Hunting The Muse

More Voting Ideas

The voting thing has stuck with me and now I think I've got a path again. For those of you who have been reading for a while, I had been spending a lot of energy to research various voting methods, and then I finally reached a point where I felt stuck.

I felt stuck because I realized that if we reached a point where we were able to interpret society's desires exactly... would we really want to? I mean, when you've got 49.9% of the people out there with below average intelligence.... that's kind of depressing. :-)

But then, I kept it cooking in the back of my head. And I found a few more things that slowly started to get me unstuck, and one of them was Deliberative Polling. When you can educate the voting population, their votes start to change. And if we make the assumption that an informed voting population is a better voting population, then those changes in voting are good changes.

So then it becomes a matter of combining the voting process with the education process. And how do you do that?

Well in my mind, it's combining full representation with the ability of the representatives to present all the varying views, and then working to reach consensus.

So, stirring that together with some other ideas I've come across, here's the sketch of the latest solution I have in mind, along with a couple of sticking points.

First, I'm a big fan of direct representation. One of the things I've always loved about the internet is that it allows you to find people that might share very distinctive interests with you, from all around the country. It always felt wrong that if some of these interests might be political, that they might be able to be represented if all these people happened to live in one county, but if they didn't, they couldn't be represented. I feel there has to be a nongeographical element in our government if we're going to be represented; otherwise interests that are nonregional in nature are in danger of being swallowed up by regional interests.

Direct representation works by a voter being able to pick any candidate to represent themselves. Everyone picks a representative, and then the votes are held, and if there are 100 slots in the legislative body, then the 100 most popular reps are elected. Usually this is implemented so that each rep is given proportional power, but that wouldn't be true in this case.

There are sticking points in that controls would have to be introduced so that different candidates would be ensured to be materially different in belief from each other. Otherwise a bunch of very similar yet popular candidates could run and squeeze out other less popular but more representative candidates.

But through using a similar process, it should be possible to put together a decision-making group that more accurately represents the voting population.

Second, the decision-making group then only passes initiatives that have unanimous approval, using a very aggressive process that combines structured discussions, education, and isolation of key points. Initiatives are broken apart into component sections that are individually passed to find consensus, and any dissenting point of view that is expressed is brought into the process in an attempt to be reconciled.

So the representative's votes may change than that of his or her voting population's, but this would be because of the education and discussion. Reports would be sent back to the voters so the voters could decide whether to stay with their representative or move on to someone else.

Posted by Curt at April 18, 2003 05:10 PM