In an opposite to the "claiming a mandate". one organisation that I'm involved in has had to tell the regional delegates that
no, they aren't "mandated to vote for <foo>, however much they personally
dislike the idea...". That the regional vote about what the issue at hand is asking about is
advisory and that they are free to vote how they think best represents the interests, even if that's contrary to the delegated wishes.
(This was most obvious with some very highly-frought issues where often the regional vote was on a knife-edge itself, and then the national vote ends up on a knife-edge, such that a single region having subtly shifted its majority viewpoint might have changed the national situation. That the regional vote was itself formed of the wishes raised up from the even more localised member-group votes, perhaps with the same issues, made a lot of people uncomfortable.)
Of course, this then makes the delegates far more important than merely being the conveyor of (one or two layers of) localised ideas. Send one who actually favours the thing that the sending committee does not (or vice-versa) and they may find themselves "swayed by the arguments" presented in the national gathering a little
too easily. Conversely, a stick-in-the-mud who happens to agree with the feeling they 'represent' might be more reluctant. So (though I haven't seen signs of this yet, just
other forms of 'politics' messing with the tree of administration from the top on down) it's maybe not just a matter of sending the delegates from last time (if they still wouldn't mind going again...) but factionalisation might matter deeply in such a meta-representational democracy.
(As a delegate myself, I have to tell you that I was only really unhappy with the result of a completely different voting item (clearly wrongly worded/intended, from a technical perspective, though not at all as controversial and game-changing as the knife-edge things), but of course I seemed to be the only person to realise this. If I hadn't had been there, probably nothing would have been said about this (not that it stopped it happening!)... I await the coming year(s) to show up the flaws in the newly-evolved system enough such that I can convince my group to pass on an amendment that (whether I can personally present it or not) might end up being recognised as a necessary change by those filtering such things up to the upper levels. But it's iffy.)
Anyway, it's complicated.
I always liked the idea of a vote that you could place upon
anyone you wanted, whenever you wanted, changing whenever you wanted. Anyone with votes for themselves would pass these alongside their own personal vote for whoever they voted for (save for any votes that would end up 'looping', being previously the vote-target's or their (other) passed-on ones, which would stop being passed just before counting again on the tab of 'prior host'[1]). Whoever ends up with the most un-passed votes (typically someone who considers themselves the better candidate who does not therefore pass their votes on - though the circular-voting-prevention-scheme might create interesting cases) gains the highest office. And so on down the ranks of personal-accumulation as required to fill the rest of any assembly.
Everyone is allowed to know where their vote ends up (otherwise their ability to transfer trust 'up the chain' would be somewhat less useful). It'd be nice if you can preserve the general secrecy of
who votes for you (I can see some genuine problems enforcing that, of course) or even how many you personally 'control', for the usual anti-vote-buying/-forcing reasons.
This is of course a solution looking for a quite different problem, to the one suggested above. I could see it fitting more into a dystopia than a utopia (in the latter, it'd probably be pure demarchy, anyway, except where it's an actual benevolent-and-fair tyrant keeping the whole thing running single-handed) when it still contains too many of the problems that I duly admit still need ironing out of it.
No, it's not actual feudalism (as envisaged) as the intention is that you can swap your vote around (or retain it for your own candidacy)
entirely at your own whim - as often and as much as would work for both the tabulating system and (probably more important) a sense of implementability. Perhaps there's a cooling-off period where a switched/(de)activated vote does not count towards regime-change purposes but puts a warning upon those you might be disengaging once it's an active change. With an additional transitional period related to the depth of change demanded by the uncooled changes as they filter through.
Have fun designing your own implementations. I have a number of such ideas myself, obviously, but until I know who I'd be
ruining running via such a system I'm not exactly tied down to the precise configuration I'd consider most useful in the circumstances.
[1] Though it might just be simpler to never allow (or remove, if acting in retrospect) the onward-voting upon anyone who sits in your own voting-previous chain.
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4201939 times)