[EM] Election-Day musings. Sainte-Lague is the best PR.

[Juho]

- voting for a person or list of persons allows the voter to be exact  
but requires lots of knowledge and candidates may just act and behave  
in a different way than expected

- voting for a party indicates quite well what the supported policy  
will be but doesn't allow the voter to give very detailed message  
about the persons or the more fine grained policy

- voting for a person on a party list (open list) introduces the  
ability to influence which persons within the party will be elected

- artificial intelligence could provide additional control to the  
voter in situations where the parameters are clear (e.g. vote to A on  
foreign affairs, vote to B on other matters)

I think votes to individuals and parties and also more detailed  
policies can be combined. The notes above mentioned open list that  
already combines persons and parties. I'd add to that a hierarchical  
structure within the parties and between parties. A vote to a  
greenish moderate democrat candidate would first go to the candidate,  
then to the green section of the moderate democrats, then to moderate  
democrats, then to democrats and then to the alliance of all democrat/ 
liberal minded parties. This is not quite as expressive as individual  
candidate ranking based PR methods would be (the order of inheritance  
is given by the candidate, not by the voter). But on the other hand  
the ideology that each candidate represents becomes very clear (and  
morally binding), the vote is guaranteed to go to the correct group  
even if the voter doesn't know the personality and thoughts of all  
the candidates (reduces the hairdo effect too), and in addition this  
allows voters to give feedback on how the parties should evolve (e.g.  
more "moderacy" and "geenishness" to the democratic party please).  
Voters are able to guide the decision making process in more detail.  
Not yet at the "artificial intelligence level" but more than in most  
systems today.

Juho Laatu


On Dec 9, 2006, at 10:01 , Brian Olson wrote:

> On Dec 5, 2006, at 5:43 PM, MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote:
>> I already knew this, but it occurred to me again that, if we have
>> to have
>> representative government, it would be better if people were voting
>> for a
>> party. Voting for a party platform instead of for a personality, a
>> hairdo,
>> someone who acts presidential, etc.
>
> Alternately, if we're going to vote for a position instead of a
> person, what we should really be doing is voting for an Artificial
> Intelligence program which would represent us in the legislative
> body. It would dutifully enact the policies we voted for and
> generally represent us well.
>
> Unfortunately AI is hard. Until we have good AI legislators I think
> we should stick with voting for people we think will do a good job of
> representing us. If some moron is voting for a hair style, tell them
> that they're a moron, move on and try to foster a society that values
> intelligence.
>
>
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