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

[Michael Allan]

Dear Juho, Fred and others,

I discovered something in history that enabled me to include formal
equality in the thesis, along with electoral power.  I post an
expanded abstract/outline for critique.  Can anyone see a weak point
in the reasoning here?

   An individual vote in an election has no meaningful effect in the
   objective world, and no effect whatsoever on the official outcome
   of the election; whether the vote is cast or not, the outcome is
   the same regardless.  Beneath this fact lies a structural fault
   that emerges here and there in society as a series of persistent
   discontinuities between facts and norms, or contents and forms.
   One rightly expects to be free because he lives in a democracy and
   has a vote; but the truth is, he has no political freedom at all.
   I trace the underlying cause of this fault to a technical design
   flaw in the electoral system wherein the elector is physically
   separated from the ballot.  This separation removes the elector as
   voter (the active decider) from the social means and product of
   decision, thereby rendering him individually powerless.  No
   electoral power exists in the vote itself, it exists purely in
   external communication networks; though the votes are brought
   together to make a result, the voters are not brought together *as
   such* to make a decision, consequently no valid decision can be
   extracted from the result.  In the 1700s and 1800s, middle class
   society was able to partly overcome this flaw by engaging in
   politically animated practices of decision formation and expression
   that, even without the benefit of a concrete ballot, were
   nevetherless voter-like.  This ad hoc practice of "abstract voting"
   enabled them to reconstitute electoral power within the flourishing
   communication networks of the day.  As voting rights later expanded
   into the population, however, the franchise came to include more
   people who lacked the personal or social means to engage in
   abstract voting and reach decisions of their own.  Their cumulative
   disengagement amounted to a power vacuum that coincided with the
   rise, after 1867, of the modern party system in Great Britain.  The
   modernized Liberal and Conservative parties each responded by
   packaging its own ready-made decision, thus reducing the input of
   the elector to a choice of which package to consume.  The resulting
   transfer of power from the weaker members of the electorate to the
   organized parties was the historical event that opened up the
   structural fault.  It opened between the two formal components of
   political liberty, namely individual power and equality.  These two
   components were torn apart for lack of any structural binding in
   society.  Society is well equipped to handle the various forms of
   inter-personal or mass communication in which electoral power alone
   exists, but it lacks any concomitant support of equality.  The
   ballot itself formalizes equality, but only internal to the
   electoral system; its structural strength cannot be realized unless
   it is externalized and personally bound to the elector.  With that
   as a foundation, society could have provided electoral services on
   the basis of form rather than content; services in support of
   decision making as opposed to a one-size-fits-all consumption.
   Ordinary competition among service providers would then be
   sufficient to ensure that all electors regardless of personal and
   social means had access to their share of constitutional power and
   its associated opportunities.  It was only ever a technical design
   flaw that precluded this development in the first place, and
   brought us instead to the present situation where the organized
   parties make the decisions and exercise the rightful power and
   political freedom that were intended for the citizens. [QCW]

Please see also this revised figure, which is too large to post:
http://zelea.com/var/db/repo/autonomy/raw-file/a44fa9a546c9/autonomy/a/fau/relations.png

   [REL] Causal relations among a formal failure of technical design
   (left) and actual failures in society (right).  See descriptions in
   text of (a), (b), (s).
        
The text itself is now divided into the following sections, which are
still largely undrafted: [T]

   1. The fact of an objectively meaningless vote
   2. A structural fault in society
   3. A design flaw in the electoral system
   4. Abstract voting and the early public sphere
   5. Franchise expansion, a power vacuum and the rise of the parties
   6. A failure of structural support for equal opportunity


Juho wrote:
> This [old abstract] was a bit too difficult to comment. The meaning
> of separation and its impacts are not clear. (No flaws identified,
> mostly opinions.)

I think this new version is better at tying the formal separation
(ballot from elector) to actual failures.


Fred wrote:
> Where voting is by ballot, it is true that a voter who does not cast
> a ballot is not a voter.  However, that does not seem to be the
> point.  It appears the point is that, at the moment a ballot is
> cast, the person that casts the ballot ceases to be a voter.  That
> is only true as to future issues which may come before the voters.
> It is untrue as to the issue on which the ballot was cast.

