[Election-Methods] How to get from here to there, was Re: Partisan Politics

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 05:09 PM 3/23/2008, Juho Laatu wrote:
>The method now presents one very clean viewpoint. The
>method introduces some clear benefits but also some
>problems. I'd maybe try to find a method that would
>keep most of the benefits and eliminate most of the
>problems. (There could be many paths forward.)

I began, over twenty years ago, with a similar idea, only the group 
size was tentatively ten. The size of three solves some problems and 
introduces or exacerbates others. However, the essential idea of 
negotiating agreement in small groups was there. The problem of 
proportional representation was resolved by allowing the groups to 
coalesce, in small numbers, around the chosen "delegate," rather than 
being some enforced or random or geographical combination of fixed 
number. Thus the representatives vary in the "votes" they represent, 
and I realized that this was essentially proxy representation. I did 
not start with the proxy concept and then apply it to elections, I 
started with distributed elections on a small scale, modified the 
concept to deal with proportional representation, and then realized 
it was proxy voting, only layered flexibly, formed from the bottom by 
direct choice rather than from the top by fiat. Thus it becomes 
possible to implement on a small scale in peer associations, and, 
what my study and the limited experience I've had so far tells me, is 
that it provides benefits even when only a few people use it. These 
people become more organizationally efficient. This already happens 
informally, most organizations would break down if it did not. But 
the formal structure makes responsibilities clear, without 
restricting the freedom of the members.

At a certain level, direct democracy becomes impossible, that is, you 
cannot have a single Assembly of the Nation where everyone can speak. 
The noise makes it utterly impractical. It is essential in 
representation that the represented be able to communicate with the 
representative. Political scientists have long been aware of the gap, 
that, say, a U.S. Representative represents so many constituents that 
for direct communication, with the vast majority, is impossible. Thus 
indirect communication must be used, and the question is how this is 
done. When it is done from the top, i.e., the Rep hires staff who 
filter communications for him or her, frequently the necessary 
rapport with the public is missing. As an example, when we adopted 
our Ethiopian daughter, we ran into government bureaucracy. A form 
which had been submitted, with all fees paid (hefty), everything in 
place, duplicating what had been submitted four years earlier (all 
the fingerprints had to be taken again, etc.), was going to take 
months to process. Out daughter was waiting in Ethiopia, in an 
orphanage; at this point she had been adopted by proxy there, she was 
our daughter by Ethiopian law. But the U.S. requires these forms and 
procedures. So we called two Senators, Kerry and Kennedy, since we 
live in Massachusetts. Kerry's office did nothing. Kennedy's office 
called us the next day and said that the forms had been approved and 
we would be notified by the agency -- and we were then able to book 
our tickets. One day. Now, Kennedy was an expert at this, he had 
excellent staff with years of experience. Kerry is a relative 
newcomer. The Kennedy staffperson who was handling adoption affairs 
was an expert, and very easy to talk to. Does anyone wonder why 
Kennedy is utterly unbeatable in Massachusetts? We found out. But it 
does not always happen that way, as we saw with Kerry. Don't get me 
wrong, I like Kerry, actually I like him very much. But his staff was 
inadequate, it seemed. They never even got back to us. (My wife 
visited both offices in Boston, in person, with her plea for 
assistance.) Now, delegable proxy sets up a representative system 
where you choose your personal representative as someone you trust, 
but the assumption is that it is someone who will talk to you. In 
other words, you could choose Clint Eastwood, but ... what would you 
gain? In fact, you would be assigned to an underling, who might or 
might not be compatible with you.

One of the foundation concepts for delegable proxy was as an idea 
filter. If I have an idea -- say I think we should hold a national 
election by meeting in groups of three -- what can I do? I can break 
myself trying to present it to many people. But suppose I have a 
proxy. If I can't convince my proxy, someone I chose for 
trustworthiness and an ability to listen to me, maybe it is not such 
a good idea. If my proxy is not going to pass the idea along, he or 
she will tell me why. If I really don't accept the answer, I can 
either change my proxy, or, alternatively, if I can convince *anyone* 
else, they can approach their proxy. Massively redundant entry points 
exist for ideas; however, they are filtered from the start. So new 
ideas get both a fair hearing *and* the center is protected from 
noise. In the other direction, the business of government (or 
management of a large association) is complex and most members would 
not be interested in most of the traffic. The proxy network, in the 
other direction, protects them from that noise, while -- in the open 
systems we propose -- they can, if they wish, follow any of it. 
Voting is done by those informed, normally, though every member does 
have the right to vote, the vast majority won't. And that, too, is 
necessary. One of the very dangerous aspects of modern political 
systems is the idea that everyone should vote. No. People should have 
trusted representatives who routinely vote, except when the people 
are sufficiently informed to have a sane opinion. Who decides if they 
are sufficiently informed to vote? They do. And, presumably, they 
will listen to the advice of their proxy. They are not compelled to accept it.

