[EM] Giving different voting weights to different people

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 01:20 PM 9/30/2006, raphfrk at netscape.net wrote:
>For example, one of the problems with a world democratic government 
>is that it will transfer
>power to countries (or at least their citizens) which are not 
>currently very powerful.  This
>means that powerful countries will resist any such change (and 
>rightly so).  The minimum that
>would occur is that they would pay higher taxes and those taxes 
>would be spent on the poorer
>countries.  Even worse would include forced social changes which are 
>designed to reduce their
>power.

This is a very old problem. The states of the United States differed 
in power and population. The weirdness of the U.S. electoral college 
and the U.S. Senate are a direct offspring of the compromise that was 
made. Another aspect of the compromise was the now-obsolete partial 
counting of certain persons:

><http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.amendmentxiv.html>Representatives 
>and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which 
>may be included within this union, according to their respective 
>numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of 
>free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, 
>and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Note that representation is based on the number of *taxed* 
persons...., at least partially. "Other persons" obviously refers to slaves.

"One person, one vote" is not a law in the United States. Sure, one 
person, on any question, on any ballot, may only cast as many 
effective votes as are allowed (effectively "one vote per option"), 
and there has been legal reference to the principle, but much of our 
system essentially *prevents* there from being equal assignment of 
voting power.

Single-winner elections are the worst offenders. The "gerrymandering" 
problem essentially results from this. Gerrymandering makes little or 
sense with proportional representation, nor, of course, with proxy 
voting (which to makes sense on a large scale, should be delegable proxy).

>However, if a mechanism could be created that would maintain the 
>current power balance,
>maybe there would be less resistance.

Now, the problem with this is that it can institutionalize the power 
*imbalance.* The electoral anomaly of the U.S. Presidential election 
in 2000, an event which arguably had world-shinking consequences, was 
made possible courtesy of the compromise which was made over 200 years ago.

>   I am not actually an advocate of a world government,
>but I think this topic can be handled better in that context than 
>applying it to government at
>the country level as most residents in a country are reasonably 
>similar in power (with a small
>number with high power).

Having little time at the moment, I'll just point out that when a 
system seeks consensus, power differentials become far less 
important. And failure to seek consensus keeps a society relatively 
weak. (Not necessarily weak in absolute terms, but compared to what 
it would be where social decisions are not being imposed by an 
oligarchy or the dictatorship of the majority.)

The BeyondPolitics concept (http://beyondpolitics.com/wiki) is to 
encourage the formation of voluntary NGOs which are "Free 
Associations" using, for scalability, Delegable Proxy. If large 
numbers of people can come to a consensus, they *have* power by 
virtue of their agreement and willingness to act on it.

Free Associations do not collect power to be exercised through 
majority vote, they leave power in the hands of the members, they 
only function for open communication on a large scale. In predicting 
how FA/DP organizations would function, I have often noted the math 
of consensus:

Suppose there is Caucus A favoring Cause 1, and Caucus B which 
opposes that Cause, favoring Cause 2. Let's assume that people are 
equal in disposable income and voting power (in reality, they are 
not, and there are means whereby this can be considered). If Caucus A 
and Caucus B have roughly equal numbers of supporters, suppose that 
Caucus A decides to act. That is, it begins to spend money in the 
political world, and it mobilizes voters. However, Caucus B, seeing 
this, mobilizes them to defeat the plan of Caucus A. The two efforts 
cancel each other out, so they might as well have agreed to spend 
nothing. (We can generally assume that, in a large FA/DP 
organization, each caucus is reasonable equal in its ability to sway 
non-member voters and other actors. If it were not so, it is unlikely 
that the caucuses would be at parity in numbers.)

If, however, the FA/DP organization had collected power, all Caucus A 
has to do is to gain a majority vote (or whatever margin is required 
by the organization), and it can then leverage the collected 
resources to which all contributed. This, of course, is the 
"dictatorship of the majority," which applies equally well to 
"majority of economic power" as well as to "majority of votes." 
Whatever faction can control a "majority" can essentially appropriate 
the resources contributed by all, dragging the others along.

"Drag" is probably the appropriate term. My opinion is that the 
efficiency of our societies is drastically reduced by the defective 
nature of our democratic systems.

Consider the situation if Caucus A attempts to work with the rest of 
the organization to develop an option more broadly acceptable. 
Suppose that the effect of this effort is to increase the support for 
Cause 3 to the point where those for it outnumber those opposed by 
two to one. If those in favor decide to proceed at this point, they 
still are spending $2 for every $1 of net effect. Only if the 
organization includes most of society would they be assured of 
success in the political marketplace.

However, if nearly everyone gets behind Option 4, the situation is 
drastically different. If the organization represents nearly 
everyone, *they don't need to spend at all, they only need to vote.*

There obviously is some shift point, some point at which those 
favoring an option can reasonably say, "Whatever we spend on this 
(effort and money) is not likely to be wasted by the efforts of the 
remaining opposition, it is time to go ahead."

Who decides when this point has been reached? *Those who will be 
spending the money and making the effort to vote.*

*Communication* is the key to political reform. FA/DP is a device for 
making *deliberation* possible on a large scale. The FA aspect of the 
design strongly favors the seeking of consensus, but it does not 
require it. No caucus is prevented from acting at any point. FAs are 
not governments and governments are not FAs, by definition. From the 
model FA Traditions, those of Alcoholics Anonymous, "Our leaders are 
but trusted servants, they do not govern."