Voting by delgable proxy

[freediver]

I'd like to see this system of voting tried out somewhere. One of the senates or the QLD lower house would be a good place. I think it would significantly improve our democracy by removing artificial barriers to participation.

http://www.ozpolitic.com/electoral-refo ... -democracy

However, there is a way to achieve both direct democracy and proportional representation while allowing members of the public to delegate the decision making process to someone else. In fact, it demands less effort on behalf of the public from those who do not need or wish to vote as often.

We start by abandoning the idea that members of parliament get one equal vote each. "One person, one vote" is for the citizens, not for parliament, which is meant to reflect the will of the people rather than the will of the politicians! "One politician, one vote" is another custom that made sense in the past when options were limited but which no longer makes sense. So instead of getting one vote each, the weight of a politician's vote is directly proportional to the number of citizens who vote for him. In effect, every single citizen gets and equal vote on the floor of parliament. Obviously this requires multiple representatives per electorate, and preferably a single electorate from which all members of parliament are elected.

Under this system, citizens are delegating their vote on each issue to a representative. Members of parliament do not represent regions, ideologies, parties or even themselves. Instead, they represent a group of people. Thus voting by delegable proxy achieves the ‘purest’ form of proportional representation. But wait, there’s more! Voting by delegable proxy would likely require electronic voting. If citizens were prepared to tolerate a system that tracks which representative they delegate their vote to, then the system could do away with elections and allow citizens to change their delegation at any time. This would effectively achieve direct democracy as well as proportional representation. Citizens could change their delegation as often as is practicable, thus effectively voting on each individual issue if they chose to do so. Likewise, staunch supporters of a certain candidate would not have to vote again until their candidate retired or they changed their mind.

Such a system could run in parallel with a paper based system, allowing citizens to chose between being on the electronic role and getting the full range of options, or being on the paper roll and voting once every few years. The number of representatives could be adjusted as it is likely that a coalition of five or so members with significant backing could gain control of parliament. A politician’s salary could be made proportional to their support base. This would give very popular members a significant income and allow them to pay ‘ministers’ to advise them on each issue. The sitting members with the least support would have far less than 1% of the vote each. Candidates who did not make it into parliament would have to delegate their votes to a sitting member. It would probably be necessary to limit the ‘chain of delegation’ to a maximum of two steps. That is, citizens must delegate their vote either to a member of parliament or to an agent who delegates all of their votes to a sitting member.

There would still be a role for political parties under such a system, as parties are far more than a group of candidates and elected representatives. However, they would likely be smaller, more numerous and more like a social club. They key difference is that they would only be represented by a single sitting member in each house of parliament. However, they could coordinate their activities across local, state and federal legislatures.

Such a system would allow local views on issues to be represented in parliament as the need arose, while at the same time allowing proportional representation along ideological grounds.