[EM] Simplifying ballots

[Abd ulRahman Lomax]

At 04:12 PM 8/16/2005, Paul Kislanko wrote:

>I want a solid "chain of evidence" from how my vote was ultimately counted
>back to what I wrote on my ballot.

Yes. In true delegable proxy, you'd have that. But in secret-ballot Asset 
Voting, you would not be able to prove that *your* ballot was actually 
counted, ballots are anonymized for ancient reasons. Get rid of secret 
ballot (I think there is a way possible) and this might no longer be true. 
But we aren't there yet, and probably won't be in public organizations for 
quite some time. I've been promoting DP for NGOs, not for governments, at 
least not full DP. Secret Ballot DP is quite similar to Asset Voting and I 
do think both of these are practical in governmental elections; Asset 
Voting has the best chance, I think, of being accepted.

>  I couldn't stand proxys when I held stock
>in specific companies because the "vote for proxy" thing meant any coalition
>of bad minorities could make my position irrelevant. (See all the
>shareholder lawsuits against BODs who promoted themselves as proxies if you
>think I'm the only one who thinks that doesn't work...)

The biggest problem with corporate proxies was that management was allowed 
to overwhelm true shareholder control by suggesting proxies to 
shareholders, and enough clueless shareholders simply sign those forms. My 
suggestion for shareholders of corporations is to form FA/DP organizations, 
the major function of which would be to create a proxy structure, 
bottom-up, where you only assign your proxies within the FA to people you 
know and trust -- or at least you can independently research the person, 
and you could choose him or her without being solicited; indeed, 
solicitation of proxies, beyond possibly some bare indication of 
availability to serve, would be, for me, a warning that the proxy might be 
corrupt. Then the FA, through its DP structure, could develop consensus 
positions. With enough members, it could fund independent analysis of 
company activities, and, in the end, it would make its own recommendations 
to its members regarding proxy choices.

DP allows initial proxy assignments to be made on a very small scale. 
Perhaps the FA would encourage occasional local meetings of shareholders in 
companies. (In principle, there might be an FA for each company, but it 
might also be practical to have one big independent shareholder FA, with 
company caucuses; there would then be a great deal of valuable 
cross-fertilization.) So one path to finding a proxy would be to attend 
such a meeting or a few such. DP will concentrate communication even if the 
average proxy only represents one or two other people, at the base level.

There are companies which do nothing but serve large institutional 
shareholders as proxies.... What I'm proposing would be a "poor man's 
version," where large numbers of shareholders could decide on coordinated 
action.

The FA itself would not make the recommendations; rather caucuses of 
members would make them, back down the proxy tree to their own 
proxy-givers. You would end up naming a proxy recommended personally to you 
by the person you chose as trustworthy (or by someone chosen by that person).

All this is basic FA/DP stuff. The shareholder organization would not own 
property beyond perhaps a domain name. It would need so little for its own 
operating expenses that tiny contributions would support it. Yes, it could 
undertake projects that would take more money (such as hiring consultants), 
but these projects would be legally independent, people would support them 
if they so chose. The FA primarily exists as a communication device, a way 
for people to develop trustworthy advice.

The European (Swedish) form of DP calls the proxy the "Advisor," which is 
half the function....

Any two or three shareholders in a company could start such an 
organization. If there were three of them, and they were smart, they could 
make enough of a splash that others would join.... But, let me tell you, 
finding the three is the hardest part, I think....

beyondpolitics.org exists to support all such efforts by collecting 
experience as well as by developing the procedures on a theoretical basis. 
There is precious little DP experience, one political party in Sweden is 
all I know about. And they abandoned the experiment for technical reasons 
(they were trying to do things that I really don't think are necessary, and 
they really did not have the FA concept at all), but I've been told that 
they plan to re-implement it when they can get to it with better software. 
It seems that it *did* work.

But DP only becomes truly important when an organization becomes large. 
Simple informal proxy (i.e, "tell me if there is something I should do, 
Ralph, some motion that has come up for vote") is enough. But the *concept* 
of DP should be there from the beginning. If it is not, it will be very 
difficult to bring it in later. Persistence of inequities, a basic law of 
political physics.

(Serious software is not necessary for DP, especially in the FA context, 
but people think it is....)