Direct Democracy by Delegable Proxy
by James Green-Armytage
Contents:
INTRODUCTION
THE FUNDAMENTAL ELEMENTS
Direct democracy /
delegable proxy system
Direct
vote option
Issue independence
Ranked ballot,
pairwise tally
VARIABLE ELEMENTS AND INTERESTING QUESTIONS
Purpose
Bindingness
Frequency of votes
Logistics
Ranked proxy lists
Standing proxies
Resolving proxy loops
Secret ballot
Generation of issues
Generation of options
How technical should
the options be?
Proxy scores
Remuneration
FURTHER COMMENTARY
Virtues of beginning
with a non-binding system
Already-existing
direct-issue voting systems
Alternative political
leaders
Expressing and developing
the nuance of public opinion
Disclaimer
Direct democracy
versus privately conducted polls and focus groups
Non-governmental
applications
SEE
ALSO: PROXY REPRESENTATION
It seems axiomatic that in a democracy,
all citizens should have the opportunity to vote directly on the key decisions of
the collective. However, when such public decisions reach a certain level of
complexity, it becomes impractical for every citizen to become fully informed
on every issue.
In a traditional direct democracy
system, every citizen has two options with respect to a given issue: vote or
abstain. If most citizens do not take the time to become fully educated on the
issues, but nearly all of them choose to vote, then public decisions are likely
to be somewhat arbitrary, and easily manipulable by public relations campaigns.
If most citizens do not take the time to be fully educated on the issues, and
many of them do not vote, then the system may become a discriminatory one,
excluding the values held by people in particular sectors of society. If nearly
all citizens do take the time to become fully educated on the issues, this may
excessively remove some people’s attention from other valuable endeavors. One
could argue that there would be a certain amount of wastefully redundant effort
in this last scenario.
Surprisingly, there is a satisfying resolution
to this ancient paradox of democracy: the delegable proxy system.
Direct democracy /
delegable proxy system
Assume that I am a voter, and there is a certain issue to be decided via this system…
• Direct vote option: I have the option of voting directly on the issue (or formally abstaining).
• Proxy option: I also have the option of deferring my vote to a proxy of my choosing. If my proxy votes directly on the issue, then the weight of my vote is added to his. There is no minimum threshold of votes needed for anyone to serve as a proxy.
• Delegable proxy: If my proxy doesn’t vote directly on the issue, but rather names another proxy in turn, then the weight of my vote and the weight of my proxy’s vote are both carried by this second proxy. There is no limit to the number of times that a vote can be transferred along a proxy chain in this way.
• Issue independence: Even when there are multiple issues on the same ballot, I should have the option of indicating separate proxies for separate issues, while still voting directly on other issues, if I choose.
Comments: The proxy system combines
some of the best features of direct-issue voting and representative voting.
People who have a definite opinion on an issue retain the option of a direct
vote. People who do not have time to become fully educated on the issue may
defer their vote to someone who does, someone with whom they share common
values and beliefs. Proxies differ from traditional representatives in that
voters always get their first choice of proxy. To a much greater extent than
traditional representatives, it is reasonable to expect that my proxy will vote
the way I would vote if I had time to become fully informed on the issue.
The importance of the delegable proxy
feature should not be underestimated. This allows me to choose as a proxy
someone whom I know and trust directly, without having to worry that my vote
will be wasted if he doesn’t have time to become educated on that particular
issue. This feature facilitates the accumulation of votes by people who are
trusted by people who are in turn trusted by others.
Issue independence allows voters to indicate as proxies people who are knowledgeable in the field that a specific issue relates to. For example, if one issue is relevant to ecology, I might indicate an ecologist as their proxy for that issue, a staff member at an NGO that deals with the environment, or perhaps just someone who I know to have researched all of the different options for that issue in particular.
Assume that there are more than two options for a given issue...
• Ranked ballots should be used, such that voters have the option of assigning a distinct ranking to every option (although they should also be able to indicate indifference between two or more options).
• When majority rule is appropriate (which is likely to be most of the time), a pairwise comparison method should be used to tally the votes. A pairwise comparison uses ranked ballots to simulate head-to-head contests between different options. Given two candidates A and B, A has a pairwise defeat over B if and only if A is ranked above B on more ballots than B is ranked above A. (All candidates who are not ranked on a given ballot are considered to be tied for last place on that ballot.)
The majority rule method should always choose a winner from the minimal dominant set. This is the smallest set of candidates such that every candidate within the set has a pairwise victory over every candidate outside the set. When the minimal dominant set has only one member, this candidate is a Condorcet winner. A method that always chooses from the minimal dominant set is by definition Condorcet-efficient. The majority rule method should also be relatively resistant to strategic manipulation.
• When proportional representation is appropriate, some type of single transferable vote tally method should be used.
