[EM] A design flaw in the electoral system

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 04:30 AM 10/3/2011, Michael Allan wrote:

>http://zelea.com/project/autonomy/a/fau/fau.xht
>------------------------------------------------
>
>ABSTRACT
>--------
>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 this failure back to a technical design flaw in the
>electoral system, wherein the elector is physically separated from the
>ballot. [QCW]

The flaw is real, and it results from secret ballot voting as a 
method of making complex decisions (choice between more than two 
alternatives), where the amalgamation process, which in pure 
democracy is only the final stage of a complete deliberative process, 
a ratification of prior work, becomees the only form of expression of 
the voter. The flaw was addressed by Lewis Carroll in about 1883, 
with his invention of what was later called Candidate Proxy (several 
authors, this list in the 1990s) and Asset Voting (Warren Smith, c. 
2002, as I recall).

If Asset Voting is used to create a proportional representation 
system, using STV (but probably most voters just listing one 
candidate), and the Hare quota (thus allowing one or possibly more 
seats to remain vacant pending further process), a system is set up 
whereby the norm is that every vote counts, and can be seen to affect 
the result. That is, the method, if applied in a certain way, creates 
an assembly where every voter made their own personal optimal vote, 
and that vote then enabled the election either of a specific seat in 
the Assembly, or, in some cases, may have been split to elect more 
than one seat, or in relatively rare cases, all or part of the vote 
is *suspended*, as it were, pending further process, and the vote, 
even then, though not having a "seat," and thus creating a right to 
participate in the full assembly deliberative process, may still have 
real political power, that is, may be expressed directly in the 
Assembly whenever amalgamation takes place.

I'm not aware of any other system that can do this on a large scale. 
Asset Voting is really Delegable Proxy with a secret ballot initial 
proxy assignment stage. It could make possible the election of very 
highly representative assemblies, with no reliance on party systems 
being necessary.

Yet it is not a "pure election method," it incorporates a 
deliberative phase (negotiation between "candidates" being an aspect 
of deliberation). Nevertheless it can produce *results* that allow 
the purest imaginable form of democracy even with the scale being enormous.

Every vote is counted and counts. An Asset experiment was done by the 
Election Science Foundation, where a three-member steering committee 
was elected by 17 voters, such that every winner was either 
explicitly approved by every voter, or was approved by the candidate 
approved by the voter, within a few days of the "closing of the 
polls." To my knowledge, that was an historic result.