[EM] Conceiving a Democratic Electoral Process

[Juho Laatu]

On 27.6.2012, at 3.10, Michael Allan wrote:

> (brief comments and a question)
> 
> Fred Gohlke said:
>> re: "Sponsoring is a separate topic."  ... Absolutely not!!!! ...
>> Sponsorship is the heart of party power.  Their ability to choose
>> and sponsor the candidates we are allowed to vote for gives them
>> control of the entire political process. ...
> 
> I agree.  Maybe we could define the party as:
> 
>  (a) a *primary* electoral system
>  (b) one that sponsors candidates for *public* office
>  (c) where voting is restricted to *private* members
> 
>> We have the tools and the ability to conceive a non-partisan
>> electoral method.  Let's start.
> 
> Juho Laatu said:
>> Let's generate better methods.  Are you sure that you don't want
>> parties even in the sense that there would be ideological groupings
>> that people could support?  Or in the sense that there would always
>> be an alternative to the current rulers.
> 
> Imagine waving a wand and eliminating (c), the restriction of primary
> voting to private members.  What effect would it have on the parties?
> What effect on the official elections?

The ability of parties to restrict voters' choice on who will be elected certainly concentrates power to the inner circles of the party. Currently used methods may have one candidate only or several candidates (per district). Several candidates might be ordered by the party (closed lists) or by the voters (open lists, STV). Preliminaries are another approach to letting voters (party members) influence more on who will be elected.

If we want to divide the opinion space into parties but we want to eliminate all party internal influence on who will be elected, what could we do? One approach could be to allow parties to be formed, and they would have their ideologies, but in the election voters could vote for any person. Each voter would vote for one person (or a list of persons) as a representative of one of the parties. In order to make this work we might need some restrictions, not to end up in a situation where the votes are distributed too widely. Maybe we would allow voters to vote only people of their own area. Maybe we would have a hierarchical system where the (numerous) winners of the first level would elect the (much fewer) represetatives of the next level. This would happen separately within each party. We might limit the choice of candidates to people who have given their permission (e.g. by joining or announcing support to some party - or maybe even multiple parties).

Juho



> 
> -- 
> Michael Allan
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