Election Geekery

[totherme]

I've been offline for a bit while I panic about thesis stuff - but an election's happening here in the UK, so I thought I'd take a moment to link to a couple of handy tools:

Vote For Policies

Who should you vote for?Both of these sites anonymise the policies of our major parties, to allow you to see how well your tribal instincts match up with

Comments

Re: elections

[ext_231682]

Hi there! I've been thinking about this lately too. In fact, we might even be on the same wavelength :) I've been building a Haskell library (currently called Votelib [3] on Github) that will address some of these issues. To summarize, it will combine Maximum Majority Voting [1] with Delegable Proxy Voting [2].

To be a little more detailed, I think the combination of these two features provides an optimal solution for the modern communication-rich world: basically, we ought to have more control over the issues we care directly about. And we have the computational power to make voting more intelligent, too (i.e. something better than first-past-the-post).

Since the barrier to learning and involvement is so low these days, it seems clear that voting on issues is a real possibility. But we should also be able to delegate our vote to someone we trust if the case for learning and deciding is not strong enough (and clearly, we can't learn about and make a decision on EVERY issue). With "Delegable Proxy Voting", the basic idea is you can assign your "right to vote" to a friend or family member for a period of time. They too can delegate their own vote and any votes entrusted to them to someone else. The real value to this system is that it's a better compromise between the "True Democracy" and the "Representative Republic" systems of governance.

Maximum Majority Voting is a way of repairing the voting system so that each individual can rank their preferences rather than vote for one individual. The result is that the most people get a "satisfactory" candidate in office, rather than the one they hate least. With this method, you can't game the system like the two-party American system has done, and you usually end up with a centrist leader who isn't beholden to any of the extremes.

If you'd like to discuss, please do email me at duane.johnson@gmail.com.

[1] http://www.radicalcentrism.org/majority_voting.html
[2] http://fc.antioch.edu/~james_green-armytage/vm/proxy.htm
[3] http://github.com/canadaduane/votelib