[Election-Methods] Partisan Politics + a method proposal

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 12:46 PM 5/22/2008, Juho wrote:
Happens to me sometimes. I write interspersed, and some space 
accumulates at the bottom, and I don't see the rest of the original 
message. Sorry.

>When considering your interest to avoid strong party style groupings
>to take control of the political life, and on the other hand your
>interest to allow the ordinary people to make the decisions, I came
>to think that you might like (in addition to your "groups of three"
>method) also the following method.
>
>One can nominate candidates for some office/task freely.  In some
>cases any nomination and/or volunteering is enough.  In some other
>cases one might require the candidate to have some education/degree
>in some appropriate area.  Or one could require the candidate to have
>at least 100 listed supporters (or 100 independent emails to the
>election coordinator).  The need for this kind of additional criteria
>depends on if the position in question requires some specific skills,
>or some level of trust.  But in general the lists of candidates are
>collected using this kind of open process that is not controlled by
>any parties or other existing bodies.  One could also check from the
>"nominated" candidates if they volunteer for the task in case they
>are elected before their name appears in the candidate list.

Wow! It certainly gets complicated when we try to anticipate all the 
details of a system we are not even close to implementing. How about 
Asset Voting? It is a truly brillig method. Simple. Invented over a 
hundred and twenty years ago.

>After the lists of electable persons (candidates) have been created
>we can arrange the election.  Winners will be simply picked by random
>votes.

How about simply allowing people to choose who represents them? 
Officer elections can be handled deliberatively, by whatever 
deliberative body is created. Asset Voting was designed for true, 
non-party proportional representation. It is not *against* parties, 
but it makes them unnecessary for the purpose of representation. It 
finesses the whole question of district representation: let those who 
want a local rep have a local rep, and those who want an ideological 
rep for some minority position have that. I think that, practically 
by definition, most people will have local reps. And several per 
specific geographical location. The reps won't know, if it is a 
secret ballot system, which specific voters elected them, but they 
will know what precincts their votes came from, and, assuming they 
were not directly elected (I think that will become increasing rare 
except in assemblies for small-population jurisdictions), they will 
know what electors transferred votes to them. The voters will be able 
to see exactly where their vote went, if it's done right.

>This method also avoids the need of the candidates to be skilled in
>fighting their way up the ladders against other candidates.  And it
>is reasonably fair towards minorities.
>
>(There are also other methods that are based on a very bottom-up
>oriented approach like direct democracy and delegable proxy.)

Couple of years ago, "delegable proxy" would not have been mentioned. 
We have made progress. Asset Voting is not exactly delegable proxy, 
it, as designed, creates a peer assembly where every member has the 
same voting power, so it is closer to existing structures; it might 
actually become the government, as distinct from FA/DP organizations 
which *cannot* be governments. DP could be used in government, but 
that might also create serious opportunities for corruption that 
don't exist in the FA/DP model. Asset Voting is clean enough and 
simple enough and really can become DP beyond the secret ballot level.