The ideas you put forth are quite interesting, to say the least. To tell you the truth, I have been working on more ways to make student government more accessible than using a system of proportional representation rather than allowing the majority faction to grab all seats. One of my ideas was to in fact create an "associate representative" position where students who show up at a certain number of meetings can speak but not vote. From the sounds of it, delegable proxy has much of the same idea behind it, except the representatives decide who they want to designate as proxies and it can be multilevel (proxy of a proxy, etc). Also, they have the right to vote...
<br><br>Currently, proxy voting is expressly prohibited in the rules of our student government. However, it could be changed by a simple two-thirds vote - which may be something I may look into as an alternative to the "associate representative" plan I originally created. Those ideas will face opposition, though - many don't like the associate representative idea because they are only representing themselves. The proxy idea could potentially be better in this regard, as the representative is the one with control. I don't know about multilevel proxy (in a student government it sounds like overkill), but a flexible proxy system seems to be something worth looking in to.
<br><br>That said, I really don't like the process of asset voting - which seems like a separate idea than proxies. This is because it takes control away from the voter in much the same way party lists do except that each candidate is effectively a "party". It sounds like an interesting system, but one that would only be useful in special cases. As far as voting systems, I'm probably either going to look into proposing STV and IRV (yes, I know IRV isn't great, but it satisfies the later-no-harm principle important to students and is familiar) or some variant of range/approval (if later-no-harm violation is less of a problem).
<br><br>Overall, I'm just hoping I can do something to open up participation and make the student government here more useful to students. I actually was appointed to a vacancy one year ago and have been working on issues of participation and electoral reform for a long time. I actually have lost two multi-seat elections - one by a lot, and the last one by one spot (10th with 9 winners) with 9 majority-party members finishing ahead of me. I do chair a committee, though (and get non-voting parliamentary rights because of it - though a person tried to abolish that after i started to USE them...).
<br><br>Tim<br><br>P.S. Am I understanding correctly what you mean by "delegable proxy"?<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 12/21/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Abd ul-Rahman Lomax</b> <<a href="mailto:abd@lomaxdesign.com">
abd@lomaxdesign.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">At 03:48 PM 12/20/2006, Tim Hull wrote:<br>>Does anyone have any suggestions? What are the flaws with my
<br>>proposed system? Is there something that would potentially be<br><br></blockquote></div><br>