[Election-Methods] delegate cascade

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Michael Allan wrote:
> Hello to the list,

Hello, and welcome.

> I'm a software engineer, currently developing an online electoral
> system.  I was in another discussion (link at bottom) and a subscriber
> recommended this list to me.  I have a few questions, if anyone is
> able to help.
> 
> A key component of the electoral system (to explain) is what I call a
> "delegate cascade" voting mechanism.  It is intended for use in
> continuous elections (open to recasting).  The overall aim is to
> support consensus building.  In this mechanism:
> 
>   ...a 'delegate' is a participant who both receives votes, like a
>   candidate, and casts a vote of her own, like a voter.  But when a
>   delegate casts her vote, it carries with it those received.  And so
>   on... Passing from delegate to delegate, the votes flow together and
>   gather in volume - they cascade - like raindrops down the branches
>   of a tree.  New voters are not restricted in their choices, but may
>   vote for anyone, their unsolicited votes serving to nominate new
>   candidates and to recruit new participants into the election.
> 
>   http://zelea.com/project/votorola/d/outline.xht
> 
> I can only cite 3 references for the mechanism (Pivato, Rodriguez et
> al., and myself) all from 2007.  Does anyone know of an earlier
> source?  Is anyone else working with this mechanism?  Have there been
> discussions along similar lines?

That sounds very much like Delegable Proxy, which Abd says was first 
thought of by Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). In DP, as far as I understand it, 
voters associate with proxies (delegates in your terminology) and the 
proxies accumulate votes from those voters. A proxy is then just like 
any other voter, and may vote directly or pass the ballot bulk (in sum 
or part) to yet others.

If you remove the ability of proxies to pass the votes on, and instead 
let the proxies decide upon the composition of a traditional assembly, 
you get Asset Voting. However, that doesn't go very well with your 
continuous election idea, since the assembly presumably has to reside 
for a given period, just like one that would be directly elected by the 
voters.

There's also the council democracy system that, I think, is used in some 
unions. There you have local councils that elect among their number to 
regional councils that elect among their number to national councils.. 
the number of "levels" is logarithmic with respect to the population, 
but again that's not very continuous, and unless you use PR, it's 
possible for a cleverly positioned minority to take control of the 
system. Consider the case of each council electing a single person to 
the next level. Then having a majority at the top will let you control 
the system. Having a majority of the councils required to have a 
majority at the top will also let you do so, etc, letting a minority of 
((floor(k/2)+1)/k)^n, where k is the council size and n is the number of 
levels, control the system in the worst case.

As for others using Delegable Proxy (or "liquid democracy"), if that's 
what your scheme is, the Wikipedia page on DP 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_voting#Delegated_voting ) states 
that it's used by a local Swedish party called "Demoex" (Democratic 
Experiment). Abd has also said that it's used in corporate governance, 
but I'm unfamiliar with whether that implementation lets proxies 
transfer votes further.