proj-branchDemocracy-branchDemocracyDesignTodos5 (DESKTOP-TEPUH57's conflicted copy 2020-05-15)

mb w/r/t interpretation of rules of debate on the Board, questions of 'fact' lie with the Chairs (altho mb Appeal from Decision of the Chair can throw it to the procedural tribunal?), but questions of 'law' (eg what the rules mean) lie with the procedural tribunal

this would reduce the power of appeal from decision of the chair, and prevent spectacles where the legislature appeals a decision when the decision was clearly correct

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need to make the Board election procedure able to deal with constraints such as e.g. at least N independent directors, at least N directors with financial expertise, at least N directors of each gender, etc.

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these ppl might be interested in using it:

jeffrey berns and blockchains LLC bought 67k mostly undeveloped acres to make a town which is a "distributed collaborative entity" where "ownership rights and voting powers will be recorded in a digital wallet" according to the nytimes. Berns is a lawyer.

"Every resident and employee will have what amounts to an Ethereum address, which they will use to vote on local measures and store their personal data."

"Mr. Berns believes that one of the big problems has been security. People have been terrible at holding the private keys that are necessary to get access to a Bitcoin or Ethereum wallet.

He wants to address that with a custom-built system where people’s private keys are stored on multiple digital devices, kept in vaults, so that no one device can gain access to the keys. He has already purchased vaults that are burrowed into mountains in Sweden and Switzerland, and he plans to build additional vaults in the mountains in Nevada."

-- [1] (archived)

"After the land purchase, the company made no significant announcements, though it did hire the founder of MyEtherWallet?, Kosala Hemachandra, as its "chief blockchains officer" in June." -- [2]

https://blockchains.com/

https://twitter.com/blockchainsllc?lang=en

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learn from this:

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8016/

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https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.00045##

" Stage c

c ollective decisions In the second part (stage c ), we asked participants to make collective decisions. First, they were instructed to find other members in their gr oup according to a numerical code found in page 1. Each group had six members, and all participants were seated next to each other in two consecutive rows. The speaker announced that there were two possible roles in the group: player or moderator. Each gro up had five players and one moderator. Each participant could 16 find their assigned role in page 1 (e.g., “You are the moderator in group 765” or “You are a player in group 391 ”). Players were instructed to reach a consensus and report it to the moderator in a maximum of 6 0 seconds. Moderators were given verbal and written instructions to not participate nor intercede in the decisions made by the players. The role of the moderators was simply to write down the collective decisions made by the players in their group. Moderators were also instructed to write down an ‘X’ if there was lack of consensus among the group. Groups were asked to answer four of the eight questions from stage i1 (see Supplementary Table 1 ). The speaker read the four questions again, and a nnounced the moments in which time was over. "

" Participants first answered individually, then deliberated and made consensus decisions in groups of five, and finally provided revised individ ual estimates. We found that averaging consensus decisions was substantially more accurate than aggregating the i nitial independent opinions. Remarkably, combining as few as four consensus choices outperformed the wisdom of thousands of individuals "

and the average of the revised individuals estimates (phase III) was even better, i think

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"Posner and Weyl do give one example of what I would call a decentralized institution: a game for choosing who gets an asset in the event of a divorce or a company splitting in half, where both sides provide their own valuation, the person with the higher valuation gets the item, but they must then give an amount equal to half the average of the two valuations to the loser. "

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tangentially relevant:

https://www.say.com/ https://www.alleywatch.com/2018/04/the-alleywatch-nyc-startup-daily-funding-report-4-10-18/amp/ https://www.barrons.com/articles/point72-backed-start-up-to-rock-the-proxy-vote-1523363755

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defendent decides whether 'jury' (full tribunal) is used, or just judges

or, have a 'trial' first with a panel of 3 judges, and only if they disagree, does it go to a jury

3 judges + 6 jurors = 9; needs 6 to convict

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no parliamentary system can survive if it does not provide a mechanism for quick decision-making in times of war and emergencies

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if the person who would exceed term limits or serve in multiple offices gets >=2/3 of the vote, they can do this even without the order of a majority of the Chairs. This is to prevent the owner of a company from having control taken away by surprise due to some unexpected procedural issue.

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recruit this guy to ask for advice:

Richard A. Arenberg

Arenberg worked for Sens. Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.), Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Majority Leader George Mitchell (D-Maine) for 34 years and is co-author of the award winning "Defending the Filibuster: The Soul of the Senate-Revised and Edited Edition." He is a visiting professor of political science and international and public affairs at Brown University.

