[Election-Methods] delegate cascade

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 07:36 AM 7/21/2008, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:

>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.

Yes. The idea has been independently invented, how, recently, in a 
half-dozen or so different places around the world, as far as we 
know. My guess is there are others we don't know about. Dodgeson's 
idea was to deal with exhausted ballots in STV by allowing candidates 
ranked first preference to serve, essentially, as proxies for the 
voters, so the context was simply an STV election for proportional 
representation, but that little tweak turns standard STV PR into 
Asset Voting, and Dodgeson used the same metaphor as Warren Smith, 
later, in 2004 I think it was. (The candidates can treat the votes 
"as if they were their own property Dodgeson) or their Assets 
(Smith). A similar idea was called Candidate Proxy, and there are 
posts to this list or its predecessor, early on, from Mike Ossipoff 
and I think it was Forest Simmons? My own idea dates back at least 
twenty years, but, though I talked about it with people, I didn't 
start publishing until, as I recall at the moment, 2003, I'd have to 
look at the wayback machine. Dodgeson wrote his comment in 1884. Quite a guy!

But the idea is really a no-brainer, once one sits with it long 
enough and sets aside all the crap that keeps us from seeing new 
things. It's not really new! It is actually just standard proxy 
voting with a slight twist, that was always possible but not, 
previously, necessary (a standard proxy could generally, before, 
delegate the right involved, and it's common that they do, but more 
than one level of delegation would be very rare. Standard proxy was 
solving a different problem, a smaller-scale problem.

I don't think that Carroll realized the full implications of his 
idea. But he did get that this would empower ordinary voters, who, he 
noted, did not generally have sufficient information to rank umpteen 
candidates, but who would know whom they most trusted, and that is 
what he mentions.


>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.

Actually, no. If the Asset election creates an "electoral college," 
i.e., a body of public voters whose identities are known, then two 
things become possible, quite remarkable things, long considered impossible.

(1) Recall of members becomes possible, quickly and easily, by those 
who gave them votes withdrawing those votes. It's easy to overlook 
this, because we think of an STV election and assume that an Asset 
one would be the same except for a few details. But Asset makes a 
major shift: votes are no longer wasted if cast for some relative 
unknown, say, your uncle Fred who knows more than politics than you 
and you trust him. I'd predict that, in fairly short order and quite 
naturally, direct election by secret ballot votes would become rare, 
people would realize that they could, almost without limitation, vote 
for the person they most trust, it doesn't have to be a "candidate" 
except in a technical sense (the person might have to be registered, 
and I'd expect there to be a directory of registered candidates 
available, and it is possible that names would not even be on the 
ballot, eventually. So while there might be a kind of "term," i.e., 
the period to the next regular election, the composition of the 
assembly could shift ad interim. My guess is that such assemblies 
would be relatively stable, though, and I'd also expect rules that 
ensured lack of serious volatility, and see the next possibility that 
makes this possible and harmless.

(2) Direct democracy of a kind becomes possible! Once there is this 
body of known, identified, electors, it then becomes possible for 
them to vote on matters before the assembly. Most of them wouldn't do 
it, I'd predict, but there would come to be a penumbra of active 
electors who do vote routinely, or who serve as advisors to those 
whose seats they created. When an elector votes directly, the value 
of that vote (which has to do with the original election fraction) is 
substracted from the vote of the seat. My guess is that normally, 
these fractional votes would be small enough to not shift results, 
but the fact that they could do so, and would do so if somehow the 
Assembly lost the trust of the body of electors (who should not be 
impeachable except for vote fraud, though some might be forced to 
unconditionally delegate their votes under some conditions, such as 
incarceration if following debate and voting were no longer practical 
for them), would shift the sense of relationship between the public 
and the assembly. An individual voter knows who the voter voted for. 
And can easily find out where that vote went, what seat (or possibly 
seats) represent it. And the voter can then contact the elector with 
concerns, and when the elector contacts the seat holder, the seat 
holder knows that the elector was literally his or her constituency.

But my work, in fact, is primarily with delegable proxy as a method 
for negotiation of consensus, *not* for direct political 
applications. And that's what's interesting about this new discovery, 
because it mentions that, whereas the others have been political schemes.

>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.

