Hello all, Robert in particular.
Re point 1.
I forget which, but there is an official (STV) election that counts an
x-vote as a first preference. Those, who don't want to change, don't
have to. But those, who do, can rank their choices beyond one order of
choice. This is not a problem of a learning difficulty,  beyond the
difficulty of learning consideration for others.
Re. 2.
Agree completely about score voting. I can't help but feel approval
voting is essentially a rebranding of cumulative voting. In about 1867,
John Stuart Mill knew it was only a trifling improvement on plurality
counting but at least opened peoples minds to alternatives.
Re 3.
Weighted Condorcet pairing arguably offers a back-door that partly gets
round the Laplace criticism of Condorcet pairing, that it does not
establish the relative importance of higher and lower preferences, in
the over-all election count.
I see Condorcet pairing primarily as a research tool for
cross-referencing the results of an at-large election with the results
from sub-elections of one-to-one contests or less minimal partitions.
Ideally, we would have an election system that does not have to watch
its back for a Condorcet paradox.
Even an admittedly crude election like IRV (Alternative Vote), according
to this group, has only come-up with the Burlington case. That may have
been politically unfortunate. But, if about 150? elections have not
suffered the paradox, that incidence is not statistically significant.
The real comparison is how many "Bush beats Gore minus Nader" contests
are there? And how many simple plurality elections make voters act as
their own returning officers in an implicit ranked choice election,
where the voter excludes his first preference for Nader, and counts it
for second preference Gore?

Re 4.
Thankyou, Robert for the thankless task of reading my book or manual on
the subject. It took me 14 years to develop FAB STV, on top of a
lifetimes study of voting method. It is bound to be unfamiliar to readers.
The key to understanding the FAB STV procedure is that one thing leads
to another, starting with the Meek method keep value. It is a logical
succession of steps each required for greater consistency. All this
hugely complex system is to fulfill this guiding purpose of
representation to higher degrees of statistical accuracy.
I can answer questions. I did think of outlining the FAB STV thread of
logic. But I found myself leaving out key explanations, to not get
bogged down in details.

Re 5.
You are way ahead of me, on administration of the new electoral system.
You are completely right. There is no chance of its political adoption
in the forseeable future. Brian Meek did not live to see Meek method
adopted for official elections in New Zealand.
Re 6.
In a multi-member constituency, a voters fifth choice may be more liked
than his first choice in a single member constituency, such is the
expansion of choice and comprehensiveness of representation. This was
why HG Wells specified the three conditions: proportional representation
with the single transferable vote in large constituencies.
It is not ranked choice that is the problem but the fixation on single
winner elections, that do not have to be more than minimally democratic.

from
Richard Lung.

On 13/07/2018 19:27, robert bristow-johnson wrote:

Ignorance about voting systems is widespread. "IRV" was invented in the
19th century, and is the single-winner version of Single Transferable
Vote, which is a not-so-bad method for creating, in multiwinner
elections, something like proportional representation, though a far
superior variant was invented in the 1880s that would, if impemented,
create full representation. "No taxation without representation," but
systems that depend on contested elections leave many and often most
voters without any chosen representation, and, at best, a weak
compromise. But because we have never seen anything better, we think
that we have a democracy, and we do, compared with truly awful systems.
But the systems we have can fail badly, and we never seem to fix them.

Now, back in the 19th century, single-winner STV was known to be a very
poor system. Within the context of a strong two-party system, it looks
good. However, whenever there are three factions, and the third faction
starts to approach parity, it can fail badly. IRV proponents look at
what can seem like successes, but ...

IRV was so-named to make it resemble the most widely-used "advanced
voting system" in actual use, top two runoff. In fact, top two runoff
showed a very interesting characteristic, in research conducted by
FairVote. In about a third of the runoffs, the frontrunner in the
primary lost in the runoff. That is rare in actual IRV elections. Why?
Well, IRV proponents also claim that Robert's Rules of Order (RRONR)
recommends IRV. In fact, it recommends a version that requires a true
majority of the votes for someone to win. If there is no true majority
(i.e., a majority of all ballots containing a vote for the leader), then
the election must be repeated. With a top-two runoff? No. That, in fact,
would cement in the pathology. With a completely new election, new
nominations, etc. RRONR actually doesn't like the IRV method, but
suggests it only because it is in actual usage in some organizations,
and if it is impossible to hold a runoff, IRV can be considered. In
fact, they know that there are better methods for that contingency, but
they are not in wide use, and RRONR is descriptive, not prescriptive.;
(and if one is following the described standard rules, no decision is
ever made by mere plurality, which IRV commonly does.

