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

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 10:36 PM 4/26/2010, Andrew Myers wrote:
>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.

Redolent. Nice word. Where can I buy some redolence?

>  Parties will exist.

Sure. In FA/DP I call them "caucuses." The problem with present 
parties is that they are too difficult to create, so FA/DP makes them 
trivial to create. When they are hard to create, they develop their 
own inertia, it becomes "my way or the highway." It's easy to say 
that one could just found another party, "if you're so smart," but 
what if one has just spent years of one's life developing a party, 
and it is taken over by a faction that is highly motivated and highly 
biased, maybe even corrupt?

Look, I've seen it happen with really great nonprofit organizations; 
the natural oligarchy that develops substitutes its own vision for 
the collective vision, the group loses connection with its roots, and 
eventually it fails or becomes a far less effective "fixture" of the 
political environment.

>  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?

Will not engage in give-and-take? Where does this idea come from? 
However, note: I'm not proposing Asset Voting as a utopian solution, 
but merely as a possible solution to a basic problem in democracy: 
how to create a fully representative assembly. It's possible to do it 
through a party system, but party systems create a serious kind of 
inertia that causes them to become unrepresentative. They end up 
representing party interests rather than the interests of the members.

Yes, Iron Law of Oligarchy. OLigarchies will form, but I do have 
experience with organizations where this fact is harnessed rather 
than becoming dominant.

In any case, FA/DP would be the utopian solution, and, strictly, it 
isn't utopian, because there exists a specific plan to get from here 
to there, and that plan does not require a fixed ("utopian") vision, 
it only requires small improvements, each step "funding" itself and 
preparing for the next steps, and, since what is being constructed is 
an intelligent decision-making system, it will modify its own course 
as it sees fit, and the FA aspect essentially requires and insists 
that no FA is controlling, so there will be independent FAs, as 
needed, and the most efficient and effective of them will survive, 
and the others will be absorbed without having caused harm.

This *sounds* utopian, but only because most people don't have 
experience with organizations that work like this. I did't invent the 
FA concept, I simply found it and gave it a name. It works, and does 
what most people routinely consider impossible.

>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.

Sure. They had what appeared to be democratic mechanisms. But they 
absolutely didn't have the FA concept. There was a supposedly 
democratic structure, but it was *coercive.* My guess is that those 
who designed the Soviet system, originally, were quite idealistic 
about it, but they were doing this within a context that blamed the 
defects of goverment on enemies, and they were trying to build a New 
Man who would only act for collective interest.

FA/DP -- and asset voting -- work with people as they are, and they 
do not incorporate any such assemptions, the opposite. Using the term 
"Soviet" implies coercion. The Soviets also used a form of approval 
voting. That doesn't make approval voting "soviet."

Asset Voting doesn't create, as proposed, formal layers beyond one. 
(I.e, it creates, from the original Voters/Seats, 
Voters/Electors/Seats). I'd be interested in seeing what the Soviets 
actually had, but there are no "intermediate councils" unless the 
electors themselves decide to form them, and they would not be 
legally binding entities. Indeed, they might be "parties," in effect, 
or political parties might create such associations. But they would 
not control the voting of electors, though they certainly could 
advise it. An elector doesn't have anything to lose, which is 
different from elected seats, who must maintain the support of their 
electors, certainly to be re-elected, but, in some systems, even to 
maintain the seat, because it might be "continuous election," 
revocable. --- because of the nature of the scale problem, I've 
suggested that seats might have some persistance as to right to 
participate in deliberation, but might lose voting power partially or 
fully, but that's a detail.)

>>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?

That's up to the voters! It will be useful for some and not for 
others. What I'm suggesting is that the system will naturally shift 
toward more and more electors receiving fewer votes each, and the 
reason has to do with communication and access. If you don't care 
about your ability to influence legislation and to talk about -- and 
be talked to about -- political matters, sure, might as well vote for 
a popular candidate. Or whomever you choose.

This ability to make a free choice is the point. You decide who 
represents you. Not others.

>  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.

And the response to coercion? Coerce voters so that they can't be 
coerced? Hello?

>  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.

In other words, Mr. Myers is proposing that the problem is insoluble. 
The vote is only anonymous in the initial layer, the secret ballot 
election. Asset, though, empowers the people. Does Mr. Myers think 
they would tolerate coercion? Sure, if the voting system is corrupt, 
the powers that be can declare any result they want. But Asset voters 
will know that they are doing this. They can, after all, talk to each other.

Mr. Myers is representing a school of thought that considers the 
people to be powerless victims. They aren't. They are merely beaten 
down and don't have ready mechanisms to organize and exercise their 
power, and there is a whole history of revolutions that promised 
"power to the people," but that delivered, instead, "power to us, the 
vanguard of the people." Hence my focus, not on confrontation of the 
"machine" or the "powerful," but on mechanisms for organizing people 
directly, without creating abusive oligarchies. Oligarchies will 
still form, but FA/DP gives them only the power to serve, to advise, 
and sets up ways in which the people can observe what their chosen 
representatives do. In FAs, the representatives have only the power 
to communicate, they cannot govern or control the people, the members 
they represent in a loose way, they are synapses in a human nervous 
system, where the individual neurons (each member) seeks out and 
chooses what other neurons to connect with.

>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.

In which case it becomes the positive form, simple negotiation, which 
is part of deliberation, basic demcratic process.

>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.

Not my problem, actually. Think what you like. Eat what you think.

>  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?

I know the answer to that, and it has nothing to do with Asset Voting 
or with voting at all.

>  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.

Yes, of course. But they created power structures that enforced party 
discipline from the beginning. I'm not working to create a political 
party at all. I'm working to create structures that allow and 
facilitate cooperation. If people want to collaborate and cooperate 
to build a structure that will destroy their society and them, they 
are free to do it. How could I stop them?

But that's not what people want. Mostly, most of the time, they want 
to be left alone. And then they want to work together joyfully and 
voluntarily. How to harness this for collective welfare? Most people 
aren't even asking the question, much less proposing solutions.

> > 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.

That's correct. And what happened to those who ignored it, that 
classic version that Mr. Myers is projecting all over this?

Another slogan.

Change the world in one easy step.

Go to sleep, we will change it for you.

Now, if Mr. Myers doesn't like that vision, what is he going to do 
about it? Be specific.

Let me put it this way: if Mr. Myers has a better solution, let him 
implement it. If it's better, we will join him. If not, well, he'll 
only have wasted some of his own time, unless perhaps buying guns is 
part of his proposals.

In which case, if our proposal is better, we will have more resources 
and access to power, if it's needed.

In the end, it's not up to me at all. If these ideas are worth 
understanding and applying, people will apply them. FA/DP concepts 
can make *any organization* that depends on voluntary cooperation 
more effective and efficient. Opportunities to apply this are legion, 
but for any individual, they don't appear every day. Open your eyes, 
folks, understand what's happening in society and how it might be 
shifted if needed. And it's needed. Badly.

"And don't speak too soon for the wheel's still in spin, and there's 
no telling who that it's naming."

Yeah, bad grammar. Screw it. Usage is king, power to the people.