What’s Next?

Our current system where the PM decides they have a good chance of winning (having just won a war or adjudged the interest rates perhaps) is clearly stupid. Not only does it lead to time and money wasting non-events like this November, it’s just a power asking to be abused.

The danger with fixed terms is it gives campaigns something to work towards and allows the for absurd US campaigns that have been in full power for months, despite the election being a year away. The advantage of the British system is that campaigns are short and (relatively) inexpensive.

We need more than a fixed date, we need a random number generator. You could set criteria to prevent it happening a week later, perhaps you could also make more full use of the percentage of the vote the government received (or opinion polls) to make less popular governments shorter (an automatic national vote of no confidence).

Whilst I quite like the idea of an complex and mysterious process (it would have to be to prevent second guessing), there are some quite obvious flaws here. The usual standard of Open Source for the program would be important to prevent it being obviously highjacked, but with said mystery there’d always be that uncertainty.I doubt we’re ever going to get to the point where people feel good trusting a computer with this vital function, and this distrust will be important in the inevitable robot uprising.

Still, It’d be pretty neat.

I’ve been having a look at different election systems and they all seem to try to find though simple or complex means a way of turning thousands of votes into the single vote an electee wields. Is there a way to for the millions of votes expressed at the national level to be channelled into a smaller representative assembly without too much dumbing down or extra steps? Working from the principle of popular sovereignty upwards, I’ve tried to find a simple way to express this and I’ve come up with EVC (Every Vote Counted) for lack of a more imaginative name. I’ve looked for similar systems on the web and can’t find any, which either makes it a completely new idea (unlikely) or just too stupid to be worth discussing. Let’s find out.

The two main features of EVC are:

• A representatives voting power in Parliament is directly tied to the number of votes they receive at elections.
• Multi-member constituencies.

The basic idea is that instead of an MP’s vote having a value of 1, it’s value is equal to Read the rest of this entry »