[EM] Delegable proxy and corruption.

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 09:36 AM 2/11/2010, Jameson Quinn wrote:

>2010/2/10 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax 
><<mailto:abd at lomaxdesign.com>abd at lomaxdesign.com>
>At 02:16 PM 2/10/2010, Jameson Quinn wrote:
>
>What if the bribe is payable only after the vote, and only for 
>effective votes? (And don't say that the bribegiver can't be 
>trusted. Since corruption is often a very cheap investment for the 
>bribegiver, they would not be particularly motivated to fail to pay 
>the bribe after the fact. Even if trust was lacking, human ingenuity 
>can easily come up with ways of securing the deal.)
>
>
>The real issue is whether or not it would be easier to corrupt a 
>delegable proxy system than others.
>
>Although you make a number of other, speculative arguments for why 
>DP should be objectively difficult to corrupt, this is by far your 
>strongest point. Even if DP is corruptible - an idea which, despite 
>your arguments, I still find plausible - I see no reason why it 
>should be more corruptible than any present-day system, or than any 
>other proposed system. Any anti-corruption safeguards could be made 
>to work as well or, in some cases, better under DP than with other 
>systems. Thus, corruptibility is not really a valid argument against DP.
>
>(In other words... quit while you're ahead. If you have one good 
>argument, you don't need 3.)

Perhaps. However, it would depend on my purpose. What I've seen, 
frequently, are assumptions that delegable proxy and Asset voting 
would function analogously to existing systems of elected 
representation which do, by nature, concentrate representation, 
creating nodes of power that are more efficient to corrupt, and which 
remove, comparatively, transparency and accountability.

Con artists can and do behave corruptly in face-to-face encounters, 
sometimes managing to fool people who imagined that they were close 
friends. But, I submit, this is a particular pathology that is 
unlikely to be reproduced on a large scale. My sense is that, by and 
large, when people can interact directly with people they are 
considering as representatives, they will make decent choices of whom 
to trust. On average. None of this implies or requires that people be 
perfect. Rather, what I expect, intuitively, is that trustworthiness 
will tend to concentrate in a delegable proxy system, as one moves up 
the hierarchy that it creates from the bottom up. As well, the level 
of attention paid by those below to those above will increase, moving 
up the structure, until, say with an Asset system, if one has an 
elector with not enough support to be elected to hold a seat, holds 
nevertheless (or influences) significant voting power, this person 
will be paying close attention, usually.

Seats who get a quota directly will be relatively immune to 
supervision, they'd have to actually break the law to lose their 
seats or voting rights. I expect that, however, to become 
increasingly rare in an assembly that covers some major territory, 
i.e., major population boiled down to relatively few seats.

So what will be created, ultimately, would be an assembly that might 
look quite similar to a current parliamentary assembly with accurate 
proportional representation -- but not party-based, per se, though 
parties might affect it -- but that would have around it, as a 
penumbra, a larger and fully representative body (*fully* 
representative) that can vote when it finds it useful and that can 
supervise the Assembly when needed, and without major fuss or 
difficult legal process. Such supervision would not involve needing 
to convince some majority of some proposition, such as requiring a 
censure vote. Rather, the electors who created a seat could, in 
theory, take it back, fully or partially. If enough of them agree, 
they could remove the seat from the Assembly and create a new one. Or 
they could remove that part of the voting power of the seat that 
their votes represented, in one of several ways. Easily. Not 
complicated, not an onerous burden that will be avoided because of 
the severe difficulty, as with present recall requirements.

Sure, some corruption aimed at seats will be possible in an Asset 
system, because the seats will have real power. But the electors do 
not depend on the seats; rather the seats depend on the electors, so 
the power of the seat is limited to situations where the seat retains 
the confidence of the electors. In a mature system, each seat will be 
associated with many electors, who become not only a means of 
restraining the seat, but also a means of advising it -- and being 
advised. These electors are effectively defined constituents. The 
seat will know -- except for direct votes, which, as I stated, would 
tend to be a relatively small part of a seat's quota -- exactly whom 
to consider him or herself as representing (and through them the 
quota of voters, from rather easily defined districts), and, as well, 
the seat will know where to turn for advice about the positions of 
the electorate, where that's important. And where to turn for support 
from the public in other ways.

