[Election-Methods] Partisan Politics

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 08:03 PM 3/18/2008, Fred Gohlke wrote:
>Good Evening, Dave
>
>re: "In New York, at least, the two major parties each do such as
>appoint half the members of the Boards of Elections." and also in regard
>to the related comments about "party leadership", "party activities",
>"party business", "state party", and "county organizations".
>
>To me, this says "the structure of government" and the "responsibilities
>of voters" are what the parties say they are. I think that degree of
>control is pretty much the same in all the states.

Yes, more or less.

>Ought we not question such an arrangement?

Why? Isn't the status quo the arrangement God has provided us?

>   Nothing in our Constitution
>grants such rights to political parties, yet they dictate all of our
>political activity.  Do we see nothing wrong with that?  Is that not,
>indeed, the cause of our political system's failure?  Have we become so
>accustomed to partisan dictatorship that we can't see how destructive it is?


Seriously:
(1) The political system has not "failed." It merely does not work as 
well as it could, and it has very obvious flaws, which have persisted 
a long time. Those flaws, under some conditions, can be practically 
fatal. Philip K. Dick wrote a book, "It Can't Happen Here." Some seem 
to think that true, that Americans are specially graced to never 
suffer a spectacular failure. Though I suppose the Civil War was 
pretty spectacular. Famous abolitionist and anarchist thinker, 
brilliant guy whose name someone escapes me at the moment, was 
seriously against slavery and seriously against using military 
coercion to end it. He was right. Other nations ended slavery without 
such major disruption. The Civil War was phenomenally bloody.
(2) There are some very simple reasons why the system does not 
change. If those reasons are not understood and addressed, reform is 
impossible. You can come up with a totally ideal political system, 
and waste your life designing and promoting it, all for nothing if 
the path from here to there is not described and followed in a way that works.

>re: "In at least most states electors are not directed by their party
>but by party members in elections and/or caucuses."

Shocked, I'm shocked. Yes, that's the system. It is not what was 
designed, the original design was corrupted through a loophole left 
in the Constitution, a loophole left because it was too difficult to 
negotiate at the time. The original design was actually more like 
what Warren Smith has proposed as Asset Voting. Sort of. Lewis 
Carroll came up with the same plan, it is an old idea.

>Yes.  But what is the rationale for a few of our citizens ... the
>so-called "party faithful" ... dictating the actions of people who are
>supposed to, after they study "such candidates as become visible to
>them, do their voting."

No, they don't dictate the actions of the voters. If the voters were 
organized, they could elect anyone whom they choose. Problem is, the 
voters think of the government as their organization. It is not, it 
does not belong to them, it belongs to a very diffuse and chaotic 
entity called "the plurality." Not a problem. Plurality ovting is not 
really the problem. The problem is that people depend on government, 
a necessarily coercive and centralized mechanism, to be the means by 
which they come to agreement. If the people could come to agreement 
outside of government, practically any mechanism on the table would 
work quite well. Too many reformers, though, completely miss this 
point, and what they want to do is have the government force the use 
of better election process.

But that runs into severe problems. Thankfully, actually!

>re: "You start with the size of legislature desired.  If legislators
>should each represent about 750, multiply my numbers by 10."
>
>That's fine.  The question I'm interested in, though, is how the
>legislators are selected.  Who names the candidates?  Would we not be
>better off finding a way to select them from among ourselves?  In what
>way do we benefit by having them named by people who can control their
>votes?

We do that with Asset Voting, and it is very, very simple. You vote 
for anyone you like. This person then represents you in subsequent 
process, including the election of a seated assembly, which is 
elected, again, by voluntary agreement between those holding the 
"assets," or votes. No coercion. No complicated structures. You can 
vote for anyone. Practically no votes are wasted. No use of majority 
power to dominate *representation*.(And it is quite possible to allow 
these electors to vote when convenient, in which case we can say *no* 
votes are wasted, and the seated assembly is a collection of proxies 
for the electors, for purposes of representation in deliberation as 
well as default representation in voting. But, of course, this is a 
utopian model. How do we get there?

You've got to understand why, though this was proposed over a hundred 
and twenty years ago, it still isn't being done, not even being 
tried, in government anywhere, as far as we know. I call it the 
"persistence of power inequities effect," and it is not rocket 
science. It's also relatively easy to get around, if.

>re: "You had mentioned pr, so I propose THE VOTERS organizing themselves
>into the right size districts with no boundaries"

It is possible to do Asset with multimember districts, but I prefer 
free Asset, with voluntary association of votes in precinct blocks to 
create virtual districts. Which overlap. Even as an anonymous voter, 
because you know whom you voted for, and you can see where your vote 
was assigned -- it is public record, electors holding assets are, 
simply, public voters -- you know who your representative is, the 
specific person whom your vote helped elect. The rep does not know, 
except as you tell him, or her, it cannot be proven.

>We have no means for the voters to organize themselves.

That's not true. We do not have a *governmental* means, nor will we, 
nor should we. The voters should organize themselves. Themselves. The 
*voters* should organize themselves. Did I mention that it should be 
the voters who organize themselves, not some benevolent dictator or 
some majoritarian political structure, nor anything else but ... the 
voters organizing themselves.

How?

It has to be simple, it has to be easy, and it has to work on a small 
scale and then be scalable without loss of the freedom of voluntary 
small-scale organization. This, itself, suggests the necessary 
structure. It is a fractal. Biology solved this organizational 
problem long, long ago.

>   The parties
>define the districts.  It's called gerrymandering.  It is an example of
>how the parties control our political process.  These are the grave
>inequities we must find a way to correct.

Wow! And, on top of it they manipulate the vote counts. They favor 
their campaign donors. And do you realize that this can all be made, 
not illegal, but *irrelevant*.

And it could happen almost overnight. If.

If what? Well, today, one more person getting it. That is really a 
major step, each time. It will accelerate, it already is.

>We can count the votes any way we like.  As long as the parties control
>the process, we will lose.

The fact is that "voting" is not the crucial part of how the people 
organize. Communication is. Voluntary communication between one 
person and another, or between one and a group who have chosen the 
one, freely and voluntarily. And who have been, in turn accepted by 
the one they chose. It is extraordinarily simple. There are no 
elections involved, though such an organization could influence or 
even control elections. It does it through discovering consensus, 
through processes which are known to work well in small groups, but 
which break down in large ones and have thus never been thought 
practical for large-scale structures. The fact is that all the 
elements of this solution have been sitting around for many, many 
years, proxy representation for centuries, Asset voting (as a 
governmental application) for well over a century, and Free 
Association concepts for over sixty years. Every element is known to 
work, but the combination is only now starting to be tried, in 
experiments which are still very small.