How do we technically give consent to our governments

[tec]

Hi All,

I haven't posted here since sometime in 2021, and I have a lot of reading to catch up on. What I have been doing in the meantime is working on the issue of consent and how it can be implemented at scale.

The idea is we would have a series of votes as part of the process of building our collective consent. What we would be voting on would be policies or policy bundles over a number of issues. The goal is to reach a consensus on what we collectively want our government to do. Also, this is done as an iterative process, with periodic votes until a consensus is reached with no explicit time limit.

My last post here was on Serial Approval Vote Elections (SAVE), and while there was some interest in it then, I realized I needed to do something to make it possible for folks to actually play with the idea. I now have a web site, SerialApprovalVoteElection.org that I invite you all to take a look at. It is not quite ready for the general public, but I think the folks on this site might well be interested, and could provide feedback to me on what to do next with the site.

The more general issue is whether a system like SAVE would be useful to us in providing information to our representatives about what we really want our government to do for us. To actually consent to the way we are governed. And to indicate when our government representatives are not acting with our consent.

The way I currently envision how the full process would work is that some non-government organization starts the process with an official master website of all the initial motions, with each of these motions a topic in a Collaboratorium or Deliberatorium. (I have not contacted Mark Klein at MIT about this, but I think it might well be consistent with his goals.) The overall structure of these motions is the basic text along with commentary both supporting and objecting arguments. (Duplicate "me, too" type comments are collapsed into a number for each argument regarding the motion. (The numbers are not votes, but rather a way to allow people to show they support a given argument without swamping the page with extra verbiage.) The reason to use documents of this type is they can be structured so as to be comparable to other motions.

The other thing the NGO needs to do is have a way to come up with the voter list, or voter eligibility criteria. (I am personally in favor of a vote going to every person subject to the rule of the government regardless of citizenship, on the grounds that anyone physically present and able to act independently can take action anyway, and it is better that the action takes the form of a vote than of an act of terrorism.) (I'm also in favor of some type of online voting, and some work on that has been done by Ben Adida, Helios: Web-based Open-Audit Voting.)

Once the initial set of motions is in place, the SAVE process begins. The first vote is a simple approval vote (AV), in which voters simply vote for which of the motions they like. The winner of the first round becomes the focus of the next round which is the first focused approval vote (FAV) round. There is time between the votes for voters to absorb the results and to discuss what happened. In the FAV round, voters are no longer voting for just the motions they approve of, but instead are asked to vote for all the motions they consider better than the focus. They can also vote for the focus itself, which is interpreted as a vote to end the process with the current focus being the consensus result.

After the vote tally for an FAV is counted, the system either finds the focus motion received more than half the vote and move votes that any other motion, in which case the consensus motion has been found and declared as the final winner. This round would be followed by a mandate approval vote, which is a normal AV vote with the sole purpose of measuring the mandate or support for every motion on the ballot.

What happens more often, particularly in the early rounds, is the focus does not get more than half the vote or, rarely, gets more than half the vote but less than some other motion. Then the system determines the focus for the next FAV round. If no motion received more than half the vote, the focus is a (strong or weak) Condorcet winner and remains as focus for the next round. If some other motion gets more than half the vote, the focus from the current round will be replaced by another motion as the focus for the next round. The algorithm for the next focus decision is strictly deterministic and public, as is the data driving the decision.

Since there are only a finite number of motions, at some point a motion will be chosen to be the focus that has already been the focus motion in a previous round. This, obviously, happens when there is a Condorcet winner, but it also happens when there is a top cycle. Whenever the next focus is a repeat, the voters are allowed to propose new motions. There are no restrictions on the motions other than their having a format that allows comparisons with existing motions. If a new motion introduces an entirely new issue, previous motions are presumed to be unspecified regarding the new issue. New motions (with or without new issues) can be thought of as being in one of two types: diversity motions, or compromise motions, although the division may not always be clear. If a voter does not like any of the initial motions, that voter might propose their own ideal motion as a diversity motion, an the motion will get votes from like-minded voters. If voters already have one or more motions they like in the mix, a voter might propose a compromise between the focus and a subjectively better motion that lost to the focus, with the thought that the compromise might get more votes against that focus.

The introduction of new motions means it is possible to defeat Condorcet winners and break top-cycles, and the electorate is thus freed from any limits from the initial set of motions, and more importantly it is quite likely that the final winner of a SAVE process will be better than any of the original motions.

As a political theory process, this vision of a future process is distinct from votes for individual offices or roles. It is a way for the electorate to provide guidance and feedback our legislative, judicial, and executive branches regarding what, exactly, we consent to, and perhaps more importantly what we do not consent to. Moreover, as a system that can be implemented over the internet, it allows voters to express their views in a nuanced way without having to write to a particular person or take part in a demonstration. With a large enough electorate and a secret ballot, it is safe to express one's true feelings on political issues.

So after all this, I have questions: Does this seem like a reasonable system? Is it worth pursuing?

I'll be posting a bit more about my website on SAVE a little later tonight. In the meantime, I hope you are all doing well, or at least as good as can be expected.

Best Wishes,

    --tec