[EM] language/framing quibble

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Fred Gohlke wrote:
> Good Morning, Kristofer
> 
> This portion of our discussion has been about using the inherent 
> bidirectionality of the Practical Democracy process.  The process is 
> designed to select the best of our people to represent us in our 
> elective offices, whether in a Congressional or Parliamentary system, or 
> in a city council.  The basic thesis is that, by exercising greater care 
> in selecting our representatives, we will have less need to monitor them 
> after they are elected.  Even so, some degree of public supervision of 
> our elected officials is necessary and we are discussing that aspect of 
> the process.
> 
> I will use the term 'pyramid' to indicate the members of the electorate 
> who participated in the selection of a public official.  'Pyramids' are 
> defined from the elected official, downward, and every person that 
> participated in an official's selection is a member of that official's 
> 'pyramid'.  Hence, everyone in the electorate is a member of multiple 
> 'pyramids', one for each person they put in public office.
> 
> In terms of initiating a recall or suggesting a course of action or 
> change of position, my suggestion is that every member of the electorate 
> have the right to petition (i.e., submit questions, comments or 
> proposals to) their elected officials.  They do so by submitting their 
> petition to the body that maintains the electoral database and that body 
> must transmit the petition to the official and to all the other people 
> in the official's 'pyramid'.  The petition need only name the public 
> official, the database will identify the members of that official's 
> 'pyramid'.
> 
> When other members of the 'pyramid' receive such petitions they may 
> support them or discard them, as they see fit,  If a petition is 
> supported by a majority of the members of the 'pyramid' it becomes an 
> instruction to the official.  Even if a petition does not achieve a 
> majority, if it achieves notable support, it will influence any official 
> not bent on self-destruction.  This is infinitely more effective than 
> the current method of writing letters to officials ... and the 
> meaningless responses they generate.
> 
> I believe, given the repetitive nature of elections, this method will 
> allow adequate supervision of our elected officials.  It will also 
> encourage the submission and consideration of minority views.

I have little to add here, as it seems sensible, but I'll say that I 
still think it would be good for the petition to include information 
about the level of the person who originated it. Since the pyramids 
exist after election and their composition is known to (at least) the 
public officials, this would probably happen anyway as the officials 
seek to find out which petition to pay attention first, given that they 
cannot respond to all of them instantaneously; still, having it in the 
official specification may help. The level information would be merely 
indicative, since an official that ignores most petitions may suffer for 
it in the next election, no matter where the petitions come from; but 
again, it would help them make priorities.

The assumption here is that if someone high up in the pyramid petitions 
the official, he has the support of many below him. If that's wrong and 
he's using his position in the pyramid for his own ends, then the system 
would be weaker (since the level gives much less information about how 
many share his views), though. Could that be solved by making the 
petition records public? If so, we get "petition buying".. hm. We might 
have to consider this further to make it sufficiently solid. My broad 
idea is that since the pyramid is exponential in nature, with a fixed 
chance of petition from each at the bottom, the number of petitions 
would increase exponentially as well, and so in order to sift through 
the mass, there has to be some sort of method for finding what's truly 
important, some sort of information aggregation and selection.