[EM] No geographical districts

[Raph Frank]

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 2:00 AM, Stéphane Rouillon
<stephane.rouillon at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> Hello Juho,
>
> using age, gender or other virtual dimension to build virtual districts
> replaces geographic antagonism by generation antagonism.
> The idea is to get equivalent sample that are not opposed by intrinsec
> construction.

A simple option would be to convert the date of birth into a number,
but have the year the the least significant part..

16-04-82 would become 160,482

The public could then be sorted by those numbers.  In effect, you are
splitting people by the day of the month they are born on, if there is
a tie, you use month and only use year at the end.

This would give a mix of ages, genders and any other measure in each district.

It is pretty much equivalent to just randomly distributing the voters
between the districts, but unlike a random system, it is harder to
corrupt.

> Thus we may find neutral decision takers that will minimize the overall
> bad impacts of a decision, thus maximize to the best of their knowledge
> the decisions for all the electorate.

You make a good point.  It would reduce the pork issue, but it gives
minorities no representation.  A group with a majority will probably
win all the seats.

The probability of a group with 55% of the votes not getting a
majority in all the districts would be tiny due to the law of large
numbers.

If that group is geographically concentrated, you are back where you started.

> The Irish senate based on profession seems one step toward getting neutral
> decision takers
> for deciding the localization of projects for example.

Professionals are also a defined group.

However, I like your idea to use a group that is non-local to decide
localisation issues.

What about having 2 houses.  The geographic house is elected by
PR-STV.  The national one is elected using your method.

The geographic house might decide that a hospital needs to be build,
but the national house would then decide where.

Ofc, if the country was ethnically divided and the majority ethnic
group lived in the East, then the national house would probably direct
most projects in that direction.

Btw, the Irish Senate looks (somewhat) good in theory, but doesn't
actually work that way in practice.  The nominating boards (which
represent different professions) have very little power.  The county
councillors are the ones who actually vote for the Senators.  It is a
secret ballot, but most councillors vote for their party (or as part
of a voting pact).  This means that the Senate elections tend to
follow the distribution of county councillor seats.

The exception is the university seats, they are elected by graduates
of certain universities (but not all ... grrr).

Also, the Taoiseach (PM) gets to appoint a few.  The combination of
the county councillor (the governing coalition should have at least a
strong minority of those seats) and the fact that the Taoiseach gets
to appoint some mean that generally the Government has an easy
majority in the Senate.