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

[Michael Ossipoff]

Ted—



You wrote:



Looking at the problem from a higher level, one could instead ask, what is

the problem that we are trying to address with legislatures to begin with?



One could argue, along the lines of The Wisdom of Crowds, that governing

can be compared to a genetic modeling problem.  If that is the case, the

part of government that proposes and argues new laws can be compared to

genetic diversity, while the accept or reject portion of government can be

compared to natural selection.  That would lead one to the proposition of

using Proportional Representation in the lower house, and centrist

aggregation for the upper house and executive branches.

 [endquote]

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Such as a single-winner method repeatedly applied.



In an ideal world, that 2-house system might be one of the possibilies.



Ideally, I don’t oppose PR, though I don’t consider it necessary or
important. GPUS, G/GPUSA, SPUSA and probably other progressive parties
too, advocate PR, and I wouldn’t oppose it or take a position one way
or the other about it.



With a progressive party in office, I’d be content with at least first
trying out the government that they propose in their platform, as-is.



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You wrote:


So what is the best way to represent the lower house?



Consider http://www.thirty-thousand.org/



At one time, there was one representative for every 30K voters.  We are now

some large distance away from that.



Historically, the number of representatives per candidate approximately

followed the curve of the cube root of the population, until the number of

representatives was frozen in 1913 at 435.

[endquote]

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 Apportioning seats to states has a built-in “1-person-1-vote” problem:


The Senate automatically gives each state 2 senators, regardless of
the state’s population. And even the House can’t avoid that problem,
because it’s necessary to give a House representative to every state,
resulting in unavoidably more representation per person in the
smallest states.



That could be avoided if we forget about apportionment to states, and
just district, disregarding state-lines, the whole country, by
Band-Rectangle districting, a districting system in which district
lines are established by the Band-Rectangle rule, with no human input.



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You Wrote:

Personally, I would prefer a combination of more representatives with PR,

so that almost everyone would feel that their voice was represented in the

lower house of the legislature.



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Yes, but the many small districts bring “pork-barrel” incentive.



My suggestion of a 7-member all at-large national assembly would avoid that.



I suggested 2 ways of electing it:



1. Repeatedly applying a single-winner method to the ballots, so as to
elect to each next seat the next highest-finishing candidate.



2. Each party offers a set of 7 candidates to fill the seats, and
people vote among the parties. The winning party fills all the seats.



I like #2, but its trouble is that every single-winner method can mess
up sometimes. The advantage of #1 is that one mess-up would only
affect one of the 7 seats, and so it wouldn’t do serious harm.



Of course the voters, too, could make a group-error (as may have
happened this time, President 2016, if we (without any particular
reason) believe that the count in the general election was more honest
than the count in the Democrat primary).



So maybe, to protect against a group voting-error, it might be better
to only elect 7 or 8 of 15 national assembly members every 2 years.
That way, an erroneous vote would only affect about half of the seats.



But I prefer Bottom-Up.



You wrote:



The problem with the Bottom Up proposal is that it is basically a

hierarchical system like the current Democratic Party Caucuses, and winnows

away true proportional representation by discretizing at each level.

[endquote]

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It isn’t good at national majoritarianism, but its advantages are overwhelming.



It, like any acceptable government, would be different from the
Democrat Party Caucuses in an important way: Bribery would be illegal.
Any offending officeholder would be subject to immediate recall. Any
officeholder who evidenced an agenda different from that of hir
constituents would quickly find hirself out on hir a**.



We’ve often heard people speculating about whether a president is
going to keep hir campaign promises.  What??!  If we elect someone
based, at least partly, on their promises, and then they disregard
those promises later, when in office, and we’re stuck with them and
their broken-promise policies…..Does anyone think that’s democracy?
Voting is entirely irrelevant if the officeholder doesn’t have to
abide by hir promises that got hir elected. The non-recallability of
national officeholders makes no sense, in a supposed democracy.
That’s without even getting into the question of vote-count
verifiability & count-fraud.



Michael Ossipoff
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