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the election protocol for the Doge of Venice is interesting:

https://www.venetoinside.com/hidden-treasures/post/the-election-of-the-doge-of-the-republic-of-venice/ https://www.constitution.org/elec/VenetianGovernment.html but see https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/52174/did-the-republic-of-venice-use-range-voting which disputes the actual claim that range voting was used https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=venice+doge+election+voting&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=venice%20doge%20voting%20election&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1-m

the Doge seems to be sort of a cross between a king and an executive officer. The governance of Venice is purported to have been pretty good. So maybe this is worth taking a look at.

Seems to me that the primary virtue of this procedure is anti-corruption through randomizaiton; it's hard to predict who the final electors will be so it's hard to get to them ahead of time. Some evidence for this is that the electors were sequestered while they debated. But for similar reasons, it also prevents any one faction from being certain of a win.

how can we use this? i think in the election of Prime Minister (CEO). If we used it on the legislature we would lose the ability to trace and hence to have cross-councils. If we used it on the Chairs they would lose their legitimacy. We could also use it on judges, i guess, but right now i'm thinking just the CEO.

imo the full procedure is too complicated to retain legitimacy in the modern world, and even the reduced 7-round one given in the paper TODO is too complicated. Also it requires too many people.

so how about this variant: the 7-seat Board elects a commission of 7*3 = 21 distinct people, where each person must be elected by a vote of >=2/3 of the Board. The 21 people are reduced via sortition to 7. Those seven elect another commission of 21 distinct people by a vote of >=2/3. And those 21 select the CEO via single-seat triscore voting with a final threshold of 3/5.

When term limits are put on hold this procedure is too (to allow a supermajority shareholder to determine the CEO).

Note https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/52174/did-the-republic-of-venice-use-range-voting which states that the nominees are considered in random order and the first one to get >=2/3s wins (is this only in the final round or in earlier rounds too?).

Unlike just letting the Board decide, this procedure yields a non-incumbent result at unpredictable times, so we need a way to decide when to use it. I say the Board can vote out the incumbent with a simple majority vote. It's possible that this procedure doesn't result in an election, though (if one of the stages fails to elect the required number for the next stage, or if no candidate gets >=3/5 of the final vote), in which case no one wins and the incumbent remains.

hmm.. actually maybe that's not so good; that means that as long as the incumbent enjoys at least >1/3 support, on average their supporters can refuse to vote for anyone in the commission-electing rounds. And then the legislature will just vote to replace again the next day, until randomly we end up with both 7-person rounds having unusually few of the incumbent's supporters. Otoh that outcome isn't actually so bad. (mb let's actually build it in; after we have a selection, the legislature then votes whether or not to accept it by majority vote; if it rejects, explicitly say that the legislature can then vote to go back and do it again?)

This also makes me think that the supermajority votes in the original Doge of Venice elections may have been intended as majoritarian, so as to promote power being kept by whichever group of faction(s) currently holds it (which makes sense as this was an 'aristocratic' system).

I guess a problem remains that in the first round, when the legislature itself is voting by >=2/3s to select 21 people, the >1/3 supporters of the incumbent can just block every time, meaning that this protocol allows the incumbent to stay in office until 2/3s of the legislature is tired of them (which is only 5/7 so it's not THAT crazy...)

We could always make it multiseat triscore in the first round, which doesn't fail (i think) or at least can't be made to fail easily by a small faction.

The thing is, if a majority faction has a candidate in mind, they can keep redoing this until their candidate wins, and if a large enough minority faction likes the incumbent, they can keep refuse to vote for anyone except their own people and thereby block the procedure from electing a replacement. So this procedure only has teeth when (a) a large enough supermajority dislikes the incumbent but (b) there is no majority preference for any single replacement.

