[EM] Idea Proposal: Listening Democracy

[Jameson Quinn]

2010/4/21 Andrew Myers <andru at cs.cornell.edu>

>  On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
>
> However, I strongly urge people who attempt to analyze the situation
> and to propose reforms to:
>
> 1. Keep it simple. An extraordinarily powerful system for fully
> proportional representation consisting of a seemingly-simple tweak on
> Single Transferable Vote was proposed in 1883 or so by Charles
> Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). If a simple system that is **obviously** far
> more democratic doesn't attract notice for more than a hundred years,
> what chance does something more complicated and dodgier (i.e.,
> involving lots of unknowns) have?
>
>
>  This description is misleading. It omits that there are no known good
> algorithms for implementing this method: the computational complexity of
> Dodgson's voting method is prohibitive. In fact, it was not even known until
> a few years ago, when the problem was shown to be complete for parallel
> access to an NP oracle (class Theta_2^p).
>
>     http://www.springerlink.com/content/wg040716q8261222/
>
> This result means it is extremely far from being usable in practice. Unless
> P=NP, there are no polynomial-time algorithms for deciding elections with
> Dodgson's method.
>
> -- Andrew
>
> Huh? Dodgson's method is asset voting. If I'm not mistaken, he did not put
any time limit on the convention - vote holders could refuse to delegate
their votes. Other Asset systems mandate vote transfers under certain
circumstances (elimination-style, to prevent games of chicken of "you
endorse me", "no, you endorse me"). However, in either case, it's still a
decidable process.

If you want tweaks to Asset to promote dialog: you can mandate some form of
accessibility to communication, either vertically (between a voter/proxy and
their proxy/metaproxy) and/or horizontally (between the voters/direct
subproxies for a given proxy). I think that vertical accessibility to
communication should be mandatory, and all vertical communication should be
accessible (though perhaps anonymized) horizontally. This would mean that
every level could function as a deliberative body.

Jameson Quinn
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