And the voters of San Francisco were lied to in the voter information
pamphlet that claimed a "majority of the votes" would still be required
to win. The IRV initiative actually removed that requirement from the
law. But they then redefine "votes." If you didn't vote for a
frontrunner, one of the top two, our ballot is disqualified. The system
pretends you didn't vote. I've pointed out that by these rules, all
elections would complete with unanimous agreement of "all the votes,"
just do the elimination one more time.

I haven't looked at recent elections, but Burlington Vermont was a city
with three major parties. It elected a candidate from the Progressive
Party when it was clear from the votes that a majority of voters
preferred the Democrat over him. Republican voters actually would have
seen a better result if they had stayed home and not voted. (Because
they preferred the Republican, the Democrat was disqualified before
their second-rank votes for hiim were counted, leading the the
Progressive winning. If one is a Progressive, one might think that a
good result, but the voters of Burlington proceeded to toss out the
method. By the way, top-two runoff would have the same problem.

People are interested in other voting systems, because some of them are
known to work better than IRV. Top two runoff, where write-in votes are
allowed in the runoff, is better than IRV. Of course, if one thinks that
runoff elections are Bad, then one might like IRV more. However, there
are other options that reduce the need for runoffs while preserving
basic democratic values, as IRV does not.

I'm fascinated how reformers, supposedly interested in improving
democratic process, will lie to promote their ideas. (But most pushing
IRV are not lying, they are ignorant, but some who make their living
lobbying for IRV do lie.)

It is fascinating to me that those with obviously little understanding
of the issues are ready to dismiss discussions of them by those with far
higher knowledge and experience as "crazy." It seems to be symptomatic
of our time, ignorance displayed with high confidence.

A naive appraisal would look at, say, Bush v. Gore in 2000 and think
that IRV would have fixed it. And it might have. However, the problem is
that with IRV, third parties would gain an initial toehold and would
gain much more of the vote. That might be considered good.; But, then,
the spoiler effect would return with a vengeance, with results like
those in Burlington, demolishing the benefit. I'm not going into them,
but there are demonstrated systems with far better and safer
performance, such as Bucklin Voting, which could be called "Instant
Runoff Approval." It counts all the votes, and is precinct summable,
unlike IRV, which is expensive and difficult to canvass, and which ends
up ignoring many or even most of the votes cast. They aren't even
counted. Bucklin was very popular for a time about a hundred years ago,
and was eliminated, not because it didn't work, but because it did, and
that's obvious from the history. (In some elections under some
conditions, there was still majority failure, but that was not actually
a poor result from the system, but a characteristic of some primary
elections. A version of Bucklin that was actually two-round if needed
would have addressed this.

And then there are score systems, which allow maximum voting
flexibility. It is now possible to design voting systems that are vast
improvements over those in use. The system I mention above as designed
in the 1880s would transform representative democracy, making party
affiliation unnecessary, probably removing the corrosive influence of
money in elections (because it does not waste any votes and you can vote
for your favorite, period, no assessment of "viability" being necessary)
... but who actually cares about real democracy?

Very few.

Advanced voting systems can and should be implemented in NGOs, because
until people have experience with them, they won't have a snowball's
chance in hell of being implemented in public elections.

On 7/12/2018 9:37 PM, Sennet Williams wrote:

On 7/14/2018 10:08 AM, Richard Lung wrote:

I'd question that simply counting all the votes would be a "trifling
improvement." It would have flipped the US presidential election in
2000, almost certainly, and is a no-cost improvement, simple to
implement and easy to understand. In a two-round system, it can provide
substantial flexibility, perhaps even allowing runoffs to have a third
candidate. Counting all the votes would be, again, an improvement over
IRV, allowing voters to equal-rank. But the IRV method, by discarding
votes, is intrinsically flawed, and Bucklin actually worked when used.
The arguments that it didn't work were based on the fact that it wasn't
magic pixie dust. The only system that fixes about everything is Asset,
which hardly gets any consideration at all. My suggestion has been for
EM reformers to suggest Asset for NGOS, since it's really simple, as
well, and creates a deliberative structure, which is far more flexible
-- and functionally democratic -- than pure amalgamation. To be
fail-safe, it could be used in a nomination process, to be actually
ratified for a final result.

