[Election-Methods] delegate cascade

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 05:41 AM 7/26/2008, Michael Allan wrote:
>This is true recursively.  As D and E acquire more vote flow, the
>formal stucture of the sub-branches will elaborate the finer details
>of their own interest positions. (Was it Abd who called this a
>fractal?)

Yes, I called it, in fact, "fractal democracy."

>   They will then be under pressure from formal vote shifts in
>these structures, shifts that reflect the dynamics of interest.  None
>of the details of this can be known in advance, nor can the overall
>pattern be predicted - it can only be revealed moment by moment as the
>election proceeds.

Note, however, that while it's interesting to consider how 
"elections" would function, I don't see, in the near future, the use 
of delegable proxy as an actual election method, with possibly some 
experimental applications. Rather, it is a device for negotiating and 
measuring consensus. In Free Associations, because the organization 
does not collect power for application by vote, there is no special 
power in "majority," rather, there is an increase of real power 
(i.e., power outside the organization resulting from agreement 
discovered within it), steadily, with an increase in the degree of 
real consensus found.

If some issue is being considered and there is 51% on one side and 
49% on the other, and then this is going to affect some outside 
process, such as a political campaign, and if the measurement was 
accurate, we might see 51% of members, following the recommendation 
of their proxies, supporting the campaign of A, and 49% supporting 
the campaign of B. The net effect of this is actually pretty low, a 
net weight of 2% in favor of the election of A, which would show up 
as a 2% differential in campaign financing, other factors being 
equal, and 2% in numbers of volunteers available, etc. However, if a 
higher level of consensus can be found, the power differential 
rapidly becomes heavily one-sides. An increase in support from 51% to 
67%, or only 16%, for A, would mean that the funding for A coming 
from organization members is now double that of the funding for B. We 
could say that in the first example, 98% of the effort going into the 
election is wasted, because it is simply spent in opposition. In the 
second, that is reduced to two-thirds. Still quite wasteful, but much 
less so than the bare majority. And we wouldn't stop there, I think. 
The goal would be to find very substantial consensus. How possible 
this is with major political issues is unknown. I do know that in 
small organizations, what can seem like intractable differences can 
disappear if there is sufficient effort put into finding consensus. 
Organizations of twenty to thirty individuals are, under some 
conditions, able to function with full consensus rule. It's tedious, 
often, and for that reason isn't necessarily stable over decades. But 
that problem can be solved. With delegable proxy, which works not 
just for large organizations, but which should help small ones as well.

FA/DP creates a structure which rewards consensus. It doesn't require 
consensus, individuals remain free to act on their own or in groups. 
(The DP structure makes organizing action groups trivial: any natural 
caucus can become an action group, with likely high agreement within 
the group. But the structure is fail-safe: if the internal agreement 
of a caucus is a false agreement, there will be little actual power 
exerted. The chief will ask for the action and the Indians will 
scatter. Another reason why I wouldn't want clients who did not 
actually trust me. Waste of time. We tend to think of power as being 
something collected, but FA/DP turns that on its head. Power exists 
out at the periphery, with each member, and most power is actually 
exercised by clients who don't have, necessarily, any incoming 
proxies at all. They are the ultimate arbiters; they accept 
suggestions coming from their proxies or they don't.

The structure is often described as bottom-up, but it really can be 
seen from both directions. Information flows in both directions. 
Proxies, toward the center, negotiate broad consensus and their votes 
are deemed to roughly represent the votes of their nonvoting clients. 
It doesn't have to be exact. The consensus, when negotiated, to 
whatever extent is going to be found, goes back out to the periphery, 
through the proxy network. It gets passed on personally, not merely 
by some organizational publication. You get a phone call.

