[EM] Public parties: a Trojan Horse in the party system

[Michael Allan]

Paul, Ed and Kristofer,

Paul said,
> indeed Demoex voting was restricted to members but membership was
> not restricted. ...

This is like a political party, but unlike a public party.  A public
party will not restrict voting to its members.

> ... to show the citizens that they have the real decisive power if
> they want to. And that is probably the most challenging part, they
> have to want to. The idea has to be sold and until this moment a
> positive response is indeed very hard to get. ...

We want people to take the reins, but we put barriers in front of
them.  It's a barrier to join a party; a barrier to accept someone
else's vision of democracy; to be told where and when to vote, with
whom, and by what method.  Even if these restrictions *seem* to be
necessary, they are effective as barriers.  Do you agree?


Ed said,
> ...  I think I get stuck here:
>
> > The public party strives to increase its primary turnout by all
> > means.  This includes mirroring the votes of would-be competitors
> > (other public parties) such that turnout is effectively pooled
> > among them. *
> 
> How can this mirroring be accomplished without duplication of votes?
> Most current formal elections (including primaries) are anonymous,
> and rely on a controlled registration process. If you are
> aggregating these controlled elections along with less-controlled
> input from many other sources, isn't it possible for some people to
> vote many times (or at least twice), while others with less
> energy/time/knowledge/etc. would have fewer votes (or perhaps just
> one)?

Yes, that's correct.  We cannot image anonymous votes.  We must know
the identity of the voter and the time at which the vote was cast.
Only the latest vote is valid.

> Alternately, if the anonymous election is assumed to always be
> redundant with other mirrored systems, then isn't it meaningless to
> the vote mirror?

I think an anonymous primary (political party) is meaningless as far
as its votes are concerned.  But the voters, nominees and candidates
are valuable.  The public parties want the voters for sake of turnout,
and they use the nominees and candidates to attract them.

The anonymous official election (state) is meaningful for executing
the decision of the public primaries.  Private individuals will carry
the decision across with their ballots.

Outside of these two places, anonymous voting seems unlikely to be
important or common.  It's kind of boring, so it probably won't be
competitive with public methods when people have a choice.


Kristofer said,
> There are two areas of difficulty. First, this party would have to
> have some kind of administration (that would publish the lists, and
> so on).  One would have to be sure the administrators don't co-opt
> the party and transform it into an ordinary party. Such things have
> happened, to lesser degrees, with small parties that have become
> large. Novel forms of voting, or consensus based systems, disappear
> because they're not effective enough, for instance.

The mirroring network is supposed to prevent that.  A public party is
a service provider (primary voting) and the mirroring network is there
to ensure that service provision is competitive.  If I don't like
party P's offering of voting method V, for example, then I can try
party Q's offering.  Or if I don't like method V at all, then I can
try W on R's voting facilities.  Or I can start party S with method X.
So the public parties (P, Q, R, S) provide competing services to the
voters while sharing the same votes (no competing for those).

I guess this a rationalization.  It unties primary voting services
from interest groups.  Currently the two are bound together in the
political party, but that makes no sense.

> Second, the Public List just reproduces the thing elections are
> supposed to solve in the first place - which is finding good
> candidates. In the actual election, the "good candidates" are the
> winners, and get parliamentary seats or executive positions. But the
> Public List doesn't have any people deciding upon the internal
> election, so it has to have some kind of primary to construct the
> list to begin with. And for that primary, it needs a way of
> winnowing the field so that voters aren't faced with having to rank
> a million candidates in the primary. Making a primary for the
> primary could get unwieldy.

Yes.  Concerning the two types of election, consider looking at the
relation this way:

 (a) Primary elections decide who the good candidates are, meaning who
     *ought* to be in office.

 (b) Official elections decide who the actual elect are, meaning who
     *shall* be in office.

The decisions in both cases are expressed in ranked lists.  If all is
correct, then the top N entries of list (a) will match those of (b),
where N is the number of offices at issue.  N is 1 in Anglo-American
elections (single winner) or several 100's in Europe (multi-winner).

