[EM] proxy representation with "dissenting votes"

[James Green-Armytage]

Dear election methods fans,

	Most of my earlier proxy proposals are for direct issue voting, rather
than representation. I recently had a few thoughts about representation by
proxy, and I'll try to sketch them out here. Most of my previous proposals
are to supplement the legislature with a direct vote venue; now I'm
thinking about ways to construct the legislature itself by means of a
proxy system.

BASIC SYSTEM:
	Each voter may assign their voting power to a proxy, or representative.
Voters may change proxies at any time (although it is not expected that
people will change proxies very often on average).
	If you are chosen as a proxy, you may delegate both your own voting power
and that of others to another proxy in turn.
	Seats in the legislative chamber are held by individuals who hold a large
number of proxies. The members of the legislative body do not have equal
voting power; their voting power is determined by the number of proxies
that they hold.
	
DISSENTING VOTES:
	Members of the legislature should be empowered to vote in a heterogeneous
way. For example, imagine that I am a legislator, and that there is an
upcoming yes/no vote. Once a vote has been scheduled, I may announce the
vote to my constituency, and indicate that I intend to vote "yes".
However, I invite dissenting votes from my constituency. Let's say that I
have one million constituents, and one hundred thousand of them indicate
to me that they will vote "no". I can then cast 900,000 "yes" votes
against confirmation, and 100,000 "no" votes.
	When an important and controversial issue comes up, there should be a
natural procedural break between the announcement of a vote and the vote
itself, to give proxies a chance to check in with their constituents, and
allow time for dissenting votes to be submitted.
	It seems that the internet would probably be a useful medium of
communication between constituent and representative (although other forms
of communication would of course be possible, especially at smaller
levels). I suspect that this system would be superior from a security
standpoint to a nation-wide internet-based vote, in part because the total
number of dissenting votes would be fairly small on average, and thus
fairly easy to keep track of. The people who agree with their
representative on the issue in question (which should be a large majority)
will not need to vote directly, and thus the count process should be less
unwieldy. 
	Different representatives could follow different standards of security
and anonymity, thus allowing each constituent to have an optimal
combination of the two. Representatives could send constituents an e-mail
or letter receipt whenever they cast a dissenting vote, which would help
to catch most cases of hacker fraud. Proxies will use different media of
communication, different security systems... in my estimation, this
decentralization effect should limit the severity of any potential fraud.
Obviously, representatives have a strong incentive to keep their
communications channels secure, since they would be in danger of losing
proxies otherwise. 

SECRET BALLOT OPTION:
	For those who want so much anonymity that they don't want there to be any
records of who their representative is, they could formally designate
anonymity, which would give them a ticket to participate in the kind of
secret ballots that are now standard in most elections. (If they do this,
they might not be able to cast dissenting votes, but that seems like a
fair tradeoff to me.) Again, a smaller volume of votes here should have a
positive impact on security, plus a negative impact on election cost.

THRESHOLDS:
	Where does a proxy chain end? That is, who is empowered to occupy a seat
in the legislative chamber and actually cast votes on legislation? Let's
assume that we want all the legislators to be able to fit comfortably in a
designated meeting room that is not enormous. Take for example the US
House of Representatives, which has 435 members. Assuming that we don't
want to find a larger chamber, we would need to limit the number of people
who hold seats in the chamber at any given time to 435 (or at most a
number not drastically larger than 435). Thus, we would probably need to
make use of a threshold.
	At least two basic types of threshold are possible: One would be to
simply give seats to the 435 people who hold the greatest total number of
proxies. Another would be to choose a minimum number of proxies held so
that the likely population of the chamber is approximately equal to some
target number, or that it is very unlikely to exceed some undesirably high
number. (As Gordon Tullock suggests, it might make sense to allocate
speaking time in proportion to the number of proxies held.) 

INDEPENDENT VOTING:
	Let's say that I don't have enough proxies to hold a seat in the
legislative chamber. If this feature is implemented, I would still be able
to cast a direct vote, provided that I didn't vote by secret ballot in the
last election. (I must either be openly represented by a particular proxy,
or I must have openly abstained from voting for a proxy.) This way, if I
vote independently, and I have designated a representative, the weight of
my representative's vote on that issue will not include the weight of my
votes (including the votes of my own constituents).
	If I'm not voting from inside the legislative chamber, where am I voting
from? If I accept that my independent vote will be a matter of public
record, then security should not be a significant problem, and thus
internet voting should be fairly reliable. (Voting my phone and by mail
might also be possible, although I'm not familiar with the security issues
in phone voting, and in some cases mail voting might be too slow.) That
is, anyone who casts an independent vote would be able to check on a
public list to make sure that the vote was received as intended.

CONCLUSION:
	The purpose of this system is to create a more seamless, fluid
combination of representative democracy and direct democracy. Proposals
where the proxy system is used for direct voting, but not used to elect
the legislature, are less ambitious, and perhaps more immediately feasible
on a large scale, but they create a certain amount of redundancy. Rather
than having a separate apparatus for direct voting and representative
voting, this proposal aims to combine them so that the best features of
each are retained.

Sincerely,
James Green-Armytage


P.S. As usual, I don't know how much of what I'm saying has been said
before. Pointing out previous proposals along the same line is actually
quite welcome; at some point in the future, I should start trying to
catalogue these sources, eventually making a kind of annotated
bibliography of proposed proxy methods.