Comments: There are many political
issues that are too complex to be reduced to a single up-or-down vote; in these
cases voters should be able to choose between multiple options. The minimal dominant
set provides the best definition of majority rule between multiple options.
Furthermore, Condorcet winners are the most likely options to serve as
compromise solutions.
For example, imagine
that there is a vote where the options are as follows: (1) drastic change, (2) moderate
change, (3) status quo. (The moderate change is in the same direction as the
drastic change, but it is not as extreme.) The votes are cast as follows:
33%: drastic
> moderate > status quo
16%: moderate
> drastic > status quo
16%: moderate
> status quo > drastic
35%: status quo > moderate > drastic
In light of these votes, we can predict
that a single up-down vote on the drastic change would fail. Use of plurality
or IRV to tally votes would also result in the status quo. A Condorcet tally,
however, picks the compromise solution when there is one, in this case the “moderate”
option. A Condorcet-efficient method is likely to pick the median even with a
large number of options, as long as they are arrayed across a single spectrum.
A Condorcet-efficient method is essential to identifying centrist,
non-polarized choices, provided of course that a sufficient compromise option
exists on the ballot.
VARIABLE ELEMENTS AND INTERESTING QUESTIONS
Delegable proxy systems can be used for a very wide variety of voting purposes. In this paper, I will focus mostly on their potential use for direct-issue voting on government policy. I also explore the use of delegable proxy system to choose representatives (rather than just supplement their decisions with periodic popular decisions) in a separate paper.
Several degrees of bindingness are possible. One option would be to have a non-binding system that allowed the citizens of a nation to express their opinion without carrying any legal weight in itself. The government would still fund the system and ensure its integrity, and there should be some general pressure put on government officials to act in accordance with its results.
Another option would be to subject the public decision to veto by other branches of government, e.g. the executive, a majority of the legislature, a supreme court. A third option would be to allow other braches of the government to postpone implementation of the public decision, but not to reverse it. A fourth option would be to give the public decision preeminent legal status.
The number of issues decided by this system per year is a matter of preference. For example, one could have three public votes per year, with ten issues on each ballot. (Any other combination of numbers is possible here.) Thus, the proxy system could serve as a guide for the legislative process rather than its sole agent. A modest proposal would be to have one direct vote per year, on the regularly scheduled election day.
A question: Should the votes should take place over the internet, or only at controlled polling stations? The internet poses problems of security and problems of equal access, so I suggest that official polling stations are a preferable venue. The voter interface should be electronic (paper ballots would probably just be too clumsy for this system), and every effort should be made to assure that the votes are being counted accurately.
Voters should be able to choose their proxies from a complete list of people registered as proxies. This list should be kept on a secure master file that is also a matter of public record, available on the internet, etc. Aside from just their name, there should be a few distinct keywords and some basic information about them so that people who want to choose them as a proxy can distinguish them from others with the same name. Proxy registrations should be filed some time in advance of the vote, to give couriers a chance to bring secure copies of the proxy list from the central file.
One may allow the voters to indicate a ranked list of proxies, rather than a single proxy.
One may allow the voters to register for a “standing proxy”, so that if a voter doesn’t show up to vote on a given issue, his vote is delegated automatically to his standing proxy. Or, one could require voters to show up in person, if only to indicate one proxy for all of the issues on the ballot. If one does not allow standing proxies, then the ranked proxy lists could be used to assure that votes are not wasted. That is, if my first-ranked proxy doesn’t show up to vote, my vote could be deferred to my second-ranked proxy instead.
It is possible that a proxy loop might arise, if for example voter A indicates B as his first proxy, B indicates C as his first proxy, and C indicates A as his first proxy. Ranked proxy lists can be used to resolve loops. One possible rule is as follows: "A vote shouldn't travel the same proxy path twice." Given the above case, A's vote has traveled the path A-->B, then the path B-->C, and then the path C-->A. Therefore, according to this rule, once A's vote returns to A, it should not once again travel the path from A to B. Instead, it should travel to the next proxy as ranked on A's proxy list. The proxy path rule is not very important, since such loops are not an especially daunting problem. Other rules are possible, for example "a vote shouldn't be assigned to the same person twice," in which case A's vote would be transferred to C's second proxy rather than being assigned to A once again.
In some circumstances it might be possible to resolve proxy loops without the use of ranked proxy lists, for example by informing the people involved in the loop and requesting that they indicate another proxy.
A question: Should someone who serves as a proxy for other voters still be entitled to keep their votes secret? It is theoretically possible to keep their votes secret from the general public, but one cannot avoid the fact that information will be stored in the computers responsible for tallying the result. Also, it seems likely that most voters would like to know for sure how their proxy voted.