Approval -- and most methods -- are plurality methods unless a true
majority of the votes is required for a result. In Australia, in some
places they accomplish that by making it illegal to not completely rank.
In other words, to make a result more "democratic," coerce the voters.
Ah, the things people do to preserve the way things are!

A condorcet paradox is an indication of an incomplete process. Depending
on preference strength, which some Condorcet methods attempt to
estimate, it might be meaningless. But to truly analyse election returns
requires preference strength information. Borda, again, estimates it
with an assumption of full ranking, such that with many candidates, the
"rank distance" would approximate a measure of preference strength.

But the only ballot that actually allows the voters to directly express
preference strength is a score ballot. And then some advocates of other
systems point out Condoret failure, as if that matters when preference
strength is obviously low. It doesn't. And then it is pointed out that
voters may vote "strategically," as if that is dishonest or bad. In a
Score system, there is never any incentive to reverse preference. Voters
decide what preferences matter to them, and will vote accordingly, and a
good overall system will detect situations where is ambiguity, perhaps
due to inaccurate perception of probable results, and will then set up a
runoff.

Instead of working together to create a system that will actually
improve and foster full democracy, we don't, it seems, trust the people
and want them to conform to our own ideas. In other words, same old same
old. The problem with democracy is the damn people!

But democracy is still government by consent, and whenever that fails,
oppression is inevitable. It's only a question of how bad it gets. The
logic that captured me, so many decades ago, is that we need
representation by consent and choice, not by "winners" and "losers." And
that appears to be doable. But who cares enough to try it?

Some. Not yet enough, but it's possible any day. It might only take one
person to make a proposal and carry it through, in one place.

It is possible to show that about one-third of IRV results were not
optimal. This is done by comparing IRV results with top-two runoff
results. If a full-information ballot were used with IRV (it could be
done! Easily!) we would then know. However, actually collecting the data
to determine, definitively, if a voting system is actually working is
not a part of any reform proposal I have seen. The collecting of
information is confused with and considered less important than creating
a result, and I can easily see the counter-argument: what if this causes
the result of an election to be called into question? Won't this damage
our trust in government? I think I have actually seen that argument.

If our trust in government is based in ignorance, it's worse than a bit
of trouble. A simple, coarse-score ballot, with explicit approval
cutoff, would be cheap and easy, and how the actual result is determined
could be explicity declared on the ballot. Providing the additonal
information would be optional. One could vote the ballot, if one
chooses, as vote-for-one. It would all generate useful information, and
could guide future election method decisions.

In a two-party system. Duverger's law and party attempts to corner the
electorate create many of them. Look at any close election and at the
participation of minor parties in it. There may be hundreds of these a
year. As well, the existing system tends to suppress minor party
participation. New York has Fusion voting, a step in a direction of
improved democracy. It was proposed for Massachusetts and lost. Who
opposed it?

The "Democratic" party, of course! It lost. So why did people vote
against it? Well, perhaps they trusted their party. After all, isn't our
party the Good Guys? If it's bad for them, surely we don't want it! It
all makes sense until and unless one starts to look more closely, which
most people don't do. And realizing that, Dodgson proposed Asset, which
actually creates, very simply, representative government, with the good
stuff associated with that, while allowing low-level decisions, by
ordinary people who don't want their lives to be about politics, to be
useful and effective.

My sense is that many would vote for a third party candidate if they did
not know it would be a wasted vote. It could be trivial to fix that
problem. But we obviously care about something else more. about what?

Thankyou for troubling to make so many comments. Have never heard of
Asset, even if it goes as far back as 1880. Have heard Charles Dodgson
mentioned but forget (am old). Indeed am unfamiliar with the host of
variations on methods. But have a few basic guidelines, which I trust.
(It surprises me but does not perturb me that many experts don't think
so.) A single-order vote, the x-marks the spot vote is not sufficient
for effective voting. A many-order vote (ranked choice) is essential.
Likewise a single majority count is far less accurate than a
many-majority count (like the Droop quota). You will perceive a pattern
here: the general system is a many order vote for a many majority count.
from
Richard.

On 15/07/2018 19:08, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

Asset is totally out-of-the-box. It was reinvented on the Election
Methods mailing list in the 1990s, and by Warren Smith, who coined the
term "Asset Voting." Asset was designed to make STV work far better. It
works well if the voter only states the favorite, and, in fact, my own
analysis came to be that adding more candidates simply complicates the
process with no benefit.

