# corevoting: the core task of voting is to select good representatives (4/6)

in @/corerepr i mentioned that i think we should have 3 representatives at the rudder wheel of an organization. but how should the stakeholders (the citizens or employees) pick the right 3 people?

approval voting is my answer since it's one of the simplest system i can think of that allows picking multiple people. each stakeholder just gives a tick to each person he would accept as representing them and that's it.

but there's some devil in the details. picking the list of candidates needs to be done carefully but i don't want to go into that here.

# eliminations

so we have a list of votes, how do we pick the 3 representatives from them? we can't simply take the top 3 people since the choices are quite correlated. we would end up with 3 people having the same opinion.

pick the first winner as the person who got the most votes. if a person gets most votes, then clearly there are a lot of people who want him.

before picking the second winner, eliminate all votes that voted for the first winner. we can consider those votes to have a representation already. the votes remaining are the voices that doesn't represent the majority opinion. so just pick the top winner from these remaining votes.

do the same thing for the 3rd winner: further eliminate votes that picked the second winner. this way an even smaller group will have representation.

in any round break ties by date of birth or name if it's still a tie.

# results

how are the results applied? if the 3 new winners are same as the current set of representatives then it's easy: no change. but otherwise i strongly believe that changes should be gradual. big changes cause lot of chaos. therefore my proposal is just to replace the least popular representative with the most popular not-yet-representative.

changing a single person at a time avoids the often disastrous results stemming from big sudden changes. and onboarding the new representative is much smoother too. with a single leader the new tasks can be overwhelming. but here the country/company keeps working until the new person fully learns the ropes. the danger of making newbie mistakes is much less.

(edit: hmm, now that i think of this, the above doesn't work. the whole leadership must be replaced at once otherwise the resulting trio might not represent the desired mix of representation.)

# frequency

how often should these elections recur? getting this new responsibility can be stressful. losing this responsibility (a job basically) can be stressful. if we have frequent elections, the representatives might be stressing about it all the time. in fact elections are an expensive event. the already elected representatives might spend inordinate amount of resources on campaigning for themselves to keep their job instead of doing their job. in fact they might be incentivised to make worse long-term choices just to make people happy now and keep their voters happy.

a way to combat this could be to reduce the frequency of elections. i say it should be done every 10 years. i say 10 years so that it's a round number and we can think in decades. so e.g. a trio would lead during the years 2020-2029 and we can talk about the "leadership of 2020".

longer terms not only means that the leaders can focus more on their job. they will also have the means to work or invest into longer term projects with less risk.

(edit: in fact, maybe allow one term per person so that during leadership they at no point focus on getting reelected. maybe allow coming back after a decade of break. but perhaps not, strict term limits are probably good.)

one problem with a decade long period is that the chances are high that one of the representatives might be incapacitated. to combat this i'd also involve the 4th winner in the whole leadership stuff. i'd grant them same confidentality privileges as the first 3 winners, i just wouldn't give him approval powers. however if one of the 3 representatives can no longer do their job, they can hop in as a replacement.

# voters

who should be able to vote for the representatives? if you have a small company of at most thousand employees, i say let everyone vote.

however at much larger organizations like whole countries this can be quite tricky. running such an organization is quite complex. how would voters know who is the best person for the job? even if they have a hunch, how do they know that the person they selected is a truthful person who doesn't lie on their promises? and how can an ordinary voter even hold a leader accountable?

it requires a lot of work to be an informed voter. fortunately there are a lot of people who are willing to invest the work into this but they are often drowned out by the uninformed voters.

so there's a crazy idea but i quite like it: create a new "the notables" class of people. they would consist of about 5% of the population. so 1 out of 20 citizens would be a notable. the notables are like ordinary citizens but with an additional privilege: they can vote in the representatives polls.

# notables

how are the notables picked? the citizens vote them too! with similar approval voting as described above, of course. i really liked the idea in https://demodexio.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-democracy-empower-the. you divide your country into districts of 100,000 people. the citizens of each district each month elect 20 new notables. the notables then serve for 15 years. so in a steady state you will have 15years * 12months_per_year * 20new_members = 3,600 notables. 3,600 of 100,000 citizens is about 5.5% of the population.

if you are a politically informed person or just want to vote yourself, then simply run for being notable. anybody should be able to join the monthly election. large applicant lists can be resolved with a simple queue. if you sign up to enter an election, you get added to a queue. every month the first 100 candidates are popped and added to the next election. so you will eventually participate in a future month's election.

if you are not that interested in politics but you know of friends who are and you really respect their opinions, then vote for them. if you ever knew a person who you think should never vote, well, this system does give some protections against that.

it also moves politics out of ordinary people's lives so they can focus on their own work better. i believe this system also makes the campaigning less of a circus. there's less value in targeting the general population with campaign ads since they have no power. and the notables are well informed, misleading campaigns targeting them should be much less effective.

the whole voting infrastructure could become easier this way since there's less votes to manage. and for notables the anonymity requirement could be eliminated too and then there would be much more trust in the results of the presidential votes. i have to admit though that i haven't really thought through all the implications of this, i came across this idea quite recently.

anyway, speaking of countries and assuming we have a way to elect leaders, what should be the government's job be? i elaborate on my crazy idea on this in @/coregov.

published on 2022-10-04, last modified on 2024-01-02

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