[EM] proportional vote - proportional term

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 01:16 PM 4/3/2007, Jan Kok wrote:
>  Why not hold an election for all the seats each year?
>
>The reason for staggering the elections is generally to provide
>"continuity". But those who want to continue and are perceived by the
>voters as having done well should have no trouble getting re-elected
>in a yearly election.

I'll agree. The continuity argument is actually antidemocratic. 
Continuity is indeed valuable, though. Jan's view that the voters can 
take this into consideration is probably accurate.

What might be done is to phase in a new method of electing the board. 
Existing terms would be completed. But new members would serve for 
one year (or perhaps until a target date, when all would be elected 
for one year).

I've written that STV is a decent method for multiwinner, but the 
assumption was that this was much more than two winners. You can't 
really have proportional representation with such a small election.

Delegable Proxy is, of course, what I'd think of, but that begs the 
question of the actual election method. (The organization must elect 
a board, I assume, for legal reasons. Still, there is no legal reason 
why, if I'm correct, that the board could not be on a short leash, 
i.e., replacable by the members at any time. If you have Delegable 
Proxy with the proxy assembly being able to replace the board by 
majority vote, at any time, you don't really need proportional 
representation on the board. Rather, you need trusted servants. It 
actually gets simpler. The board becomes a little more like staff, 
which is where the real continuity is, anyway.

This *could* be brought in, one board member at a time, so there is 
no need to displace existing board members. I'm not going to explain 
Delegable Proxy here in detail.... but, as we describe it, it is 
direct democracy *plus* proxy representation *plus* an assumption of 
delegability, so that if A names B and B names C, then C represents 
both A and B. With little fuss, a group of any size can be boiled 
down to a small group with flexible membership that almost 
*completely* represents the membership. Call it Proportional 
Representation on steroids.

It's not as radical as it seems. Proxy representation is actually 
standard in business, but many nonprofits prohibit it. Why? Well, 
typically, it gives more power to the members and less power to those 
managing the organization. That's often not desirable to those who 
write the initial bylaws, they don't want to lose control, and they 
worry about surprises (Joe shows up at the meeting with a fistful of 
proxies. when nobody has been using proxies for years.). Those 
problems can be headed off, but they really don't even think about 
actually *encouraging* the naming of proxies. If everyone names a 
proxy, and registers it, valid until revoked, and proxies are 
delegable, there can't be those surprises. Joe can only prevail if he 
actually has majority support.