Representation by Delegable Proxy
by James Green-Armytage
Contents:
My earlier paper explores the use of delegable proxy for direct issue voting, rather than for representation. In this more brief paper, I'd like to make a proposal for representation by proxy. The former approach is to supplement an existing legislative system with periodic direct votes; the approach here is
to redesign the legislative process around the delegable proxy principle.
BASIC
SYSTEM:
Each voter may assign their voting
power to a proxy, or representative. Voters may change proxies at any time
(although it is not expected that people will change proxies very often on
average).
If you are chosen as a proxy, you may
delegate both your own voting power and that of others to another proxy in turn.
Legislators do not have equal voting power; their voting power is
determined by the number of proxies that they hold.
Every citizen should in theory be empowered to vote on every issue. However, I see an advantage to having a legislative chamber where individuals with a large amount of voting power should be able to gather, engage in debate, and cast votes. To make debate manageable, and to have a legislative chamber that is reasonably small (i.e. not the size of a stadium), it seems reasonable to set a number of people apart as privileged "legislators" (who could be called representatives, members of parliament, senators, etc.). A legislator would serve a fixed term, draw a salary from the government, and would be given a budget to hire policy research staff.
So, how should legislators be selected? I suggest electing legislators via a public STV vote every few years, a vote in which citizens should be allowed to delegate their vote to proxies.
INDEPENDENT
VOTING:
Non-legislators should still be able
to vote on every issue, but not from within the legislative chamber. Some kind
of system would be set up to allow them to exercise their vote within the time
frame set by the legislative body for its vote. For example, the person could
watch a live video feed of the legislature, and then declare their vote via the
internet. If this person allows their vote to be a matter of public record, then
the security/authenticity of the internet-based vote should not be a problem.
Of course, whenever someone voted independently, the weight of their vote would be removed from their standing proxy for that issue.
I don't expect that a large number of votes will be cast in this way on a daily basis, as many votes taken by the legislature are not controversial or important enough to attract wide participation; for the most part, I think that these votes will be decided by standing proxies. When matters do arise that are both controversial and important, I would expect that some more people might choose to vote independently. However, in the next section I suggest an alternate method for citizens to vote independently, one that would perhaps be more convenient and less logistically difficult. I call this the "divided votes" method.
DIVIDED
VOTES:
Members of the legislature (and other
individuals with multiple proxies) should be
empowered to vote in a heterogeneous way. For example, imagine that I am a
legislator, and that there is an upcoming yes/no vote. Once a vote has been
scheduled, I may announce the vote to my constituency, and indicate that I
intend to vote "yes". However, I invite dissenting votes from my
constituency. Let's say that I have one million constituents, and one hundred
thousand of them indicate to me that they would like to vote "no". I can then
cast 900,000 "yes" votes, and 100,000
"no" votes.
When an important and controversial
issue comes up, there should be a natural procedural break between the
announcement of a vote and the vote itself, to give proxies a chance to check in
with their constituents, and allow time for dissenting votes to be submitted.
It seems that the internet would
probably be a useful medium of communication between constituent and
representative (although other forms of communication would of course be
possible, especially at smaller levels). I suspect that this system would be
superior from a security standpoint to a nation-wide internet-based vote, in
part because the total number of dissenting votes would be fairly small on
average, and thus fairly easy to keep track of. The people who agree with their
representative on the issue in question (which should be a large majority) will
not need to vote directly, and thus the count process should be less unwieldy.
Different representatives could
follow different standards of security and anonymity, thus allowing each
constituent to have an optimal combination of the two. Representatives could
send constituents an e-mail or letter receipt whenever they cast a dissenting
vote, which would help to catch most cases of hacker fraud. Proxies will use
different media of communication, different security systems... in my
estimation, this decentralization effect should limit the severity of any
potential fraud. Obviously, representatives have a strong incentive to keep
their communications channels secure, since they would be in danger of losing
proxies otherwise.
ELECTIONS
AND SECRET BALLOTS:
Although voters should be able to
change proxies at will, it should still makes sense to have specific election
days. I recommend that all standing proxy arrangements should be cleared on
election day, so that voters who want to keep their current proxy need to return
to the polls to renew the designation. The point of this is to prevent someone
from letting a proxy stand for decades without being engaged in the process at
all.
Having an election day would also provide the opportunity for secret ballots. For those who want so much anonymity that they don't want there to be any records of who their representative is, they could formally designate anonymity, which would give a secret ballot (the kind that is now standard in most elections). If they do this, they might not be able to cast dissenting votes, but that seems like a fair tradeoff to me. Again, a smaller volume of votes here should have a positive impact on security.
Although the system here is designed so that citizens coming to the polls to vote on individual issues should be largely unnecessary, there may be some benefit in having a few such votes, perhaps once per year on the regular election day. Of course, voters would be free to indicate a proxy on the issue.
CONCLUSION:
The purpose of this system is to
create a more seamless, fluid combination of representative democracy and direct
democracy. Proposals where the proxy system is used for direct voting, but not
used to elect the legislature, are less ambitious, and perhaps more immediately
feasible on a large scale, but they create a certain amount of redundancy.
Rather than having a separate apparatus for direct voting and representative
voting, this proposal aims to combine them so that the best features of each are
retained.