many). For yucks I will call them Shadow
Ministers, which is in my opinion the coolest title for any real political
office. A shadow minister would be authorized to sponsor alternative
options to be put onto DD ballots. Perhaps they would be given a certain
number of sponsorships per year which they could not exceed. Also, they
might be able to generate one or two separate issues per year as well.
They would be paid a modest amount which would allow them to keep their
own time available for the job and hire a small office staff. They would
not need to generate all the ideas themselves. Instead, people from across
the land would contact them with suggestions, and they would sponsor the
suggestions if they believed them to have merit.
	So far I like the shadow minister idea. It fits along with my general
notion that since the legal government is too power-bound and deeply set
in its ways to change sufficiently and with sufficient speed, an
alternative process based on more effectively democratic principles should
be created to supplement the elements which it lacks. Exactly how
threatening mainstream politicians would find this notion, I'm not sure. I
suppose it depends on just how sinister you actually think they are. It
seems to me that they might find the shadow minister suggestion a bit more
threatening than the rest of it, since it clearly implies that the
congress isn't able to do what it's supposed to do, that is listening to
the voice of the people and transforming their more meritorious ideas into
law.
	Anyway, again I agree that your question is the logical next step to look
in. I have made a couple suggestions here; what do you think?

James