[EM] Staggering elections (was: Re: Holding byelections with PR-STV)

[Raph Frank]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 9:19 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm
<km-elmet at broadpark.no> wrote:
> To protect against brute populism or ever-changing governments, the function
> f might decay more slowly than linear for the first half of its shape. An
> ordinary reelection scheme would be equivalent to one where f(n) is 1 all
> the way until x, when it drops to 0.

Your proposal is something like
- collect signatures of 5% of the population to trigger an initiative
- referendum held on the question "Do you have confidence in the government?"

I really don't see a government having any legitimacy to continue if
they don't get 50% of the vote in a referendum like that.

What you could do is have the only option on the ballot be No and
could reference the required number of No's to the number of people
who voted in the last election.

For example, if there were 2 million voters at the last general
election, then the thresholds might be

Year 1: 1 million
Year 2: 1 million
Year 3: 750k
Year 4: 500k
Year 5: 250k
Year 6: 0

People who support the government would just not bother to vote.

Ofc, if that system was used, there wouldn't be much of a problem also
allowing Yes votes too.  If the government says "You don't need to
actually vote if you support us", then even if 95% of the ballots are
No, then they can still claim a mandate, as long as <1 million vote
against them.

> Possible problems with this idea: unstable governments (could perhaps be
> fixed by "constructive motion of no confidence", i.e. that the people have
> to prove they won't do the same thing to the person they elect the next
> time)

The constructive motion of confidence means that you must propose a
successor in order to call a motion of confidence.

In the case of a President, the voters would be asked "Do you want
<name> to replace the current President?", rather than "Do you want
the President to resign?".

Another option would be to have the VP automatically take over if the
President is removed and a motion of confidence would not be allowed
if the VP's office is vacant.

The VP could be directly elected, when the office is vacant.

> and "neverending referenda" as minority groups try again and again to
> get the recall to get above f(n) support. The latter could be fixed by
> having a grace period since the last proposal for recall, so that, for
> instance, if a recall fails, one has to wait at least two months (or half a
> year, or whatnot) before trying again. However, then the supporters of the
> incumbent can strategize by running a recall when the government's support
> is just above f(n) so as to block an early recall.

They are unlikely to have polls that are sufficiently accurate, and
anyway, it only keeps them in office for 2 more months.

In practice, the process of collecting signatures and calling the
referendum would naturally prevent the from happening to often.

Another option would be to have a random group of citizens selected.
They would have the power to appoint a President by 60% of their
number and that threshold could increase.

> The same idea could be applied to laws with automatic sunsets. Popular laws
> stay on the books for a longer time than unpopular ones before they have to
> be re-approved. An advantage of the automatic sunset, with or without the
> gradual decay mentioned above, is that pointless laws (of the sort like "you
> can't drive a car unless you have a person next to you holding a flag so as
> not to scare the horses away") would quickly disappear once no longer
> relevant.

Yeah, also, it would mean that legislators would spend time renewing
laws and not creating dumb new ones.

However, they may just, once a year, renew everything as a bloc,
defeating the purpose.

Anyway, the staggering of elections that I was thinking was like the
US Senate, where only part of the house is elected at any one time.
The House voted down the original bail-out bill, but the Senate
didn't.  Clearly, the staggered election system provided more
resistance to the fact that an election was imminent at the time,
relavative to the house.