[Election-Methods] Selecting Leaders From The People

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 11:04 PM 2/4/2008, Fred Gohlke wrote:
>The idea presented here will be considered radical.  It bears little
>chance of adoption because it protects no vested interest.  The only way
>such a process will ever be adopted is if the concept can be made a
>topic of discussion, particularly among students interested in achieving
>a righteous government.

Fred, it's not nearly radical enough.... it still involves a 
centralized process, where people are essentially commanded to do it 
the centralized way or they are out of luck. Now, pretty much, some 
kind of centralized process is probably necessary, but if it's a 
complex one, requiring the coordinated activity of the whole 
population, all at once, in a series of meetings as described, it's 
going to be very vulnerable to manipulation, not to mention 
practically impossible to get going. I doubt you could succeed in 
getting this idea going on a single college campus, much less in a 
political jurisdiction.

The idea is quite similar to what I came up with over twenty years 
ago: hold a Presidential election in less than ten days, by having 
groups of ten meeting and select the best person from among them to 
be President, who then meets with nine others, etc. And then I really 
started to think about it, and how representation is lost; if someone 
doesn't agree with the choice of the others, they are simply not 
represented, and, as is well known, this process can actually exclude 
the majority.

It would seem that this was fixed by requiring it to be three people, 
with no allowance of voting for yourself, and with a penalty for not 
agreeing in time, i.e., loss of participation in the ensuing process. 
However, not only am I opposed to what amounts to coercive process, 
finding the loss of participation in this case to be perilously close 
to punitive, but there is actually a much better method, which can be 
traced back to Lewis Carroll: Asset Voting.

Further, there is an even better method and approach which can start 
with where we are right now, starting small, provide benefit for 
those who participate from the beginning (instead of only at the end 
of a long process), taking minimal effort, highly efficient, and 
thoroughly libertarian with a small L. No coercion, no loss of power, 
no dictatorship of the majority, no overhead, and most elements of it 
have actually been tested. They work.

This is, of course, FA/DP. Delegable Proxy can be used as an election 
method, similar to Asset Voting, except that it creates a virtual 
assembly where members have variable voting power. FA stands for Free 
Association. An FA can't be a government, it can't exercise power 
directly, it cannot accumulate property beyond the minimal amount it 
needs (generally almost nothing), it doesn't take controversial 
positions *as a whole*, all it does is to facilitation communication 
and the development of consensus on a large scale. It does this by 
using DP to create ad-hoc "committees" that represent practically the 
entire membership. Without elections, purely by voluntary choice.

Power remains with the members, each retains his or her own personal 
power; but now this power is *advised.* Mikael Nordfors calls the 
proxy an "advisor," emphasizing the centrifugal flow of information, 
whereas proxy emphasizes the centripetal flow of representation.

As some might know, there was an effort to implement this on 
Wikipedia, a proposal at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PRX. 
What this proposal did was to design a proxy assignment file and a 
proxy table format, for experimental use. I do predict that delegable 
proxy will start to be used on Wikipedia in fairly short order. The 
proposal was essentially testing the water, and, as could reasonably 
have been expected, the small groups of editors who present 
themselves as representing the community rejected it. I did not 
*specifically* expect this, but it was not surprising that the 
rejection was thoroughly dramatic. The proposer was blocked (though 
he had certainly given some cause, in his frustration; but for what 
would ordinarily have been at most a 24 hour block, he was blocked 
indefinitely, and in violation of policy as to the procedure). I was 
investigated to make sure that I wasn't his sock puppet or he mine. 
There was a concerted effort to delete the proposal, not merely to 
mark it as rejected. That's unusual for proposals. At the same time, 
the article on Delegable Proxy was proposed for deletion, and 
likewise the article on Mikael Nordfors, an independent European 
inventor of what he called "delegated voting," which is nothing other 
than delegable proxy, was proposed for deletion. Now, the 
"notability" of these topics was, by Wikipedia standards, marginal; 
what must be noticed is that serious efforts were made, only 
partially successful, to eradicate all traces of this proposal from 
the encyclopedia and the project pages. Those articles had been there 
for over two years. The article on Delegated Voting was merged with 
Proxy Voting, under the latter name, on the argument that they are 
the same (not really). However, there has now been peer-reviewed 
publication of an article on "delegated democracy," which is, of 
course, delegable proxy. Apparently another completely independent 
invention of it; at least it credits no prior work. (Liquid democracy 
is another name for delegable proxy going back to about 2000).

But delegable proxy can't be stopped by central action. It does not 
depend *at all* on central structures. The implementation that was 
proposed on Wikipedia did have a central structure. The effort to 
delete the proposal failed, it's still there; basically some 
influential editors became suspicious of the urgency of "Delete!." 
That proposal did not outline much of how it would work and what it 
would do, but a few of those attempting to shut it down did appear to 
realize some of the implications: it could balance out participation 
bias, and those who have excess power because of their close 
participation and developed understanding of the arcane aspects of 
Wikipedia process may well have felt threatened. Though, in fact, 
this kind of revolution is about as mild as one could imagine. The 
process of choosing a proxy is one which I expect will concentrate 
wisdom, and the active proxies would be none other than, for the most 
part, those who are already active in any case. All that happens is 
that there is a rebalancing of participation, the creation of 
communications links that break a large group down into smaller 
groups representing the larger group. This concentration is scalable 
to any size; the organizational chart is a fractal, self-similar 
regardless of scale. For a message to go from bottom to top takes a 
little longer, the larger it gets, that's all, but since most 
activity takes place in smaller groups, that messaging time isn't a 
critical problem. Instead of a dinosaur, think of an ant hill. With 
smart ants, and really good communication between them. Not control. 
Communication.

Full representation. (exceptions would be rare, mostly people who 
simply don't care to be represented.)