The concept of a voting system that simply allows the voter to name
their most-trusted candidate, with nothing more needed, is definitely
not how people think!

You think that ranked choice is "essential" but that comes from an
assumption of contested elections. Asset with a Hare quota creates fully
cooperative elections. Nobody loses. Depending on specific rules, the
election might run a seat short. I actually prefer that to using the
Droop quota, which then creates wasted votes. With the Hare quota, votes
might seem "wasted" but only because those holding them don't get it
together to create a seat. Natural consequences, and it becomes possible
to allow a seat to be elected later, and it's even possible to use the
"electoral college" that Asset creates to allow some level of direct
democracy.

Asset used for single-winner elections would find a majority or simply
fail until the electors get it together. They eventually will, that's
history!

Asset can create a winner or winners that are not even on the ballot.
And, in fact, Asset doesn't need printed ballots and doesn't need
restricted candidate lists, but for simplicity I'd require candidate
registration.

http://rangevoting.org/Asset.html

Warren's version of Asset was needlessly complicated, and he was still
thinking in terms of trying to select the "best" candidates using
amalgamation. Asset can do this much more directly and intelligently.

Basically, if Asset is run properly, all voters are represented by a
person they freely chose (from among those willing to serve), either
actually by that person or -- for most elected seats -- by someone
approved by the person they chose. I call the collection of candidates
receiving any votes the "electoral college," because this does resemble
the original U.S. electoral college.

Again, Warren, writing that page, was still thinking in terms of a party
system. Asset could be truly revolutionary, making the party system
unnecessary. Most people, hearing about Asset for the first time, simply
don't get that with no wasted votes, there is no need for strategy, no
need to campaign, even, so no need for money to run for office. Leaders
will emerge, for sure, but will be clearly responsible to those who vote
for them.

I expect that ballots with names on them would disappear. With Asset,
you can decide to vote only for someone who will actually talk with you,
whom you know. Those who are actually elected will know which electors
actually voted for them, so there is, again, responsibility, and a
communication network would be naturally created. You can talk with your
elector, the one you voted for, and your elector can talk to the seat,
generally. Electors who only have a few votes will turn them over to
other electors, so the chain of communication can become larger, but
that's normal. It can still be clear and reliable.

On 7/16/2018 3:34 PM, Richard Lung wrote:

Regarding the quota, one of my four averages (in FAB STV) is the
Harmonic Mean quota which is the average of the Droop and Hare quotas,
which I invented in order to achieve a more representative quota. (I
won't go into details here.) Ranked voting is indeed essential, because
order is essential. Order in the vote and proportion in the count are
essential, because they are essential to mathematics, not to mention
civilisation, itself.
Order and proportion, the bases of science, have become political
footballs. Electoral science was founded in the age of the Enlightenment
and has foundered in this electoral age of the Benightenment.

I say this only as helpful advice. I don't mind if you don't take it.
Good wishes.
from
Richard Lung.

On 16/07/2018 21:40, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

Richard, thanks for the advice. How to apply it is mysterious to me. So
I'll just look at what you wrote, on what I wrote about.

The essence of genuine democratic representation is choice. I may, for
most affairs in life requiring my decision, designate a proxy, when I
can't be there to make a decision myself.

In designating a proxy, the only relevant factor is my choice, my
decision to name a person. I may revoke this designation at any time,
but it generally stands until revoked (either deliberately or by the
lapse of some specified time.)

Needing to meet a quota is contrary to the fundamental principle of
choice in representation, but it may be made as a compromise. So, we
decide that, to have a seat in an Assembly, the seat must be supported
by a quota of voters, who agree to the person serving in that way, for
them, and if this is fully democratic, then those voter choices are not
coerced. It is possible for a voter to designate a series of choices,
i.e., my first choice is A, my second choice, if A cannot serve, is B,
etc. However, this leads to a fairly complex system and Dodgson
(Carroll) found a far better way, far more suitable for ordinary voters,
who, after all, have busy lives. STV  systems only work because of party
candidate lists, otherwise most voters, as Dodgson pointed out, really
only know their favorite, and there is a far simpler way, that allows
the exercise of choice in a slightly different way.

Rather, a basic principle of leadership is understanding how to delegate
authority. The skill of serving as a representative will be associated
with skill in designating someone to serve. In the system I have
described, electors will focus on politics and may be able to develop
personal relationships with those who end up with seats. That is, they
will not merely be depending on media impressions, and the corrupting
power of money is politics is largely related to the cost of dominating
media coverage.