I propose that some issues to be decided by the proxy system could be generated by the legislature, while others are generated by the public process itself. I suggest that we might want to set the agenda for a few direct votes at a time. For example, let's say that there were three direct votes per year, each with about ten issues on the ballot. At the end of one year, we could decide which issues to vote on over the course of the next year. Each time we went to the polls for a direct vote, there could be a combination of congressionally generated and publicly generated issues on the ballot.
For issue-generation inside the legislature, I suggest a system of single transferable vote (STV) proportional representation. For example, the legislators could take an STV vote to fill a certain fixed number of slots for issues in an upcoming direct vote. Perhaps the legislature should also have the ability to add extra issues in case of emergency.
For issue-generation outside the legislature, I propose that issues should first be nominated via a public process, and that nominated issues should then be placed on a ballot for a direct agenda-setting vote. (Of course, we do not need to drag voters to the polls just to do an agenda-setting vote; it can be put on the ballot with other issues.) The public agenda-setting vote can also be based on STV, filling a fixed number of slots.
Question: How would issues qualify for the agenda-setting vote itself? A certain number of petition signatures?
Question: Should the legislature (or some other entity) maintain the power to assert that two or more issues should be combined into one to avoid redundancy and possible contradiction? What should the boundaries of this power be?
To sum up, we could do an agenda-setting vote about once a year, with the legislature filling a preset number of issue slots, and the public filling a preset number of issue slots. Once the issues-to-be-voted-on had been decided, we would divvy them up onto different ballotings (e.g. one balloting in February, one in June, etc.), and we would get to work on generating the options for the issues.
A more conservative proposal would be to allow voters to generate issues when they come to the polls for regularly scheduled primary elections, and then to actually vote on the issues in the general election. Thus, we could have a modest direct democracy system without scheduling any new voting days that don't already exist under the current system.
Once it has been decided that there will be a direct vote on a given issue, the next step is to generate the different options that voters will choose from when voting that issue. The goal here is to make sure that a less-than-ideal option doesn't win because a more effective compromise option didn't make it onto the ballot.
Option-generation inside the legislature: Again, an STV vote is logical, but in this case, an option called "no additional option" should be in competition with the other options that have been proposed. A certain number of maximum slots would be available to be filled with options, but if many legislators are satisfied with less than the maximum, some of the extra slots could be filled with "no additional option", that is to say, unfilled.
Option-generation outside the legislature: There should also be a public process for generating options. Question: should there be a separate public STV vote for option selection as well as issue selection? This might prove too cumbersome to be worthwhile, in which case any proposed options meeting the given requirements (e.g. acquiring a certain number of petition signatures) could be placed directly on the ballot without further filtering or a hard limit as to the number of possibilities.
How technical should the
options be?
Should options be written in the sort of dense legalese that characterizes the handiwork of most professional legislators, or should they be worded in a more general, approachable way? Where can the balance be found between legal precision and common understandability?
People who serve as proxies would be given a score, calculated yearly, which would be based on how many votes they actually cast on specific issues. That is, if there was a vote where many people named me as a proxy, but I deferred the votes to someone else, it wouldn't count toward my proxy score. However, if I applied the weight of those votes toward a specific option, it would count. Proxy scores should be averaged / normalized so that a score of 300 basically means that on average during the previous year, I executed direct votes on each issue for 300 people including myself. Hence it would be meaningful to say that a single proxy's score was equivalent to a specific fraction of the total number of participants.
Proxy scores could potentially be used to facilitate the process of issue generation and option generation, in that the signatures of proxies could carry the full weight of their normalized proxy score. Hence, instead of having to get thousands of individual signatures, one could achieve the same effect by getting the support of a few high-scoring proxies.
Question: Should those who serve as proxies for many other people be given monetary compensation? If we do decide to compensate super-proxies, what money-allocation formulas might we want to use? Here is one possibility: There is a total preset budget for proxy remuneration, which is divided among those who receive compensation. Each super-proxy's share of this overall budget is proportional to a modified proxy score, which is calculated as follows: The modification comes as a result of a minimum threshold, such that those whose proxy scores are below the minimum will not receive remuneration. Instead, their scores are added to those whom they list as a standing proxy, and they continue up the proxy chain until they coalesce into an above-threshold score somewhere along the line.
For example, if I am the proxy for about 10 people, and thus have a proxy score of 10, that might not be enough to justify the paperwork of having the government send me a check, etc. So the remuneration-weight of my score should be passed along to my proxies, and perhaps their proxies, and so on, until it gets to someone who crosses the minimum threshold. If you like, you could do this in a series of successive rounds, such that first you eliminate below-threshold people with the very lowest proxy scores, and transfer their remuneration-weight before doing the next round of eliminations.
