nehrlich

I think it's a shame that the electoral college was almost immediately de facto converted into a quasi-direct election. I think most people are pretty good at pointing out somebody from their community who they know honest and competent and representative of the community sentiment - i.e. an ideal elector. They are much worse at those decisions when scaled way, way up to an anonymous figure who reaches them through advertisements and two-sentence-long newscast quotes.

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Indeed. I believe that the original intent of the electoral college was exactly what you say - I can say "That guy over there - he's a smart guy, he knows the situation here - he can go study things and make an appropriate decision on my behalf". If a board of electors chosen in that fashion came together to deliberate on the choice for president, you would actually get the representation of local interests that I think the framers of the Constitution were trying to preserve. From what little I know, the Constitution was all about balancing the local needs of the communities and states against the needs of the nation as a whole. Anyway. It's a pity that it got subverted by the national parties.

Of course, being idealistic, it'd be even cooler if you could get representation on a virtual community basis rather than a strictly geographical one. Although there's huge scale problems associated with that - I just realized that if there are only 500 electoral seats, spread over 280 million people, that's 560,000 people per elector. Kinda blows the whole local representation theory. Hrmph.

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Maybe it should be 50,000 electoral seats, then. I think the crucial dimension is the ratio between citizens and electors. I guess the test question for this would be: Is local government less stupid than federal? And I think it usually is.

And the "virtual community" idea is even better. It acknowledges the fact that people's physical neighbors no longer necessarily have much in common with them. Also, voluntary virtual communities would totally bypass issues about gerrymandering (both the "well-meaning" affirmative-action type and traditional party-power type).

Your spend-time-to-vote idea is pretty cool, too, and definitely better than any other franchise-limiting criterion I can think of offhand.

OK, I'll support your coup. You are planning a coup, right?

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The problem with 50,000 electoral seats that I see is that it can no longer be a deliberative body - substantive discussion can't take place at that large a scale. Maybe we need some sort of fractal government structure where smaller units deliberate and pass up decisions to representatives to larger units, which deliberate and pass up decisions, etc.

I'm not planning a coup. So twentieth century. Subvert through superior processes. Or something. I've been kicking around a post in my head for a while now of how to deal with the situation where your personal values don't jibe with the organizational values of a group you're part of. I'll get around to writing it one of these days. Stay tuned...

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Yes exactly. The problem is mostly one of scale. The electoral college system is designed for a country with far, FAR fewer voters than we currently have. So you need to have a representative for every fifty to a hundred people, and then a meta-representative for every fifty to a hundred reps, and so on until you get down to just a couple top-level uber-reps. The problem is figuring out how to cluster the representatives together so that they can make a meaningful decision about their meta-rep, since they almost certainly don't know one another well enough to have formed a community.

The problem with basing suffrage on a time commitment is that it *does* discriminate. What matters is not how many hours you have in the week, but how many *free* hours you have. And rich people have, on average, a hell of a lot more free time than poor people.

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Yeah, the clustering bit is tricky to maintain meaningfulness. Especially if the reps get to know each other well enough to form a meta-rep community, they will have become too isolated from their constituency, as we can see with Congress. On the other hand, because the whole point of such a system is to make good decisions rather than necessarily popular ones, maybe we need to have a meta-rep community. Hrm.

And while I think it's a good point that rich people have, on average, more free time than poor people (given that poor people are often working two jobs to make ends meet and things like that), I still think that time is more equitable than money or intelligence or any other way I can think of to slice things to get rid of universal suffrage. To offer a counter-argument, according to Nielsen ratings in 1998 (and, yes, I realize that page is associated with TV Turn-off Week, so they might be biased, but I seem to remember reading similar statistics elsewhere), the average American watched 4 hours of television a day. Even accounting for how a few couch potato 12-hour-watchers (and/or kids and teenagers) yank the mean around, that's an astounding number. So asking the average American to spend 3 hours a month at a city council meeting when they're apparently happy to spend 4 hours a day in front of the TV doesn't seem like a large sacrifice to me. I'm probably missing something, though. And I'll get flambeed like the elitist I am. Whee!

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(Daniel Lomax, daniel@beyondpolitics.org, posting anonymously to avoid the hassle of registering).

The essential problem is how large groups of people make decisions collectively. This is quite a general problem, government is only a special case, albeit a difficult one. So I'm addressing the general case.

Consider this as a model for proxy democracy, which is *full*, *direct* democracy with the added privilege for members of an organization that they may turn over decision-making to a representative whom they chose, a proxy. Proxies are chosen, not elected. As soon as you have elections, you have losers, i.e., people who are supposedly represented by someone whom they have not chosen. Add to this the delegability of proxies, and you have a scalable organizational structure. Add to this "meeting" rules where any member of the organization (perhaps specially qualified for the meeting by geographical location or other association) may personally vote on any question, but in order to address the meeting, the member must meet a certain standard in terms of proxies held. The standard may simply be that no more than X persons may qualify at any given time. This keeps the meeting size down to a manageable one. The size of the meeting, possible restrictions on proxies held by one person, are details which will vary with the nature of the business to be transacted.

Add to this a "light" organization, where power is *not* collected to be exercised by central decision-making, but where power is, to the extent practical, reserved to the individual members. There is no property to fight over; if the organization is hijacked by some faction, the organization can fission with almost no disruption. But the mechanism still remains in place for what are now two organizations to cooperate where they can agree.

I call these Free Associations. And so, short on time, I come to the Plan. Develop the technology and make it known. Sooner or later, it will be tried. (Pieces have been tried -- and generally are known to work -- but the whole picture has not come into existence, as far as I know.) If it is implemented, the organization using it will tend to be successful beyond similar competing organizations. Further, I think that once people realize how *different* this would be from existing organizations, less of a burden, with more power and freedom to act, they will never again be content with the other organizational methods (oligarchical -- most nonprofits, for example; electoral democracies -- some membership organizations which elect Boards; and simple direct democracies, which are usually only practical with small organizations and even then are quite vulnerable to being hijacked by fanatics).

And sooner or later it will also be tried in a governmental context.

But existing structures are highly resistant to change. So this plan bypasses existing structures entirely, nor does it propose, at least not immediately, to change those structures. Rather, it proposes an independent, parallel structure. Perhaps like a nervous system, which is, in fact, a fractal, with filters at each synapse. And the proxy is a filter, a bidirectional one. As I see it, primary proxies would be limited to a relatively small number, either naturally or by rule. You want your primary proxy to be someone you can telephone and chat with. Someone who will respond to your emial. Indirect proxies (proxies of proxies) would not be limited.... so it is scalable.

beyondpolitics.org is at the moment oligarchical. I.e., I run it. However, as soon as the membership is large enough to require a formal structure, it will be a proxy democracy.....



www.beyondpolitics.org

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Subvert through superior processes

Does this mean I don't get to build any flaming barricades, or shell the White House with Project Newbury^TM?

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Of course you can if you want to. I probably won't participate, though. They've got bigger guns. Much much bigger guns. Because, well, they like big guns.

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