[EM] A structural fault in society owing to a design flaw in the electoral system

[Michael Allan]

Dear Warren,

Thanks very much for looking at the argument.  I know of no design
flaw in the bee colony's decision process that would be equivalent to
the separation of elector from ballot, or signaller from means of
signal.  In this regard, I think the success of the species is
consistent with my thesis.

Maybe we should not be too surprised at the lack of a modern style
party system in Venice.  Many changes separate the medieval Italian
city states from Victorian Britain, including mass communication media
and a newly enfranchised electorate of millions.  It might be that the
rise of the party system cannot be pinned to a flaw in the electoral
system as my theory holds.  But there must be *some* reason why
political parties have gained influence in the selection of
candidates, in the success or failure of their campaigns, and in the
drafting and passage of laws, when these political freedoms are denied
to me.

-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, +1 416-699-9528
http://zelea.com/


Warren Smith wrote:
> > Michael Allan:
> http://zelea.com/project/autonomy/a/fau/fau.xht
> "An individual vote has no effect on the formal outcome of the
> election; whether the vote is cast or not, the outcome is the same
> regardless. This appears to open a structural fault in society between
> the individual person and the individual vote. The voter as such (as a
> decider) is thus alienated from the means and product of decision, and
> thereby disengaged from political power and freedom. I argue that the
> sum of these disengagements across the population amounts to a power
> vacuum, which, in mid to late Victorian times, led to the effective
> collapse of the electoral system and the rise of a mass party system.
> Today, the organized parties make the decisions and exercise the
> political power that was intended for the individual voters. I trace
> these failures back to a technical design flaw in the electoral system
> ..."
> 
> --REPLY:
> Theories need to be judged via experiment.
> A massive experimental refutation of this entire thesis would seem to
> be the fact that honeybees have been highly successfully using
> range-voting elections for millions of years:
> http://rangevoting.org/ApisMellifera.html
> 
> However, despite this immensity of time and the immensity of the
> number of elections (hundreds of trillions !!!) they've
> held, honeybees still have not reached "the effective collapse of the
> electoral system and the rise of a mass party system."
> 
> Note, honeybee experimental evidence vastly outweighs human election
> experience, vastly outweighs all data Michael Allan has ever seen in
> his life, etc.
> 
> So.   Either
> (a) Michael Allan's whole set of ideas is just wrong.
> (b) Range voting (which the honeybees use) is somehow different and allows
> escaping Michael Allan's ideas (which could still be right for some
> other voting systems such as plurality).
> (c) having political parties somehow would be beyond the ability of
> honeybees, even though
> range voting is not beyond their ability; and even though with humans
> at present political
> parties are within their ability but range voting is beyond it.
> 
> MORE EVIDENCE is the fact that various other human countries
> apparently never got important political parties
> despite centuries of elections.  E.g. Venice, which also used range voting:
> http://rangevoting.org/VenHist.html
> 
> Michael Allan completely ignores this evidence, which kind of
> indicates his great scholarly contribution
> to political science... falls a bit short.
> 
> -- 
> Warren D. Smith
> http://RangeVoting.org  <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
> "endorse" as 1st step)