Which seems like this is pushing us to use simple majorities rather than supermajorities. So, if any legislative faction has a majority, they can get their way (which seems OK for choosing a prime minister). And when a majority dislikes the incumbent, but there is no majority for any single replacement, now is when this procedure 'has teeth'; the procedure has some probability of coming up with a replacement which is preferred to the incumbent even by the Board, although it's not clear who this person will be.

another issue is that an incumbent friendly commission of electors could simply refuse to end debate. We can deal with that by giving the legislature the power to disolve them at will.

we can better serve the purpose of resisting corruption by making the first commission elected by the Boardelectors rather than the Board (which is more similar to the original Venetian procedure in which a large electorate elected the first commission); in fact, like the Venetians, just start by sortitioning that larger body down to 7.

what if the 7 who are selected happen to be mostly incumbent supporters? They can just refuse to elect a candidate, or to elect someone who is just as unacceptable to the Board as the incumbent. We could add complexity to force them to at least elect someone, but i think this is a lost cause -- if they like the incumbent, they like the incumbent, and they'll find some way to do what e wants. So let's just let them do their thing -- forcing them to filibuster, or to elect someone else besides their guy, is 'punishment' enough for not doing their "duty" of honestly searching for a good, broadly-supported, replacement for the incumbent.

if the office of CEO is vacant, then whoever is currently filling in for that role (acting CEO) (the understudy of the previous CEO) is in the role of incumbent in the final vote, and if they win, they become the real CEO. If the office is truly vacant (there is no one even filling in, and it's totally unclear who should), then the first Chair acts as the incumbent, but if separation of powers is in effect, they remain only an acting CEO, and in this case the CEO replacement procedure is automatically invoked every Boardmeeting until a real CEO is found.

so the procedure i'm currently advocating is:

the Board can vote to challenge the incumbent CEO. When they do so, 7 out of the Boardelectors are chosen by sortition. They elect a temporary commission of 21 seats via multiseat triscore (with a final runoff vote of the chosen replacement against debating more and then redoing the vote). That commission, after debating, elects a potential replacement CEO by single-seat triscore (with the incumbent not eligible) (with a final runoff vote of the chosen replacement against debating more and then redoing the vote); note that this procedure might not terminate, so if these commissions haven't elected a potential replacement CEO by the beginning of the next Boardmeeting, they are dissolved. This potential replacement is then sent to the Board, who vote in their own runoff between the incumbent and the potential replacement. The Board may re-challenge the incumbent (or new) CEO once per Boardmeeting. if the office of CEO becomes vacant, the previous CEO's understudy immediately becomes CEO. However if there is no understudy and the office becomes vacant, the Chair becomes acting CEO and the CEO replacement procedure above is automatically invoked every Boardmeeting, with Chair as incumbent, until a CEO is found (if separation of powers is not in effect then a vote for the incumbent by the Board makes the Chair the CEO).

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what are the advantages of the above procedure?

with this expansion of their role, we might change the name of the Boardelectors to just Electors. Which sounds better anyhow.

also, i forgot how many Boardelectors there are, but we should make the commission number the same as that, instead of just 21.

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maybe a simpler variant would be:

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yknow we could actually use the board-tracing system to have local law; when there is a civil suit between two citizens of the same traced faction, their jury is only composed of others from the same faction. And you could let each faction make its own rules that only apply to its citizens.

One issue here is that each citizen is actually in two factions at once due to the two-term structure of the Board. Do these additional rules only apply when the same rule is passed by both factions? Yeah, probably, because it's already annoying for citizens to have to obey these 'dynamic factions' that they didn't directly join.

A simpler thing would be to do the jury-only thing without the additional rules. Does the jury-only thing only trigger if both citizens match on both of their factions? Yeah, probably.

When two citizens are of different factions, we could still select the jury so that it only consists of other citizens from those two factions? i think that's a bad idea though; in that case everyone on the jury has a 'side'.

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not even precedent can override plain meaning of the rules even if the rules were not followed in the past precedent does not compel or allow them to be disregarded

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https://www-vox-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2019/9/25/20881843/supreme-court-britian-judicial-selection-brexit?amp_js_v=0.1#referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2F2019%2F9%2F25%2F20881843%2Fsupreme-court-britian-judicial-selection-brexit

"Britain’s brilliant method of picking Supreme Court justices, explained"

skimmed this but it probably deserves a read

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interesting scifi take on fundamental rights:

https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/485acb81cdb0b

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" When, finally, during the Kronstadt rebellion, the Soviets revolted against the party dictatorship and the incompatibility of the new councils with the party system became manifest, he decided almost at once to crush the councils, since they threatened the power monopoly of the Bolshevik party. The name 'Soviet Union' for post-revolutionary Russia has been a lie ever since, but this lie has also contained, ever since, the grudging admission of the overwhelming popularity, not of the Bolshevik party, but of the soviet system which the party reduced to impotence. ... More recently, his- torians have pointed to the rather obvious similarities between the councils and the medieval townships, the Swiss cantons, the English seventeenth-century 'agitators' - or rather 'adjustators', as they were originally called - and the General Council of Cromwell's army, but the point of the matter is that none of them, with the possible exception of the medieval town, 7 * had ever the slightest influence on the minds of the people who in the course of a revolution spontaneously organized themselves in councils.