So, in an Asset election, the voter need only choose one person, the
person the voter most trusts, out of all those willing to serve as
public voters. Obviously, anyone who is a candidate is so willing to
serve, since votes in the Assembly will be public.

By some means, a quota is chosen. I use the Hare quota because it is
very simple to understand, and the only problem with Hare is that it is
likely, given real-world phenomena, that the Hare quota will fail to
elect the full number of seats. There are many ways to solve this
problem, and an Assembly that is missing a seat for a time can still
function with little harm.

One of the facts often overlooked is that under standard parliamentary
procedure, any assembly makes its own rules. All it takes to make -- or
remove -- a rule is a majority vote. If one doesn't like that, tell it
to Robert's Rules, or the parliamentarians. It is a basic right of the
majority in any democratic assembly to make its own rules. For lots of
reasons, the rules tend to be not changed very much. But the "nuclear
option" in the U.S. Senate reflects this very old principle, being
abused because of the party system. The party system has corrupted many
basic democratic processes, including the U.S. Electoral College.

It is not that parties are Bad. It is that the Iron Law of Oligarchy is
very real and to design fully democratic institutions we need to be
aware of it and factor for it. There is a way, and the path has been
blazed, but few pay any attention to it. Rather, most people run with
the standard assumptions about democracy, it's all they have heard for
their entire lives.

So ... suppose we use the Hare quota. So there are one (or less likely,
more) seats that are not filled. So then the Assembly, if it cares about
those voters whose votes have not been applied, can decide to allow some
kind of representation. Perhaps "observers" can be allowed. Perhaps they
might have fractional votes, which they could use, perhaps to break
ties. And there are many, many possibilities.

I see a common reaction to new ideas for election methods, and it was
repeated in these discussions. A proposal was made that seats have
voting power proportional to the votes they received. Immediately it is
pointed out that what, in delegable proxy systems I called a superproxy,
someone who represents a majority of voting members, could make any
decision unilaterally. Yes, they could, if the rules allowed it. Any
system coupled with a well-designed set of Stupid Rules could create a
disaster.

But Asset systems that I wrote about create a peer assembly, with
anything different from that only on the edges, and easily handled with
sane rules.

Use of the Droop quota is based on the idea of election by majority. In
such an election, there are losers, who do not end up with chosen
representation, and that is by design. Our election systems were
designed for district representation, where districts are represented by
someone chosen by a plurality. Used to be that the representative was
chosen by the Sovereign. Maybe the people were consulted, and maybe not.

Any number could be picked as an election quota. Key to a fully
democratic system, though, is that seats, elected by the same number of
voters, have equal voting power (setting aside vote-weighting systems,
which would still be democratic). And then we can deal with the "dregs,"
the votes not yet assigned to a seat. Right now, such people have zero
representation, unless a seat decides to serve them anyway (which
members of assmblies often do).

It would take very minor adjustments to rules and procedures to create
what would amount to full representation, or which would, at least,
approach it.

What is often missed in considering this is communication in the other
direction. Amalgamation is thought of as a one-way process, where the
voters "express their will," albeit in a primitive way. Human
communication can be far, far more than that. An Asset seat would know
who voted for him or her, and could directly communicate, could explain
his or her stand on issues, could ask for advice, and could, in fact,
ask an elector to communicate with his or her voters.

But, wait, electors won't know who they voted for. No, not formally, but
yes, often, and voters know who they voted for and will be able to talk
to their electors, unless they are dumb enough to vote for . . . I used
to use Clint Eastwood as the model for this style of voting. Vote for
someone with whom you cannot have personal communication. Not bright, in
my book. But some people will do it. It harms nobody but them, unless
everyone votes for the Your Fired guy.

What? That can happen? Yes. That can happen with the present system,
because we only know candidates through the media.

We need to rebuild democracy from the ground up, and I suggest creating
advanced election methods and using advanced voting systems in NGOs.
That's an old suggestion of mine, and the Election Science Foundation
actually did it in an election, with the only known actual Asset
election in history. It worked spectacularly, as a voting system. It did
not create magic candidates who would kick ass and change the world. It
only created a steering committe that could have advised the leadership
and the active volunteers. Had they asked. They never did. But that
committee ended up, quite quickly (it took a few days), representing
every voter. There was one dissenter, who had not understood that his
vote might be transferred and he Didn't Like It. He wanted his Favorite
and the H with everyone else! But his Favorite transferred all his votes.

