IP: on the Swiss way of doing Representative Democracy

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Marcel Waldvogel <marcel () news m wanda ch>
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 23:35:06 +0200
To: farber () cis upenn edu
Subject: Re: IP: How to rig an election

Dave,

I just finished reading the excellent article "Representative Democracy
and the Profession" by Neville Holmes in IEEE Computer (February 2002,
links on 
http://www.comp.utas.edu.au/users/nholmes/prfsn/index.html#2Fb), where
he proposes some simple computer-supported measures to get rid of the
rigging. Below, I also describe the Swiss system (dating from the
pre-computer aera), which has not been found vulnerable to forced
rounding and still achieves minority representation.

In the article, he first proposes to get back to the "one citizen, one
vote" rule, enabled by simple technology: Every representative's vote
would not count as unity, but proportional to the size of his
electorate. Such a system would allow for "mild imbalances" in
electorate size, thus removing the requirement for near-continuous
redistricting.

In a second proposal, he refines this scheme to fix the problem
mentioned in the Economist article, he proposes that (in a two-party
system), both the winning and the minority candidates would be elected,
but each would only have voting power proportional to the number of
voters that actually voted for him/her. He concludes this would also
have many psychological benefits, resulting in a higher voter turnout.
And the technology behind it would be very simply: Just an addition of
each representatives' voter count.

[Nevill Holmes also proposes "continuous elections," where voters could
change their vote whenever they became too upset with their
representative, not having to wait for the re-election, where everything
would be forgotten and the representatives try to be nice to everyone
anyway.]

To depart from the article, I would like to mention that even before
computers, there were countries that devised simple rules that would not
require constant tweaking of electoral borders and, even though rounding
errors do occur, it seems impossible to abuse them, yet they still
enable minorities to make their voice heard.

Switzerland, for example, does not split the voters further than the
Canton ("state") level. For the National Council, every state is
apportioned seats proportional to their population and the entire
population votes using the system of proportional representation (the
average Canton has around 8 representatives). To reduce rounding errors
further, parties from the same part of the political spectrum may
(pre-election) decide that they will pool their fractional seats.

For more information about the Swiss political system (some are quite
unique, focusing more on cooperation and consensus among all involved,
instead of highly visible political battles), visit
http://www.parlament.ch/e/Staatskunde/Einrichtungen_e.htm .


Marcel Waldvogel
http://marcel.wanda.ch/




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