[EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections

[Andrew Myers]

On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> Asset doesn't resemble what the Soviets had in the least.... There is
> no "party" control, parties become unnecessary with Asset.
Abd,

The phrase "parties become unnecessary" is redolent of utopian idealism. 
Parties will exist. Or do you think somehow asset voting is going to 
prevent concentrations of power, despite the "iron law of oligarchy" you 
are fond of quoting? Or there will be concentrations of power, but they 
virtuously will not engage in the give-and-take on the issues that at 
least some asset voting proponents have argued is a positive feature?

No, of course there are and will be concentrations of power.  The Soviet 
system had layers of electors. This allowed voting power to become more 
and more concentrated toward the top of the hierarchy until the top 
levels were pure Communist apparatchiks chosen for their unblinking 
loyalty to the system.
> It's also not necessarily "multistage." If voters fear coercion of
> small-scale electors, they can decide, in advance, to give large
> numbers of votes to single candidates whom they trust.
The ability to vote for the single candidate you think will win does 
help with the problem. But then what's the point of the asset mechanism? 
And if voters fear coercion of small-scale electors, they will vote the 
way those electors tell them to. That's the nature of coercion. Giving 
their vote away to someone else could open them up to reprisal. Maybe 
you think the vote will be anonymous? Then you need to design the 
protocols that protect anonymity. Not so easy. We should assume that the 
voting system is run by the parties and they will cheat if they can. The 
more layers your vote filters through, the more opportunities to cheat.

Also, we must remember that coercion comes in both negative and positive 
forms -- the latter is called vote buying. Asset voting seems to me to 
offer great possibilities for efficient distributed vote buying. 
Peer-to-peer vote buying, if you will.

If you propose something new that appears to have some of the features 
of a system known to be horrible, the onus is on you to convince others 
that these features are not a problem. You say asset voting isn't like 
Soviet democracy because it doesn't have party control. But how do you 
think that party control was established in the first place? Many 
totalitarian regimes (Soviet, even Nazi) start with a base comprising 
mostly idealists who sincerely want to make things better. The idealists 
are purged in the first few years via the governance mechanisms they 
have naively established.

 > We will organize anyway, whether Mr. Myers likes it or not. He can
 > join us, or not. We are not going to coerce him.

Classic.

-- Andrew