Asset will not require *any* expenditure to be elected. I would be 
very reluctant to vote for someone who solicited it from me, in an 
Asset system! That people interested in being public servants as 
electors would make themselves available, would talk to neighbors and 
generally make it easy to meet them, that would not offend me at all. 
To me, the crucial qualification to receive my vote in an Asset 
election would be:

1. The candidate is available. I can call the candidate up and talk 
personally with him or her. If I like the candidate, but can't make 
that direct connection, I will instead look for someone I *can* call, 
and I might even ask the candidate for recommendations. I would 
expect, in fact, this from candidates who actually have come to hold 
a seat. They will be far too busy to talk to all their constituents. 
Electors need not be so busy.

2. I trust the candidate personally. I may not necessarily agree with 
the candidate on all issues, but I trust that *on average* this 
candidate is as likely or more likely than myself to make a sound 
decision, once informed. If I can't find anyone to trust like this, I 
should either become a candidate myself, and vote for myself, or I 
should realize that I don't have time to take part in the system, and 
I might then vote for someone, if I vote at all, who wasn't quite up 
to that quality (as perceived by me.) But, note: if I find myself 
thinking like that, on theoretical grounds I will start to suspect 
that my own judgment has become warped!

In other words, as with delegable proxy, I expect Asset to build 
*personal connections* that collectively structure the entire 
society. Below the Assembly level, delegable proxy, in fact, could be 
used as a *voluntary* organizational system so that electors can 
efficiently find how to amalgamate their votes to create seats, and 
then allow for shared supervision of the seats elected. If a seat has 
been created by amalgamation of votes from a thousand electors, most 
of them won't have the time for close supervision and communication, 
and the seat might have trouble managing it as well. But a thousand 
people already united somewhat coherently (by agreeing on a choice of 
the person to fill the seat) could probably put together a delegable 
proxy committee that collectively represents all or nearly all of 
them, with a handful of members. If we imagine that a "discussion 
group" might consist of, say, twenty people, we would want about two 
or three levels of structure to keep communication personal and 
always open, while still filtering the seat from having to deal with 
a thousand people. DP allows the "committee" sizes to naturally form 
and function efficiently; when they get too large, they fission, when 
they are smaller than necessary, thus requiring more levels than 
necessary, they will merge.

A DP committee can be, simply, a mailing list that has, as 
subscribers, all the clients of a proxy; it would be moderated by the 
proxy or someone designated by the proxy. The proxy is 
himself/herself a client of someone up the structure, perhaps even 
the seat -- say it's the seat -- so when the proxy sees something 
worth passing on, in his or her judgment, the proxy can just forward 
the message, and is a subscriber to the seat's direct list.

It's essential that these lists not have too much traffic, noise is 
the basic problem of scale in democracy. In a system like this, all 
the subscribers to a list routinely get the email addresses of every 
other member of the list who posts.

(If I'm involved in a system, and I'm asked to accept being a proxy 
for someone I don't know and don't trust yet, I might not allow the 
person to subscribe to that basic list for my clients, I might have 
another list that echoes posts to the lists, but without email 
addresses being shown. In delegable proxy systems, very important, 
accepting a proxy is accepting a communications burden, and accepting 
raw proxies could represent more burden than benefit. For this 
reason, I expect DP systems to be self-regulating, they will find the 
ideal sizes for lists and committees and proxy assignments. And, 
again, for this reason, I've abandoned ideas that the number of 
proxies should be regulated in some way, except that for Asset 
Voting, direct voting in the Assembly is restricted to one quota of 
votes. (In a pure DP system, with a DP Assembly, there is no 
restriction at all, and a superproxy is possible, one person who 
directly or indirectly represents everyone. That's okay for voluntary 
organizations, perhaps, but probably not for government.)