Hence, no tradition, either revolutionary or pre-revolutionary, can be called to account for the regular emergence and re- emergence of the council system ever since the French Revo- lution. If we leave aside the February Revolution of 1848 in Paris, where a commission pour les travailleurs, set up by the government itself, was almost exclusively concerned with ques- tions of social legislation, the main dates of appearance of these organs of action and germs of a new state are the following: the year 1870, when the French capital under siege by the Prus- sian army 'spontaneously reorganized itself into a miniature federal body', which then formed the nucleus for the Parisian Commune government in the spring of 1871; 75 the year 1905, when the wave of spontaneous strikes in Russia suddenly de- veloped a political leadership of its own, outside all revolution- ary parties and groups, and the workers in the factories organ- ized themselves into councils, Soviets, for the purpose of repre- sentative self-government; the February Revolution of 1917 in Russia, when 'despite different political tendencies among the Russian workers, the organization itself, that is the soviet, was not even subject to discussion'; 76 the years 1918 and 1919 in Germany, when, after the defeat of the army, soldiers and wor- kers in open rebellion constituted themselves into Arbeiter- und Soldatenrate, demanding, in Berlin, that this Ratesystem be- come the foundation stone of the new German constitution, and establishing, together with the Bohemians of the coffee houses, in Munich in the spring of 1919, the short-lived Bavarian Rdterepubli\'^ the last date, finally, is the autumn of 1956, when the Hungarian Revolution from its very beginning produced the council system anew in Budapest, from which it spread all over the country 'with incredible rapidity'. 78

The mere enumeration of these dates suggests a continuity that in fact never existed. It is precisely the absence of con- tinuity, tradition, and organized influence that makes the same- ness of the phenomenon so very striking ... It is true that wher- ever the revolution was not defeated and not followed by some sort of restoration the one-party dictatorship, that is, the model of the professional revolutionary, eventually prevailed, but it prevailed only after a violent struggle with the organs and insti- tutions of the revolution itself. " -- https://archive.org/stream/OnRevolution/ArendtOn-revolution_djvu.txt

"Odysse Barrot formulated with rare precision the chief difference in terms of French history between the new form of government, aimed at by the Commune, and the old regime which soon was to be restored in a different, non- monarchical disguise"; then a French quote which translates to something about federation rather than 'one and indivisible'

" the intimate connection between the spirit of revolution and the principle of federation. In order to prove what Odysse Barrot felt to be true, we must turn to the Febru- ary Revolution of 1917 in Russia and to the Hungarian Revolu- tion of 1956, both of which lasted just long enough to show in bare outlines what a government would look like and how a republic was likely to function if they were founded upon the principles of the council system. In both instances councils or Soviets had sprung up everywhere, completely independent of one another, workers*, soldiers', and peasants' councils in the case of Russia, the most disparate kinds of councils in the case of Hungary : neighbourhood councils that emerged in all resi- dential districts, so-called revolutionary councils that grew out of fighting together in the streets, councils of writers and artists,

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hmm.. a person both lives in a neighborhood, but also works.. my 'constituencies' get part of the way there because people are free to self-organize into them, rather than top-down drawing fixed geographic districts; but i had previously thought that each citizen could become a constituent of only one 'constituency' -- but perhaps this should be generalized into a system where each citizen has one 'vote' that they can fractionally allocate between as many constituencies as they like.

most people have a home, a workplace, and a political affiliation, so people should be able to split their vote at least 3 ways.

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some ideas:

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the thread starting with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21513184 had a few good points on 'loser pays' court systems:

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consider adding a third legislative house, citizen assemblies/deliberative polling either by sortition, or stratified by board tracing (which means it only can include the first layer of delegates)

now something passes if it passes a majority of those houses which choose to vote on it

a new deliberative polling group is convened whenever the other two houses disagree. there is also a standing deliberative polling group that can create its own proposals, or take up and vote against a resolution passed by another house.

in the past, similar efforts seem to have involved groups of 32 to 200 citizens, chosen in a demographically stratified manner. i would have much smaller groups, 7 to 24, chosen either randomly or using board tracing.

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