[EM] Small National Assembly. Bottom-Up government.

[Michael Ossipoff]

Small National-Assembly:

I expect that the reason why we have such a (otherwise unnecessarily) large
Congress is so that it can have representatives from hundreds of districts.

Without the districts, we wouldn't need the humungous Congress.

Of course that's likewise true of other countries' Congresses & Parliaments.

With a 7-seat governing-body, there needn't be an unnecessarily unwieldlly-
large candidate lineup in the elections.

We could have one big national election to fill those seats. The winner
would get a seat. That winner is removed from the election, and the count
is repeated with the remaining candidates. That winner is seated and
removed from the election, and another count is done...etc. ...till the 7
seats are filled.

In other words, the top 7 candidates in the finishing-order take the 7
seats.

It's more majoritarian than proportional representation.

In fact, why not just use a good single-winner method to choose, as one
whole party slate, between the various parties' 7-seat candidate sets. When
a certain party wins, its 7-candidate set takes the 7 seats.

With either of these national assemblies, combined with honest, open media
and verifiable vote-counting, I don't expect that there would be any
Republocrats in the assembly.  ...nor need there be.
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Bottom-Up System:

But I also like the suggestion for the Bottom-Up system:

Workplaces, neighborhoods, & maybe colleges, would each elect a local
management/governing body, and also a representative to send to the next
higher jurisdiction.

At that higher jurisdiction, the representatives that have been sent there
would constitute a governing body for that level of govt.   ...and they'd
also elect a representative to send to the next higher jurisdiction.

...and so on, all the way up to a national assembly.

The intermediate levels could be municipal (city, county, or both), state,
and national--but maybe with intermediate-size regions inbetween.

No, it wouldn't be very majority-preserving at the national level. But it
would be in each level's elections.

A big advantage is that, at each level, including the bottom level, you
better know the other voters, and even the candidates.

And the candidates aren't distant and unreachable. There's full direct
close-up communication among voters at each level, and between voters &
candidates. ...and between voters and officeholders.

Not like the distant, unreachable officeholders now, who aren't available
to answer questions, comments, requests, complaints, etc.

Count fraud would no longer be a problem,. The count-fraud problem could be
solved now, with public ballot-imaging, but in the Bottom-Up system the
problem wouldn't need to be solved, because it couldn't exist in the first
place.

Bottom-Up is the easy, natural, locally-organizable system. Arguably
Bottom-Up is the natural orientation & form for government.

Is i worth giving up numerical majority-preservation at the national level
to achieve those advantages.

Michael Ossipoff
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