> So the Public List needs some kind of logic. If it has that -
> e.g. if it used Gohlke's triad system - then it could be used to
> change the political system without actually changing the general
> election method. ...

Yes, the triad system would probably make a good primary method for
this purpose.

> ... But if the system isn't part of the general election, then there
> may be incentive not to bother. Say that the internal selection
> process produces a list of centrists. Left-wingers (who didn't win)
> may decide to just vote for a left-wing party instead of the Public
> List in the general election. People taking part in the internal
> election may, anticipating this, think that "we'll go through all
> this work and then, because we're a centrist party, few people will
> put us first, so why should we?". ...

First consider the single winner case.  Suppose it's election eve.
Suppose the public primary ranks the candidates (C, L, R) with the
centrist leading.  We expect people to carry their public votes (C or
L or R) into the official election and there reproduce the decision.
If they do, then C wins exactly as decided in the primary.

Can this be generalized to the multi-winner case?  (I'm not an expert,
so please correct me if I'm wrong.)  Suppose there are three seats in
the assembly (N = 3):

    List      Party
    -------   -----
    C, L, R   Public party P

    C, L, R   Public party Q 

              . . . (public parties all tend to have the same list,
                     as reflected in the mirroring network)

    L, M, N   Leftist political party

    R, S, T   Rightist political party

Candidate C has more support than L or R, and is therefore elected no
matter what the leftists or rightists do.  That much is certain.  It
also seems likely that L and R are elected in the predicted order.
But this depends on two assumptions.  One is equal loyalty among the
political parties.  If all the leftists were to vote for their party
while none of the rightists voted for theirs, then M might get elected
instead of R, for example.

The other assumption is that the political parties order their lists
by popularity.  If the leftist list were instead (M, N, O), then it
might be possible (?) for M to be elected in place of L, thus (C, M,
R); or even for the leftists to drop down a rank due to vote
splitting, thus (C, R, L) or (C, R, M).  But generally there appears
to be nothing positive a party could gain from manipulating its list.

Did I figure this correctly?  Demoralization seems more likely to
affect the political parties than the public parties.  Leftists would
no longer have much to gain from participating in the leftist primary,
for example.  They could not sway the decision in their favour except
by joining in the ongoing public primary and somehow shifting its
result (C,L,R) more to the left.

> ... This suggests the internal method should be proportional as
> well.

I think of proportional representation as cutting across a patchwork
of regions and replacing them with a patchwork of interests.  I think
of public parties as cutting across all boundaries and rendering the
election completely fluid (as Fred says).


 * http://metagovernment.org/wiki/User:Michael_Allan/Public_parties

-- 
Michael Allan

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


Paul Nollen said:
> Hi all,
> 
> indeed Demoex voting was restricted to members but membership was not 
> restricted. At the time they started (2002 ) and place this was the only 
> possibility to make a list of people with voting rights.
> Here in Belgium, today, we can use our electronic ID card for voting. The 
> only problem with that is that we can't exclude people who lost their voting 
> rights by a court conviction. That list is not publically available.
> And the purpose is indeed to use the system in the way it is (elected 
> representatives in a representative system) , because it is nearly 
> impossible to change it, and act as a Troyan horse with a direct democratic 
> initiative in a purely representative system.
> Of course this can be only a temporary action, just like the Troyan horse, 
> to breach the power of the representative system and to show the citizens 
> that they have the real decisive power if they want to. And that is probably 
> the most challenging part, they have to want to. The idea has to be sold and 
> until this moment a positive response is indeed very hard to get.
> On the other hand, the same idea is emerging, even here in Belgium, in other 
> groups who never heard about us and Demoex. We can say that it seems to be a 
> more or less natural proces when people become aware of the possibilities 
> offered by the technological developments.
> 
> Paul