Hence, when I see the triad representational system, I see it as 
familiar, with a new aspect (the very small size of three, which has 
some appealing characteristics), but I also see it as requiring 
coercive implementation from the top. (If you cannot agree on who 
represents you, that is, the two who are not represented don't agree, 
you are not represented. While that seems to make sense, it forces 
representation through people with whom one does *not* have rapport. 
It neglects the critical aspect of voluntary connection. So I'm not 
terribly interested in it.

Mr. Gohlke also wrote to the Election Methods Interest Group with his 
idea, at the yahoogroup election-methods at yahoo.com. When I wrote that 
such discussions were not appropriate at that list, because it is a 
top-level list for a family of lists, with detailed discussions 
taking place in those virtual committees, and that he could form such 
a committee to study his idea easily, he apparently did not get it, 
and went away in what may have been a bit of a huff. The fact is that 
EMIG is much closer to his concept than he might realize. It's as if 
he wanted to stand up on the floor of the Senate and make his 
proposal. That access is carefully controlled. Now, it is not 
currently a moderated list, so he was able to make his post, but, 
indeed, if that happens very much, I expect that the top-level list 
will indeed become moderated. The idea is that this list is for 
overall coordination and for announcement of polls with regard to 
committee reports. EMIG is not going to make "decisions" as such, but 
it will report consensus, thus making its reports a possible 
foundation for a new kind of peer-reviewed publication. Why is that 
important? Well, if any of you have tried to write about election 
methods on Wikipedia, and have stuck around long enough to see what 
happens, most of what we routinely no cannot be asserted there, 
because there is no peer-reviewed publication. Hence EMIG was 
started. And it's a delegable proxy organization, though at this 
level of activity that is not very significant. But the idea is that 
there is no reason *not* to be a member of EMIG if you are interested 
in election methods. You can be a member, and have an effect, doing 
nothing, simply by joining and naming a proxy. Now, if you *never* 
participate, your "vote" as represented through your named party may 
start to be deprecated. In order to understand this, one must 
understand that EMIG will report "raw" poll data. I.e., this member 
voted this way. The proxy table is a separate thing and, as we have 
been realizing in various experiments, there can be many proxy 
tables, plus many different ways of analyzing the results. A 
publisher of this new "peer-reviewed journal" can set his or her own 
standards for adequacy of approval. My goal would be that it meets or 
exceeds what is routine with standard academic publications, and I 
won't go into detail at this point. This is already way too long.

It's happening, one step at a time. So far, several rungs on the 
ladder have been scaled. It has come to the point that opposition is 
beginning to materialize, which is actually a huge accomplishment. 
And, boy, is it opposition! The proposal page on Wikipedia is WP:PRX 
(enter that into the Go field on any en.wikipedia.org page). You will 
notice that it is marked Rejected. What that means is that one user 
placed a rejected tag on it, before it was even presented. I took 
that tag off, since I clearly considered it premature. Then, when we 
actually had an idea of what was being proposed -- which was 
astonishingly simple and did not involve voting -- the Rejected tag 
was replaced, and I was not willing to edit war over it. Particularly 
since I didn't care if the proposal was Rejected or not. It did not 
depend on central approval *at all*. (The specific implementation was 
central and was vulnerable, but that is only one of countless methods 
of implementing it.) However, that was not enough. Proposals on 
Wikipedia are not ordinarily deleted, not if they are fresh or have 
some historical or preventative value (like "don't even think about 
trying this if you don't want to see your computer melt, we have R E 
J E C T E D this). This proposal was nominated for deletion, and 
many, many not-voters voted to Delete (Wikipedia is a bit 
self-deluded, they don't vote, but they do, as turned out to be 
really visible in this case). Why? It was about voting, they said, 
and we don't vote. Where did they get that idea, that it was about 
voting? The nominator for deletion told them that and an ancient rule 
of on--line discussion, I've been seeing it for twenty years, is that 
most people don't actually do the footwork, they comment in a 
knee-jerk fashion based on shallow impressions. A few voices, mine 
included, said Keep as Rejected (which would be the norm). Along 
comes an ordinary user, but a very experienced one, who closes the 
deletion process as Keep as Rejected, in spite of near-unanimity the 
other way. Why? Well, it's supposed to be about the arguments, not 
about the not-votes. As one might imagine, the not-voters were 
outraged that this obviously biased person, who they thought was an 
administrator, disregarded all their not-votes and applied policy and 
guidelines, having read the arguments. (He was actually an 
ex-administrator who could have become one again any time he asked.) 
Anyway, they appealed the debate to Deletion Review, and, to make a 
long and turbulent story short, the original deletion review was 
re-opened. Few additional people commented, and it was closed with 
the same result. There was a serious and dedicated effort made to 
*delete* the proposal, not merely to mark it as Rejected. And there 
were attempts, similarly, to delete the related files, those also 
failed. At the same time, the one who proposed it -- it was not me -- 
was blocked for disruption, a complicated story in itself. The 
Wikipedia article on Delegable proxy was set up for deletion debate 
as not notable, original research, etc. That article had, in fact, 
been started by me in 2005, when I had no clue about Wikipedia 
conflict of interest policy. It was not much more than a dictionary 
definition, and it was not of "Delegable proxy" but of "Liquid 
democracy," a name which was current for a while, not my invention. 
The name was changed later. I did not vote in that debate, though I 
commented, because of my conflict of interest, and I also expected, 
by notability rules, that it would be deleted. About a day after it 
was, we found a peer-reviewed publication of "delegated democracy" 
with some nice charts and mathematical analysis of the social welfare 
function of what is, essentially, delegable proxy, and I could, if I 
cared enough, take the article through Deletion Review and probably 
prevail. But I did't care about the Wikipedia article all that much 
though it had become quite an extensive article, if "creatively" 
sourced (It's now on electowiki, I think). We don't need it, people 
find their information by Google, even when it is on Wikipedia. What 
I cared about was that people, quite a few people, heard about it. At 
this stage that is quite enough. In a year, when they see the idea 
again, they will be more open. That's what I've found. I did not 
arrange for all this publicity, I merely had to react and respond to 
questions and opportunities.