I lived in a small town in Western Massachusetts when the beyond 
politics web site was set up. I tried to start a Cummington Free 
Association. Probably the single most influential person in town was 
very interested. However, turns out, that doesn't necessarily mean 
much. Anyway, one of the things I had noticed was that the town had a 
vote to implement a tax override. It's a Town Meeting town, and Town 
Meeting had voted to put this on the ballot, because tax overrides, 
by Massachusetts law, must be submitted to the voters in a regular 
secret ballot election. Town Meeting, of course, isn't secret, it is 
a deliberative body. Anyway, the override failed. There was a big gap 
between what Town Meeting decided and what the voters decided. Why? 
Isn't that an interesting question? Oddly enough, I didn't see anyone 
asking it! The Town of Amherst has a specially-chartered "Town 
Meeting." It's really not a Town Meeting at all, rather it is a huge 
representative assembly, individual small neighborhoods elect 
representatives. (They don't seem to get it, that this *really* is 
not Town Meeting, it is something quite different. But many Amherst 
residents are fierce about preserving their Town Meeting, even 
though, as a body of several hundred residents, it is unwieldy and 
famously contentious. Anyway, there were two elections in recent 
years where an initiative to abolish Town Meeting was on the ballot. 
In both elections, it failed, by a tiny percentage, truly close. Town 
Meeting supporters breathed a sign of relief. But didn't they notice 
that this supposed bastion of democracy wasn't supported by *half* of 
the voting electorate? Something is wrong, and who was looking at it? 
Really, I looked. Nobody is looking at it.

In Cummington, Town Meeting functions quite well, actually, it is 
rarely highly contentious, people are friendly and open, and 
newcomers are welcomed into the Town governmental structure. Moving 
in, we were asked if we wanted to serve on Town Committees. There is 
always a shortage of people willing to serve. It kind of turns your 
idea of politics on its head to realize that small towns often have a 
shortage of people willing to run for office, particularly the minor 
offices. There were opposed elections there. Sometimes.

Why did the tax override fail? Well, I can say why I didn't vote for 
it. As it happened, I did not vote against it either, I realized that 
I really didn't know whether it was a good idea or not. There were 
some problems with the proposal (a new safety complex), it seemed 
overblown, and I knew that a friend active in town government, much 
more than I -- she had become a town officer -- was opposed. So I 
simply abstained. I'm sure, though, that a lot of people would simply 
vote against a tax increase, unless they actually favored it. Bottom 
line: nobody called me to tell me that I should vote for it. Or 
against it, for that matter. Why not? Small town, about 600 
registered voters. Now, some volunteer could have called me, easily. 
But what if I'd gotten a call from my proxy, the person I'd 
designated to represent me -- informally, in a Free Association, not 
officially -- explaining to me why the proposal was worthwhile? Would 
I have voted for it. I'm sure I would have. Unless the argument 
seemed totally bogus, in which case I'd be wondering why I'd chosen 
this person, and would probably change the proxy assignment. But it's 
highly unlikely it would be totally bogus.

More to the point, when the safety complex proposal was the subject 
of hearings, etc., my proxy would have kept me informed, would have 
asked me if I had any input to give, would have discussed with me any 
question I had, would generally have seen that my ideas were part of 
the process, and I'd know that. It wouldn't have been a mystery. Even 
if I didn't have time to go to the hearings or vote at Town Meeting, 
Town Meeting would have a sense of what I and other participating 
townspeople felt about the proposal, and they wouldn't have wasted 
time and money on a tax override that wasn't going to pass.

The communication is the point, not the voting in the Free 
Association, and a great deal would happen with no voting at all. 
When Town Meeting was ready to decide whether or not to put a 
proposal on the ballot, I'd assume that someone would request a vote 
within the Free Association, and the results would be available to 
Town Meeting. The Meeting could choose to disregard the vote. But I 
doubt that, if the FA were substantial, with more than 10% of the 
Town participating, that they would simply dismiss it. And one could 
hope for much higher extended participation than that.

And the whole point of an FA/DP organization is that, in theory, it 
is extremely simple to join and participate to whatever level one 
wishes. In most organizations, if you simply joined and did almost 
nothing, there wouldn't be much benefit, either. In an FA/DP 
organization, though, simply naming a proxy establishes a 
communications link. It costs very little (just enough lookabout to 
identify someone you think might have a good head or good heart, or, 
preferably, both). The present problem, of course, is that nobody 
believes that. It really takes some wrapping of one's head around 
some new perspectives to get it. Once FA/DP organizations are 
operating, people will be able to see it. It will be obvious, it's 
not actually complicated, it's merely hard to see when one hasn't 
seen it before....