The problem with this is, of course, that representation is lost. A 
group that is a minority in all lower level councils is utterly 
unrepresented at the top; and, by a well-known effect, because of 
uneven distribution of the faction, it could actually be a majority. 
Delegable proxy and Asset Voting totally bypass this problem. 
Representation is unconditional, uncontested, as it should be. 
Representation should not be subject to some kind of vote, really. It 
should be voter *choice.* And that is what a good Asset system would 
do. I'd use, in fact, the Hare quota, not the Droop quota as Dodgeson 
selected. This makes it exact, and the dregs can, if they desire, 
still vote directly even if they have not cobbed together a seat.

But what you get with a seat isn't voting power, it's representation 
in deliberative process. Electors would not have, as such, the power 
to introduce a motion, for example. This realization that 
deliberation and voting (aggregation) could be separated seems to be 
new, standard political science analysis misses the possibility entirely.


>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.

It's unclear, and practice in some corporations may differ from that 
in others. The original Wikipedia article on Delegable Proxy was 
rather overenthusiastically expanded with, shall we say, unorthodox 
sourcing (I didn't touch it except for years ago because of conflict 
of interest), and when that same user, an very experienced 
Wikipedian, in fact, proposed Delegable Proxy as a solution to 
Wikipdia structural problems (it would be, indeed, the situation is 
crying for it), he was ultimately blocked, the article was deleted, 
and some tried, but failed, to delete the proposal: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Delegable_Proxy.

See, there is this thing that some call the Lomax effect because I've 
described it so often. If an organization has developed a power 
structure that assigns power inequitably such that some group has an 
inequitable excess of power, and a proposal is made to distribute 
power equitably, the excess power group will oppose it, seeing it as 
a threat to their control. Often, such people see their control as 
benefiting the organization; after all, they are the ones who, 
perhaps, work hardest for it, know the most about it, etc. However, 
what was actually proposed on Wikipedia did not change policies at 
all, did not challenge the oligarchy except in the most diffuse 
possible way.... but the reaction is one I've seen before, it is 
practically instinctive.

And I know, pretty much, how to move around it, in a safe way, that 
will fail if it is unjustified. As it should! And I'm doing it. It 
seems to take about a year for people to start to get DP after they 
were first exposed to the idea. Only a few get it right away, and 
even at a year, people simply become a little more open to it. But 
some of the smartest people I know have essentially signed on. And 
when there is critical mass of these, we may start to see some 
fireworks. Pretty fireworks, not destructive ones.

Free Association/Delegable Proxy (FA/DP) is designed to be fail-safe; 
almost by definition, it can't be destructive. It includes rather 
than excludes. It doesn't make centralized decisions except about its 
own process, and it can fission easily, so that limited exception is 
harmless. And for the same reason that it can fission easily, it can 
effectively merge in a flash.

Yes, I have some hope for the future, some hope that I'll actually 
see some serious realization of this stuff before I die. And I have 
prostate cancer, Stage I (Don't worry, I'm an old guy and will 
probably die from something else). My point is just that ... twenty 
years. Could happen much sooner, could start to happen in as little 
as about a year.

Dear readers, for this point in time, simply notice the idea, think 
about it when you can, and talk to others when the opportunities 
present. And if you have some time, join with us. I've got Attention 
Deficit Disorder (that partly explains why I could see this stuff), 
and the down side of that is that I have difficulty following 
through. Web sites need work, a wiki should be transferred from one 
domain to another, stuff like that. Volunteers needed. And I also 
need to make some money, so.... never asked for this before, but 
donors needed as well. Personally, to me (but it could be through a 
nonprofit of some kind). FA/DP does not need and, in fact, does not 
want, large amounts of central funds. Alcoholics Anonymous, the model 
Free Association, was given a jump-start by some grants to Bill 
Wilson, the major theoretician, for his living expenses while he 
worked on the organization. Then, he wrote and edited the famous Big 
Book, "Alcoholics Anonymous," and quite modest royalties from that 
meant that he never needed to worry about money again, and his wife 
was left with a small fortune, which, I think, she left to charity.

Fortune isn't what I did this for, but I do have, in spite of being 
64, two small children, 5 and 6 years old.... and little income to 
speak of except for social security. I totally turned away from my 
own business to do this work.