Ed Pastore said:
> Michael, I am re-reading your original proposal more carefully, and I think I get stuck here:
> 
> > The public party strives to increase its primary turnout by all means.
> > This includes mirroring the votes of would-be competitors (other
> > public parties) such that turnout is effectively pooled among them.
> 
> How can this mirroring be accomplished without duplication of votes? Most current formal elections (including primaries) are anonymous, and rely on a controlled registration process. If you are aggregating these controlled elections along with less-controlled input from many other sources, isn't it possible for some people to vote many times (or at least twice), while others with less energy/time/knowledge/etc. would have fewer votes (or perhaps just one)?
> 
> Alternately, if the anonymous election is assumed to always be redundant with other mirrored systems, then isn't it meaningless to the vote mirror?

Kristofer Munsterhjelm said:
> On 07/09/2012 03:29 AM, Michael Allan wrote:
> 
> > Kristofer Munsterhjelm said:
> >> We don't really have primaries here, at least not in the sense of
> >> patches to make Plurality work, because we don't use Plurality but
> >> party list PR. There are still internal elections (or appointments,
> >> depending on party) to determine the order of the list - those are
> >> probably the closest thing to primaries here.
> >
> > Imagine a PR party that invites all residents (even members of other
> > parties) to participate in the "primary election" of its party list.
> > It is not an ordinary party with an ideology, or platform.  Its only
> > concern is primary *inclusivity*.  It calls itself the "Public List"
> > and it strives to be just that, and nothing more.
> >
> > Hypothesis: the Public List will have a lower attrition rate than any
> > other party.  Unlike other parties, it cannot easily offend the voters
> > because all it does is open its list to their participation.  Nor can
> > it easily offend the nominees and candidates, because it is equally
> > open to them.  It will therefore come to win all elections.
> >
> > Is this likely to be true?  What could work against it?
> 
> There are two areas of difficulty. First, this party would have to have 
> some kind of administration (that would publish the lists, and so on). 
> One would have to be sure the administrators don't co-opt the party and 
> transform it into an ordinary party. Such things have happened, to 
> lesser degrees, with small parties that have become large. Novel forms 
> of voting, or consensus based systems, disappear because they're not 
> effective enough, for instance.
> 
> Second, the Public List just reproduces the thing elections are supposed 
> to solve in the first place - which is finding good candidates. In the 
> actual election, the "good candidates" are the winners, and get 
> parliamentary seats or executive positions. But the Public List doesn't 
> have any people deciding upon the internal election, so it has to have 
> some kind of primary to construct the list to begin with. And for that 
> primary, it needs a way of winnowing the field so that voters aren't 
> faced with having to rank a million candidates in the primary. Making a 
> primary for the primary could get unwieldy.
> 
> So the Public List needs some kind of logic. If it has that - e.g. if it 
> used Gohlke's triad system - then it could be used to change the 
> political system without actually changing the general election method. 
> But if the system isn't part of the general election, then there may be 
> incentive not to bother. Say that the internal selection process 
> produces a list of centrists. Left-wingers (who didn't win) may decide 
> to just vote for a left-wing party instead of the Public List in the 
> general election. People taking part in the internal election may, 
> anticipating this, think that "we'll go through all this work and then, 
> because we're a centrist party, few people will put us first, so why 
> should we?". This suggests the internal method should be proportional as 
> well.
> 
> >
> >> I imagine that the primary link is even weaker in STV countries. Say
> >> you have a multimember district with 5 seats. To cover all their
> >> bases, each party would run at least 5 candidates for that election,
> >> so that even if they get all the seats, they can fill them. But that
> >> means that people who want members of party X to get in power can
> >> choose which of the candidates they want. There's no predetermined
> >> list, and there's less of a "take it or leave it" problem than in
> >> single member districts.
> >
> > Wouldn't the Public List also have an opening here?
> 
> Yes, but STV also supports independents. Even more than in party list, 
> the Public List's advantage rests only in finding good candidates before 
> the real election.