(Those of you who have been watching me for a few years may be able 
to realize how much has shifted. I am no longer the voice crying in 
the wilderness, there are now others working on this, and there will 
be more, little by little.)

It's been a fascinating process, and there are many stories to tell, 
full of drama and insights .... :-). It is a little more exciting 
than the Election Methods list, I must say. Too exciting, really. I 
need to get the book written, and Wikipedia is Endless Distraction, 
highly addictive. The Deletion attempts were only the beginning. At 
least one sock puppet has appeared who is dedicated to disrupting 
anything done by the original proponent of WP:PRX, who, being a 
typical impulsive ADHD wikignome (the DP proponent), the kind who are 
in a position to understand FA/DP at this point, has been blocked 
twice since then and this time it may stick, even though what he 
finally did was the equivalent of, say, jaywalking on an empty 
street. The disruption and outrage over that toothpick of an offense 
was stirred up by this sock puppet, who was, of course, claiming that 
this user and I were the same person (preposterous on the face, but 
also doubly preposterous because with the first flap, an 
investigation had been done and IP evidence showed that we were quite 
distinct); the sock puppet has now been blocked and things may quiet 
down for a while. Meanwhile the network is starting to be built. At 
last one enemy of the proposal reads this list, but nothing is being 
done which is contrary to Wikipedia policy or guidelines and it is 
the nature of this proposal that the tighter you make the controls to 
prevent it from happening, the more it is likely to happen. The enemy 
of FA/DP is apathy, despair, and ignorance, not the oligarchs who 
might fear it, though it does not contemplate attacking them. (What's 
the oligarchy on Wikipedia? Well, I have various theories. First, 
there is the "cabal," the operating core of users and administrators 
who are highly familiar with how the arcane process works and who 
thus control it. That is what I'd call a "natural oligarchy," we can 
expect opposition from it, but not a particularly evil kind, they 
generally mean well (and simply believe that anything that lessens 
their relative power, since they are the experts, must be harmful). 
But there may be another kind of opposition. The new efforts to "get" 
that original proposer, and me, had a new level of intensity and 
hatred behind them, and I've taken to calling the puppet master the 
Grand Panjandrum. I've used that term in the past for Rob Richie, but 
that was a mere analogy, he is practically the soul of collegiality 
in comparison. In this case, it is much more like the actual Grand 
Panjandrum. Who very much does not want Wikipedia to succeed, and who 
does, in fact, understand that Wikipedia is beginning to fail due to 
the problems of scale, and realizes that delegable proxy would 
prevent that. The Grand Panjandrum has other names, and is known from 
ancient times; there are many interpretations of the reality behind 
this concept, but from those with sufficient experience, the reality 
on an archetypal level, at least, of this entity is beyond doubt. 
This is the ancient enemy of humanity, whose main characteristic is 
contempt for these bags of "dirt," and whose modus operandi is to 
induce us to hate each other and fight. Of late, he's been winning on 
Wikipedia, which is one reason why so many long-time users have been 
leaving. The atmosphere in areas concerned with central policy, 
particularly around deletion, and in some of the outer reaches as 
well, has become increasingly poisonous. It's possible it is too 
late. I am, in fact, withdrawing from direct attempts to influence 
Wikipedia policy and will focus instead on purely building the 
network. Which, as a Free Association, has no intrinsic bias, though 
it may have accidental and temporary biases based on the accidents of 
membership.

How to Change the World in One Easy Step.
Go Back to Sleep, We Will Change It For You.

(My wife hated that slogan. Sinister. Uh, what do you think will 
happen if we remain asleep? They are changing the world for us. Well, 
not for us, for themselves.... But everyone needs to sleep part of 
the time. Who will take care of things while we do? Do we choose 
these people or does someone else choose them for us?)