Technically it is always true I think, or at least in my terminology.
The elector is technically a "voter" while in possession of the ballot
(in the act of voting) and not at other times.  The distinction is
crucial to the thesis, because it can be difficult to behave like a
voter and engage in social decision making without the support of a
concrete ballot (abstract voting).

You are speaking of an "elector" in my terms (one who has a right to
vote) and not an actual voter.

> Ballots are the method by which voters express their opinions on
> matters at issue at the time they cast a ballot.  The fact that a
> ballot is no longer in a voter's physical possession after it is
> cast does not alter the validity of the expression of interest
> stipulated by the voter.  Voters are not diminished by the act of
> voting; they are no less the voters on an issue after they cast
> their ballots.  Subsequent events may cause voters to rue the ballot
> they cast, but that does not alter the validity of their ballot.

I wasn't clear about this earlier, but the crucial period (for the
thesis) is prior to election day.  Then the electors are expected to
inter-communicate and make a decision, thus behaving as voters.  But
the system offers no structural support for this - crucially no
support for formal equality among electors - and consequently they
lose all of their electoral power to the parties.  Historically the
loss began with the weaker majority of the electors, but it soon
tipped over to everyone else.


 [T]  Draft text: http://zelea.com/project/autonomy/a/fau/fau.xht

 [QCW] CW's steady insistence (Skype, 2011.9) that the economy has
      primacy over politics has led me to juxtapose (however clumsily)
      these two snippets of theory:

    * The individual labourer as such (as an artificer) being
      alienated from the product of her labour (artifact), is thereby
      disengaged from economic power and freedom.

    * The individual decider as such (elector cum voter) being
      alienated from the means and product of her decision (vote), is
      thereby disengaged from political power and freedom.

-- 
Michael Allan

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


Juho Laatu wrote:
> On 22.10.2011, at 1.42, Michael Allan wrote:
> 
> > Here is my latest attempt at a brief
> > summary with conclusions: [2]
. . .

> This was a bit too difficult to comment. The meaning of separation and its impacts are not clear. (No flaws identified, mostly opinions.)
> 
> > 
> > I now ask you to accept these conclusions as apparent or provisional
> > truths, provided you still see no flaws in the supporting argument.
> 
> Too vague for me to be accepted as a provisional truth. The technical analysis of the methods part was the part where I had not identified any technical flaws.
. . .

> Juho


Fred Gohlke wrote:
> Good Morning, Michael
. . .

> re: "I still maintain that the introduction of a ballot that
>       (unlike hands) is physically separate from the elector is a
>       technical design flaw.  It is not necessarily a significant
>       flaw at the very moment of its introduction; but even still,
>       an elector without a ballot is formally not a voter."
> 
> Where voting is by ballot, it is true that a voter who does not cast a 
> ballot is not a voter.  However, that does not seem to be the point.  It 
> appears the point is that, at the moment a ballot is cast, the person 
> that casts the ballot ceases to be a voter.  That is only true as to 
> future issues which may come before the voters.  It is untrue as to the 
> issue on which the ballot was cast.
> 
> Ballots are the method by which voters express their opinions on matters 
> at issue at the time they cast a ballot.  The fact that a ballot is no 
> longer in a voter's physical possession after it is cast does not alter 
> the validity of the expression of interest stipulated by the voter. 
> Voters are not diminished by the act of voting; they are no less the 
> voters on an issue after they cast their ballots.  Subsequent events may 
> cause voters to rue the ballot they cast, but that does not alter the 
> validity of their ballot.
> 
> 
> re: "It follows that communication among voters *as such* is made
>       impossible.  Moreover, if there is grounds to suspect that
>       actual voter-like communication among the electors is now
>       hindered, then this suspicion alone is enough to invalidate
>       the election results."
> 
> This appears to be the crux of the matter.  The right of the people to 
> communicate among themselves (i.e., deliberate) on matters of public 
> concern is the essence of democracy.  The flaw in modern electoral 
> practice is not the separation of voters from their ballots but that 
> voters have no means by which they can deliberate on and decide for 
> themselves the issues on which they will vote.
. . .

> Fred Gohlke