But other than that one person, the election was Unanimous!

Richard, this is all simpler than you think. "Order" as a demand is
oppressive. In real life, I am indifferent between certain
possibilities, and so they are "equally ranked," and requiring a choice
be made is introducing noise into the system, not smart.

The quota set, with a certain number of voters, is designed to insure
the election of a consequential number of seats. it's based on an idea
that so many seats must be elected, and the demand that an election
produce a determined result has already lost a basic principle of
democracy, that a decision requires a majority; instead, in effect,
deterministic voting systems are undemocratic. A free people may decide
not to decide, or may act such that no decision is made.

(Arrow's theorem doesn't even consider nondeterministic systems as
"voting systems," thus ordinary, standard, Robert's Rules election
process is not a "voting system," which shows how crazy this field gets)

On 7/17/2018 2:50 PM, Richard Lung wrote:

Thankyou for your discussion.
I just pick-up on two or three points. People often think of first,
second, third choices, in terms of a poor choice for a single vacancy,
so that their second choice, or even their first, is not someone they
really want. A fifth choice in a large multi-member constituency,
equitably elected, can be a better choice than a first choice for a
single vacancy. I'm not considering necessary conditions of campaign
finance reform, freedom of information; the need for local democratic
infrastructure, instead of the information poverty of the fly-by-night
polling station, etc.
By the way, my system of FAB STV, uses all preference information,
counts all preferences including abstentions, and they go to a quota for
an empty seat. I agree that this is a voters right, but it only came
about in this system, as a necessary condition of the logic of its count.
Four Averages Binomial STV treats elections as statistical
representation. I believe that (social choice theory, or what have you)
refuting the assumption that there is a logically determined winner or
loser, in no way invalidates the reasonableness of democratic elections.
In other words, I agree that it is "crazy" to assume voting systems must
be deterministic and then blame them for not being so!
from
Richard (Lung).

On 17/07/2018 22:17, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

I'm not getting my message across.

On 7/18/2018 1:30 PM, Richard Lung wrote:

I'm encouraging looking at basic democratic process, as has been
practiced in NGOs for centuries. NGOs, generally, don't allow members to
name proxies (while share corporations uniformly do so). Most small
organizations don't have any representative assembly. They may elect
boards, and board members are more like officers than representatives
(though multiwinner methods might be used).

I'm pointing out that if I cannot choose my representative to an
allegedly representative assembly, I am not represented. Rather, my
district might be represented, i.e., a majority in my district, or some
quota. Not me.

Imagine this concept for choosing a representative assembly. Candidates
are listed and people openly vote for them, and can change their votes
at any time. When a quota of people choose a candidate, the candidate
gains a seat. All seats, then, represent by choice the same number of
people. (The system stops accepting votes for a candidate, when the
candidate gains a quota).

Then add this tweak: if candidates may still accept votes after reaching
the quota, they may then transfer the votes to other candidates. This,
then, becomes Asset. It is very close to direct choice of representation.

It is simple, optimal voting strategy is totally obvious -- vote for
your best choice -- and is then compatible with secret ballot in the
primary election, which simply creates electors who then have so many
votes to transfer to create seats, and who may serve to reassign votes
as needed pending the next full election.

The electoral college, then, represents the/entire electorate,/ by
direct choice.

I would have the Assembly formed decide its own rules, as is
traditional. Because deliberative democracy is essential (not merely
aggregative popular democracy), I would handle all officer elections in
the Assembly, officers to serve at the pleasure of the Assembly. I.e., a
parliamentary system.

On 2018-07-17 23:17, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

One thing I don't get about this phrasing of Asset is how the problem of
scale is handled.

If the number of people initially voted for is small enough that they
can all physically meet, then Asset is easy: everybody who gets at least
one vote meets and then negotiate to distribute vote assets until the
vote assets have been concentrated on sufficiently few candidates to fit
the final council. If the council votes are unweighted, one might
additionally add a constraint that every candidate needs more than a
quota's worth of votes.

But now suppose there are a million voters and everybody chooses one of
their friends as the one they trust. The set of everybody who's
somebody's friend is unlikely to be small enough that they can
physically meet. How does Asset proceed from this point? Is it just like
delegable proxy, where the "initial candidates" name other candidates in
turn until the set has been narrowed down enough?