[EM] The Grand Jury Approach. Condorcet(opposing votes).

MIKE OSSIPOFF nkklrp at hotmail.com
Fri May 14 21:07:01 PDT 2004


I have nothing against the grand jury approach to representation. It has 
some important advantages, which include:

1. No campaign contributions, which means:

A. Candidates aren't bribed or influenced by campaign contributions.
B. Candidates who don't serve big money aren't excluded as they are now.

2. No voting means that:

A. Media don't decide winners as they do now.
B. No bad choices for representatives, because no one's choosing them. Many 
would agree that sometimes our choices are worse than random choice a 
governing body would be.

Of course there are other ways of avoiding the bribery problem. Simply 
forbid giving payoffs to a candidate or office-holder, and have pubilc 
campaign funding, and proxy DD. One public campaign funding proposal that I 
like is: Pay parties, candidate, proxy candidates, or factions in proportion 
to their support, as measured by petition signatures, or votes in previous 
elections.

Media dominance problems can be simiarly avoided when advocacy media-time is 
proportional to public support instead of big-money support.

The grand jury representation has the advantage that there's precdent for 
using randomly-chosen grand juries to make important decisions.

Possible problems:

1. Officeholders can be bribed, whether they were elected or randomly 
chosen.  Of course proxies can be bribed too, but there would be many more 
of them, making bribery more difficult. Espcially more difficult to bribe 
sufficiently many of them without getting caught and going to prison.

2. Public acceptance of random choice of government would be difficult to 
achieve. People might not want to believe that random choice is better than 
their choice. On the other hand, the popularity of term-limits suggests that 
voters sometimes know that their choices might not be the best.

Opposing-Votes Condorcet:

Isn't that the circular tiebreaker that counts votes-against in all pairwise 
comparisons, not just defeats?

My problem with that is that it would mean giving the wv properties of SFC 
compliance and GSFC compliance. To me, those are the most important 
Condorcet properties. Under plausible conditions, a majority who prefer the 
CW to B can ensure that B won't win, simply by ranking sincerely.

Mike Ossipoff





2.

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