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From BeyondPolitics

On Delegable Proxy and Secret Ballot

Hi, I am new here. I followed link from elsewhere and see that this site suggest Delegable Proxy for various associations. I can see that you are suggesting it as an extension of direct democracy for organisations or anything that's too big for that.

My worries is that such a proxy system must fail secret ballot. In order to let each member choose if he/she will vote him/herself or entrust his/her delegated proxy for each voting event, records of who's whose proxy must be stored indefinitely long. And being able to retrieve those information violates the spirit of secret ballot - protect voters' will from distortion by threat and force.

If the 'organisations' are just interest groups and/or professional bodies, lack of secret ballot may be tolerable. But for many other cases, the lack of secret ballot can be dangerous, especially government. For direct democracy in its pure form, secret ballot is achievable, not so for delegable proxy.

At this point, delegable proxy is being proposed for Free Associations, which do not control property, but which exist solely for communication, cooperation, and coordination; because no power is manifest in votes (beyond, possibly, some trivial organizational issues), secret ballot isn't an issue. No proposal is being made to use delegable proxy in government.

Solution: 'Fixed Proxy'

In my opinion, asset voting or some forms of it is better than delegable proxy as an alternative/extension of direct democracy. A more direct-democracy-like variant of it is as follows: For some constant interval, an election event occurs. Members elect proxy representatives for themselves. Those representatives can be themselves or some other people. Fractional votes spread to multiple electorates are also allowed. After the election, each representative has voting powers corresponding to the amount of votes he/she received. Without being 'delegable', the proxy system become compatible to secret ballot again.

--Billyswong 17:49, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Absolutely. Asset Voting is very similar to delegable proxy and, in fact, the electors may use delegable proxy to organize themselves. They are already public voters (they must be!). Fractional votes are possible, but a totally unnecessary complication. Just vote for the candidate you most trust! However, Warren Smith's original Asset did allow fractional distributions of votes. It requires a far more complex ballot. Asset Voting is delegable proxy, though, simply with a secret ballot input stage that collects and assigns votes to electors.

However, what you described isn't asset voting, it's a different system, pure proxy voting with secret ballot proxies, so that voting power in an assembly depends on the votes received. This was proposed for a major U.S. city, I believe it was on the west coast, very early in the 20th century. I think it probably isn't a good idea, regular Asset is better; it elects a peer assembly, with every seat holding the same voting power, and there is some filtering. I.e., you have to get a quota of votes to get a seat.

Many students of democracy missing the necessity for filtering; that's what makes direct democracy break down, the lack of filtering. Any solution to the problem of scale must efficiently -- and safely -- filter.

What is also often missed is that the body of electors can form an "electoral college" which functions during the election term to represent the voters purely. If, in transferring votes, electors respect precinct blocks, "seats" can be created which are geographically tight in terms of who is actually represented by a given seat, how tight depends on the level of support that can be assembled overall. Some seats might represent, say, scattered voters across an entire state, whereas others could represent very small districts, their neighbors. And the electors, who have specifically and openly elected the seats, act as filters in both directions, serving the seats in communicating with their constituents and the constituents in communicating with the seat that represents them. The electors will form a penumbra around the Assembly that advises it and supports it.

And anyone can be an elector, just vote for yourself! But that, alone, of course, only gives you one vote to pass on publicly. Under difficult conditions, the voting system might not reveal votes below a certain threshhold; rather, anyone declaring as an elector might be required to name a backup to receive their votes if they don't receive enough.

But that is only for difficult conditions, where serious vote coercion is likely on a small scale, i.e., candidate gets only one vote, knows he voted for himself, so he beats up his wife and everyone else whom he demanded vote for him..... --Abd 03:51, 11 September 2009 (UTC)