[EM] Proportional parliamentary and government elections with proxies

[Peter Zbornik]

Dear all,

has a direct proportional election system with proxies been considered
before?

Each voter is granted a vote in parliament, either personally or through a
proxy (as in stock companies). The voter could change his representative in
parliamet when she/he likes (or at a specific date to avoid identification
of the voter). The voter could have several representatives, each of them a
specialist in a different issue (health care, tax, education, business and
so on), or split his vote on several representatives in each area. There
would be no elections, just a continuous switching of proxies. The
representative of the voter would not know who supports him/her to avoid
coercion.

The voter who chose to represent himself would have the right to speak and
be present "virtually" or (less practical) physically in the parliament and
to vote on all issues and so on. For the time being I would like to put
aside such practical details, like how a milion parlamentarian would vote
and so on. Such problems can be solved through remote voting or similar.

The government could (but need not) be formed through proportional elections
by the citizens too.
Each voter would vote for each department, i.e., if there were 10
ministries, then the voter would cast a ranked ballot for each of the 10
ministries.
Some weights could be applied, i.e. if the voter could only care for one
ministry instead of all 10, then he could put all of his votes on this
ministry and none for the others.
In addition to this, each ministry could be weighted according to the share
of the public budget it uses.
I.e some ministries would take more of the vote than others. I.e. if one
ministry has half the budget, then a "standard" vote for this would require
half of the votes the voter has (i.e. 5 votes in the case of 10 ministries).
I.e. the voter has a constant number of votes (say V votes), each vote for a
specific seat "costs" A1,...,AS, where S is the number of ministries, and
A1+...+AS=V. A vote for ministry s, 1>=s>=S, would be normalised by the
"cost", i.e. if the voter would like to vote only for one minstry s, then he
would get V/As votes.
Furthermore, the voter would need to specify the rank-order of the
ministries themselves, so that all of the vote is used, even if the minister
in the "favorite minstry" becomes someone else than the candidates preferred
by the voter or if the preferred candidate is elected but the vote is not
fully exhausted.
The elections would then proceed as a normal STV election.
This got a bit complicated, I will provide a simple example upon request.

An election system as described above would blur the difference between
proportional representation and direct democracy and allow for direct
elections of a government.

A question I am not sure of, is how the approach above should be applied for
budget allocation for each ministry, i.e. how big part of the cake each
ministry should get. I guess each voter could make his budget allocation
between the ministries, and the resulting budget would be the arithmetic
mean of the submitted allocations. I guess there are better or more
sophisticated systems for optimal budget allocation.

Does anyone on this list have more information on similar methods to the
ones described above?
I guess such methods have been discussed on this list before.
A recommended book or paper or a reference to previous posts on this list
would be appreciated.

Best regards
Peter Zborník
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