[EM] Conceiving a Democratic Electoral Process

[Fred Gohlke]

Good Afternoon, Juho

re: "In typical national elections the number of representatives
      is much smaller than the number of voters you will have the
      problem that candidates are distant to the voters, one way
      or another."

Only if you assume present practices are cast in concrete.  Once you 
open your mind to the idea that we can each choose, from among those we 
know, a person we can trust to make choices for us, and that person gets 
ample time to examine his competitors for office, we will no longer be 
required to vote for people whose ability and integrity we have no way 
to validate.


re: "... or maybe they are allowed to elect only representatives
      that later elect some higher level representatives, and
      again, they will never meet the candidates that will be the
      top level representatives."

You're correct.  They will not have met them, but each of them are part 
of a direct line of individuals that culminates in the people who are 
make the later selections.  Depending on the way the process is 
implemented, they can influence those who make the later choices by 
expressing their position and providing whatever evidence they may have, 
good or bad, to those who are making the later choices.  If the 
capability is implemented, they will also have the ability to institute 
a recall.  Each of them is a link in the electoral chain and have reason 
to trust those who make the final selections because they were part of 
the process of selecting them.


re: "If we want each candidate to be forced to answer to some key
      questions that their fellow candidates might ask them (good
      idea), one solution would be to simply force them to do so."

It may not be simple.  I'm not sure you can 'force' someone to answer a 
question - honestly.  Words are cheap.  What someone says is much less 
revealing than their demeanor when they say it.  That's why face-to-face 
interaction is so important.

We would also need to decide who will formulate the question(s) or what 
the question(s) will be.  I haven't thoroughly considered this idea, but 
perhaps others can help examine it.


re: "I mean that other candidates (maybe from second level up)
      (and maybe also media) would be entitled to ask some
      questions from them, and all candidates would have to
      present written answers to these questions publicly. (We may
      have to limit the number of questions, but that's another
      story.) Voters would still be the bottom level voters.  I
      kept that approach in the described approach to keep the
      link between the bottom level voters and the top level
      representatives direct (and to provide an alternative to the
      chained hierarchical evaluation model (where the elected
      elect the next level etc.)). My target was to empower the
      bottom level voters as much as possible."

I'm sorry, Juho.  I seem to have missed one of your posts.  You say, "I 
kept that approach in the described approach", but I haven't seen the 
approach you described.


re: "... I think no two countries are alike."

No, but people are pretty much the same all over the world.  We all love 
and hope and dream and fear pretty much the same way.  Genius and 
repugnance are distributed throughout the human race.  Our various 
cultures develop at different rates, but our Attilas and our Napoleons 
pop-up here and there throughout our existence.  If we can conceive a 
democratic electoral process, any community can use it when their local 
circumstances allow.

Fred