It seems like a lot of the challenges in designing a voting system stem from wanting to give each geographic region “their” representative, while not letting people “throw away” their vote.
If we abandon the first part (which is totally reasonable here in the 21st century, with the takeover of digital communication and virtual communities), there is a clean solution to the second part.
Specifically, remove all the names from the ballot, and have people only vote for their preferred party, then allow each party that gets more than [small]% of the vote to designate a representative, who has voting power equal to the number of votes they got (or round it off in some way, to improve legibility and avoid recount recriminations). Those 10-20 unequal voters then meet, discuss, compromise, vote, etc. on the actual legislative proposals (as representatives of their parties, so everything would also get vetted by the party elites in some way).
Thus, each individual can find or found the party that most closely matches their own values, and their vote is never “wasted” because at worst their minor party just votes with the closest major party, but that decision gets made by informed political actors, who know their relative voting power and the true positions of the other parties, not masses of deliberately-lied-to people who don’t know if there are enough [new party] members to unseat [existing party].
I don’t think we have a takeover of virtual communities. When I’m ill then I don’t go to a virtual hospital but on in bricks and mortar. While some people work virtual jobs at home most people have local jobs.
Having the interests of different localities represented matters for day-to-day politics. You can argue that maybe it would be better if there’s no representative from Detroit who thinks saving the car industry from Detroit should be his most important political goal but we don’t live in a world where the people in Detroid work in virtual jobs and thus the Detroit car industry isn’t a big deal to them.
You’ve described, essentially, a weighted-seats closed-list method.
List methods: meh. It’s actually possible to be biproportional — that is, to represent both party/faction and geography pretty fairly — so reducing it to just party (and not geography or even faction) is a step down IMO. But you can make reasonable arguments either way.
Closed methods (party, not voters, decides who gets their seats): yuck. Why take power from the people to give it to some party elite?
Weighted methods: who knows, it’s scarcely been tried. A few points:
If voting weights are too unequal, then effective voting power can get out of whack. For instance, if there are 3 people with 2 votes each, and 1 person with 1 vote, then that last person has no power to ever shift the majority, even though you might have thought they had half as much power as the others.
I think that part of the point of representative democracy is deliberation in the second stage. For that purpose, it’s important to preserve cognitive diversity and equal voice. So that makes me skeptical of weighted methods. But note that this is a theoretical, not an empirical, argument, so add whatever grains of salt you’d like.
General points: I like your willingness to experiment; it is possible to design voting methods that are better than even the best ones in common use. But it’s not easy, so I wouldn’t want to adopt a method that somebody had just come up with; important to at least let experienced theoreticians kick it around some first.
Why should random people who are not experts in “ability to debate,” “ability to read and understand the impact of legal language,” or other attributes that make a good lawmaker get to decide which human beings are tasked with the process of writing and compromising on language?
People have an interest in having their values reflected, but that’s already determined by the party they vote for.
This is especially true in a system that encourages multiple parties, so the, for example, “low taxes” faction, the “low regulation” faction, and the “white power” faction can each be separate parties who collaborate (or not) on individual legislative priorities as needed. And each party can hire whatever mix of lawyers, negotiators, speech writers, and speech givers they want, without forcing “the person who decides who to hire,” “the person who gives speeches,” and “the person who has final say on how to vote” all be the same “candidate.”
It seems like a lot of the challenges in designing a voting system stem from wanting to give each geographic region “their” representative, while not letting people “throw away” their vote.
If we abandon the first part (which is totally reasonable here in the 21st century, with the takeover of digital communication and virtual communities), there is a clean solution to the second part.
Specifically, remove all the names from the ballot, and have people only vote for their preferred party, then allow each party that gets more than [small]% of the vote to designate a representative, who has voting power equal to the number of votes they got (or round it off in some way, to improve legibility and avoid recount recriminations). Those 10-20 unequal voters then meet, discuss, compromise, vote, etc. on the actual legislative proposals (as representatives of their parties, so everything would also get vetted by the party elites in some way). Thus, each individual can find or found the party that most closely matches their own values, and their vote is never “wasted” because at worst their minor party just votes with the closest major party, but that decision gets made by informed political actors, who know their relative voting power and the true positions of the other parties, not masses of deliberately-lied-to people who don’t know if there are enough [new party] members to unseat [existing party].
I don’t think we have a takeover of virtual communities. When I’m ill then I don’t go to a virtual hospital but on in bricks and mortar. While some people work virtual jobs at home most people have local jobs.
Having the interests of different localities represented matters for day-to-day politics. You can argue that maybe it would be better if there’s no representative from Detroit who thinks saving the car industry from Detroit should be his most important political goal but we don’t live in a world where the people in Detroid work in virtual jobs and thus the Detroit car industry isn’t a big deal to them.
You’ve described, essentially, a weighted-seats closed-list method.
List methods: meh. It’s actually possible to be biproportional — that is, to represent both party/faction and geography pretty fairly — so reducing it to just party (and not geography or even faction) is a step down IMO. But you can make reasonable arguments either way.
Closed methods (party, not voters, decides who gets their seats): yuck. Why take power from the people to give it to some party elite?
Weighted methods: who knows, it’s scarcely been tried. A few points:
If voting weights are too unequal, then effective voting power can get out of whack. For instance, if there are 3 people with 2 votes each, and 1 person with 1 vote, then that last person has no power to ever shift the majority, even though you might have thought they had half as much power as the others.
I think that part of the point of representative democracy is deliberation in the second stage. For that purpose, it’s important to preserve cognitive diversity and equal voice. So that makes me skeptical of weighted methods. But note that this is a theoretical, not an empirical, argument, so add whatever grains of salt you’d like.
General points: I like your willingness to experiment; it is possible to design voting methods that are better than even the best ones in common use. But it’s not easy, so I wouldn’t want to adopt a method that somebody had just come up with; important to at least let experienced theoreticians kick it around some first.
Why should random people who are not experts in “ability to debate,” “ability to read and understand the impact of legal language,” or other attributes that make a good lawmaker get to decide which human beings are tasked with the process of writing and compromising on language? People have an interest in having their values reflected, but that’s already determined by the party they vote for. This is especially true in a system that encourages multiple parties, so the, for example, “low taxes” faction, the “low regulation” faction, and the “white power” faction can each be separate parties who collaborate (or not) on individual legislative priorities as needed. And each party can hire whatever mix of lawyers, negotiators, speech writers, and speech givers they want, without forcing “the person who decides who to hire,” “the person who gives speeches,” and “the person who has final say on how to vote” all be the same “candidate.”