<div>I found this paper by James Green-Armytage very interesting:</div><div><a href="http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~armytage/proxy2010.pdf">http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~armytage/proxy2010.pdf</a></div><div><br></div><div>He doesn't cover all of the issues you mention, but it's a good start.</div>
<div><br></div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 2:27 PM, Peter Zbornik <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:pzbornik@gmail.com">pzbornik@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
Dear all, <div><br></div><div>has a direct proportional election system with proxies been considered before?</div><div><br></div><div>Each voter is granted a vote in parliament, either personally or through a proxy (as in stock companies). The voter could change his representative in parliamet when she/he likes (or at a specific date to avoid identification of the voter). The voter could have several representatives, each of them a specialist in a different issue (health care, tax, education, business and so on), or split his vote on several representatives in each area. There would be no elections, just a continuous switching of proxies. The representative of the voter would not know who supports him/her to avoid coercion. </div>
<div><br></div><div>The voter who chose to represent himself would have the right to speak and be present "virtually" or (less practical) physically in the parliament and to vote on all issues and so on. For the time being I would like to put aside such practical details, like how a milion parlamentarian would vote and so on. Such problems can be solved through remote voting or similar.</div>
<div><br></div><div>The government could (but need not) be formed through proportional elections by the citizens too.</div><div>Each voter would vote for each department, i.e., if there were 10 ministries, then the voter would cast a ranked ballot for each of the 10 ministries.</div>
<div>Some weights could be applied, i.e. if the voter could only care for one ministry instead of all 10, then he could put all of his votes on this ministry and none for the others.</div><div>In addition to this, each ministry could be weighted according to the share of the public budget it uses.</div>
<div>I.e some ministries would take more of the vote than others. I.e. if one ministry has half the budget, then a "standard" vote for this would require half of the votes the voter has (i.e. 5 votes in the case of 10 ministries).</div>
<div>I.e. the voter has a constant number of votes (say V votes), each vote for a specific seat "costs" A1,...,AS, where S is the number of ministries, and A1+...+AS=V. A vote for ministry s, 1>=s>=S, would be normalised by the "cost", i.e. if the voter would like to vote only for one minstry s, then he would get V/As votes. </div>
<div>Furthermore, the voter would need to specify the rank-order of the ministries themselves, so that all of the vote is used, even if the minister in the "favorite minstry" becomes someone else than the candidates preferred by the voter or if the preferred candidate is elected but the vote is not fully exhausted.</div>
<div>The elections would then proceed as a normal STV election.</div><div>This got a bit complicated, I will provide a simple example upon request.</div><div><br></div><div>An election system as described above would blur the difference between proportional representation and direct democracy and allow for direct elections of a government.</div>
<div><br></div><div>A question I am not sure of, is how the approach above should be applied for budget allocation for each ministry, i.e. how big part of the cake each ministry should get. I guess each voter could make his budget allocation between the ministries, and the resulting budget would be the arithmetic mean of the submitted allocations. I guess there are better or more sophisticated systems for optimal budget allocation.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Does anyone on this list have more information on similar methods to the ones described above? </div><div>I guess such methods have been discussed on this list before.</div><div>A recommended book or paper or a reference to previous posts on this list would be appreciated.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Best regards</div><div>Peter Zborník</div>
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