[EM] [Election-Methods] Re: final attempt for a strategy-free range voting variant, and another proportionally democratic method

[Raph Frank]

On 8/22/08, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km-elmet at broadpark.no> wrote:
>  One problem of a straightforward "every candidate gets p voting money units
> at the beginning of each block of time" is that, on one hand, the situation
> may be serious enough that one needs to pass more than p units' worth. In
> that case, we'll have a problem.

Stuff can be passed with 1 voting point if there is consensus.  75%
support doesn't mean that the number of votes in favour must be at
least 75% of the legislature.  It just means that at least 75% of the votes cast
must be in favour.

Even if there is objection, the opposition would end up losing more
and more of their votes, so they may be reluctant to do that.

Also, a bill could cover lots of stuff and be voted on as a single unit.

I think the system has problems when dealing with large voting blocks.
If parties tend to have weak power, then it is more effective.

The problem is that if you can get the other party to spend all their
votes, then you increase the value of your votes as there are now
more votes in circulation.

If legislators are mostly independent and parties are weak, then most of
that increase in value goes to other people, so it isn't an incentive to vote
against things they don't care about (but they know that the other party
really wants).

> A better solution to that would
> be to, if there are q days, supply p/q (subject to ceiling) every day, or
> p/(q*24*60) every minute.

It comes down to having legislators not spending all their points as
soon as they get them.  A legislator who has spent his yearly allowance
in January would be a poor legislator.

I would allow legislators from the previous term to keep their allocations
and vote/spend their account, but they wouldn't receive any new votes.

This smooths out the end of term effects.

>  That still leaves the former problem, though. Reweighting would escape it,
> but the relation to voting money (which is easy to understand) would be
> somewhat obscure. In order to prevent dictatorship of the "rich", the
> weights would then be reset, for all candidates, to one at the beginning of
> each period, or for a continuous variant, the differences would be smoothed
> out at a certain rate so that it goes towards equality.

I think the decay option is better as it doesn't create a suddent point where
there is a big incentive to pass lots of stuff in a use it or lose it
period of time.

>  Adding up to a ceiling would mitigate this somewhat; as long as the current
> amount isn't close to the ceiling, there's no incentive to spend it now.
> However, when it gets close, the incentive returns.

True.  Another option is to allow an excess to be passed to other legislators.
This means that a legislator can't have a huge amount of points, but his points
don't go to waste as he gets to pick where his overflow goes.

>  It seems to be not only like reweighting, but simply another form of
> reweighting. Well, that depends on how it's used. If it's used to "pay" for
> a decision, then it's indirect reweighting, but if it's used to reduce the
> strength of votes, then it's direct reweighting.

The voting money proposal was based on Clarke taxes.  You only
have to pay the tax if your vote affected the result of the election.

In an election, the odds of anyone ever having to pay the tax is
virtually zero.  This means that if it did happen, people would be
pissed that they lost some of their vote points and since it is unlikely
to happen again, they would not get back to parity with other voters.

Since it is so unlikely, the voting method effectively becomes Rangevoting
and people would just ignore the tiny change of Clarke taxes.

>  If you're only using budget dollars as an unit and the allocation doesn't
> affect the budget, then that's no different from using synthetic voting
> money units. If you use real budget dollars, then I think that could create
> an incentive to spend. If you're not in office in the next term, why not use
> all the money now? Maybe you'll even be remembered for the grand projects
> you started.

Well, the theory is that the budget would be split between all
legislators.  Even
the minority part(ies) would have control of their share of the budget.

The rule might be that to start a project would require support of 1/3
(maybe 1/4)
of the legislature.  Once a project is created, legislators can assign
some of their
budget allocation to that project.  If it hits its target, the project
is considered funded
and the executive can then proceed with its implementation.  If the
executive vetoes
the project, the allocations are returned to the legislators.

I might also allow a non-vetoable project which basically just passes money to
the voters in their district.  If the executive keeps vetoing their
project, they can
just assign the money back to their supporters.