Shithouse Rat wrote on Apr 14
th, 2007 at 1:08am:
On what basis does a delegate/proxy gain a seat in the parliament under the proposed DP model? Is it intended that the fringe members would enter and exit the parliament "in time" as their votes change?
Because I periodically search for "delegable proxy" I came across this discussion. DP has been independently invented in at least four or five places around the world over the last ten or twenty years. My own work goes back about twenty years, but I did not start publishing anything until roughly 2002 or so.
Most thinkers on the subject have proposed DP for electoral representational systems, but, as has been noted, it is largely untried for that, aside from the Demoex work in Sweden. I, too, thought of it first as a political device, but realized that this suffered from extreme difficulty in implementation, political institutions are ordinarily highly conservative, and the existing models are so thoroughly entrenched that even radical reformers tend to use them them when structuring their own movements. (That is, they set up oligarchical structures, openly top-down, or they set up electoral systems which suffer from the same problems as the status quo, just, generally, with different faces.)
To be brief, I realized that DP would have to come first in NGO, where peer participation was, from the beginning, desired, where consensus was sought and considered useful, and where some means of balancing out participation bias (the typical problem of direct democracy) was desired. I call these organizations Free Associations, hence my current work is with FA/DP democracy. However, the question here was about the possibility of governmental structures.
Warren Smith, better known as an analyst who found Range Voting to be close to an ideal election method, also invented what he called Asset Voting. Asset Voting could be considered a form of Single Transferable Vote where the transfer of votes is under the control of candidates receiving the votes. If a voter votes for one, that person may reassign the vote at will. In the original Asset Voting, voters could vote, for as many candidates as desired, a fraction of a vote, with the restriction that all the votes must add up to no more than a total of one full vote. Again, each candidate "owns" the "assets," i.e., the votes they received, until and unless they pass those votes on. Smith, inventing Asset Voting, was not aware of Delegable Proxy, but it's pretty easy to see that this is similar to a Delegable Proxy system, and, in fact, Delegable Proxy would be a great means for the candidates holding assets to coordinate the vote reassignments.
Further, Smith did not notice what happens if ballots allow write-ins. It becomes possible for voter to have an almost completely unrestricted field of who to vote for. What Asset does is to convert a secret ballot election, with anonymous voters, into an open election with a reduced set of "electors," who are public voters. Thus composing an assembly can become a deliberative process and as fully democratic as possible. The only restriction is the necessary one: it is impossible for large democracies -- absent some mechanism like Delegable Proxy -- to carry on deliberation in the same way as is known to work on a small scale. What Asset/Delegable Proxy can do is to reduce the size of a representative assembly to one which is manageable.
It should be understand that, at this point, this is not a fixed concept, so when someone asks "How would this work?" there is no single answer. In fact, it could work in many different ways, and, in particular, it would not come all at once, full-blown , as a direct democratic system. Rather, it would come in stages. Perhaps:
(1) Asset Voting replaces an STV system for some Assembly; while representation could be district-based, what becomes possible with Asset is state-wide representation (province-wide, jurisdiction-wide); this would come when it is considered valuable to have full participation in an Assembly from all groups. I think it likely that most seats in the Assembly would have defined districts, and that electors would tend to combine votes in such a way as to make this happen; however, the system is not so constrained, and this allows some "districts" to be state-wide.
(2) Because there is now a reduced set of public voters (the "electors') it becomes possible to implement direct voting. The "seats" really are representation for the purpose of deliberation, electors could vote their votes directly; but where an elector does not vote directly (and most would not, I'd predict), the holder of the seat votes. Each seat represents the same number of votes in an Asset Assembly, so, probably, direct votes would be reported as fractions of a full-seat vote.
The rest is details. What frequently happens when a system like this is proposed, which really does fundamentally restructure a democracy to make it far more fully participative, is that people will project upon it characteristics of existing political systems, whereas the Delegable Proxy concept is really outside the box (and Asset is DP but with a secret ballot layer, and any voter who wants to become a public voter may do so, simply by registering as a "candidate" and voting for himself or herself). As such, we will probably have to see demonstrations outside of government before it happens inside.
For further info, see beyondpolitics DOT org.
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