Another question: Should the government place regulations on what proxies can do with their remuneration? For those who receive only a moderate amount of money, this might not be worthwhile, but if someone’s total remuneration exceeds a certain amount, it might make sense to require them to invest funds in excess of that amount into policy research ventures that meet certain standards. I imagine that these research groups could help to further the democratic goals of the proxy system.
Comments: The argument in favor of
proxy remuneration is that the extra money could help them do good policy
research, by allowing them to reduce the hours they spend at other jobs, and in
some cases by allowing them to hire research staff and acquire
research-facilitating capital. The money may also serve as an incentive to do
good research. The argument against it, aside from the cost, is that it might
produce ‘impure’ incentives for people to act as proxies, and to over-represent
their understanding of policy in an attempt to advertise themselves.
Virtues of beginning with a
non-binding system
(1) It is important for the system to build public participation and trust before it begins to carry the weight of legal power.
(2) There should be more freedom in the design of a non-binding system, in that there should be less pressure and more leeway for trial and error. This will make it easier to incorporate innovative ideas such as the delegable proxy option and the pairwise tally. It should be much easier to apply advanced voting rules to an entirely new institution than to an existing electoral institution, as existing institutions tend to get mired in entrenched practices and interests.
(3) It should be much easier to achieve than a binding system, and it should greatly hasten the advent of a binding system.
Already-existing direct-issue
voting systems
For those locations that already use direct-issue voting systems of one kind or another, there are at least two possible goals:
(1) To try to make changes in the system so that it incorporates some of the essential elements of a good direct-issue voting system, as listed above. For example, one may try to introduce a delegable proxy option. One may also try to encourage multiple-option issues with a ranked ballot and pairwise tally. (Question: which Condorcet completion method should be used in this situation?)
(2) To create a non-binding system with the essential delegable proxy elements, as a supplement to the existing system.
The proxy system acts as a perfectly ‘high resolution’ version of proportional representation, in that voters always get their first choice of representative. As such it may provide an increased political role for third parties, nonprofit organizations, and community leaders.
Expressing and developing
the nuance of public opinion
This system attempts to end the state of affairs where most citizens have only a very diffuse and indirect impact on government policy. In most plurality elections, the voters essentially have to choose between two ready-made issue ‘packages’. Limiting the voters’ choices this way totally glosses over even the slightest bit of nuance that might exist in people's political beliefs. This oversimplification is so drastic that it’s dangerous. It’s important to have separate votes on individual issues for the sake of clarity. There are scores of important and controversial issues which deserve better than to be lumped together into winner-take-all packages, or worse yet, to be ignored by all major parties. It is frustrating to know that there must be several good solutions to pressing social problems that would be supported by a majority if they were put to a public vote, but that for some convoluted reason they are not implemented by the ruling party/parties.
Furthermore, if ordinary people actually have an opportunity to influence policy by expressing their views on key issues, I suggest that it will help to clarify their positions on these issues, and to engage far more people in the political process.
I don’t intend to imply that a good direct democracy system eliminates the need for other electoral reform, campaign finance reform, media reform, etc.
Direct democracy versus
privately conducted polls and focus groups
Opinion polls and focus groups have a lot of influence on politics at present, but they are not an appropriate substitute for direct democracy. Both are generally controlled by private entities who have a good deal of power to influence the result, e.g. through suggestive wording and through the omission of relevant options. Focus groups take place behind closed doors, routinely have unpublished results, and in general do very little to further political discourse. Both polls and focus groups are participated in by only a small segment of the population, leaving everyone else with their opinions unheard. Also, they reduce the participants to a relatively passive role that does not foster political organization, action, or education.
This is why even a non-binding system would be a tremendous improvement over the current system. It would allow the popular will to come through as a result of direct political action in broad daylight rather than through the dubious conduits mentioned above. It engages people to get involved, to discuss, and to act. It includes all adult citizens who are willing to participate, rather than just a few people who are randomly selected by a network news agency, or who strike a focus group research firm as being representative of swing voters.
Application of the delegable proxy system is by no means limited to governments. Almost any organization with a sufficiently large membership can potentially benefit by using it. (E.g. unions, schools, churches, etc.) The larger the organization, the more important the delegability feature becomes. One particularly interesting application is to publicly traded corporations. Many corporations allow shareholders to vote by proxy, but in many cases, shareholders do not know much about the proxies whom they designate. If corporations were required to allow for delegable proxy voting, then I as a small stockholder could potentially delegate my votes to nonprofit organizations that shared my values with regard to corporate policy. (I should retain proxy vote rights even if my ownership of stock is brokered by an intermediary agent.) This could help corporate policy to conform more closely to the values of ordinary citizens, just as the general proposal could help government policy to do the same. Hence, the use of the delegable proxy system could bring us closer to both political and economic democracy.