Constitution v2.0

Anton Sherwood (dasher@netcom.com)
Sun, 10 Aug 1997 23:17:18 -0700


Eliezer writes
: >Switch the legislative branch to an at-large system. This amounts
: >to setting up a 121 (1-to-1 correspondence) between voter and
: >congressbeing.

John Clark writes
: Everybody can't vote for 500 people so somebody would have to decide what
: citizen gets to vote for what congress critter, and this is a huge area for
: potential monkey business.

What about proxies (as in _The Probability Broach_)?
What about the Hare (single transferable vote) method?

: >I should also note that having members-at-large may also fix the
: >problem where the congress beings spend all their time trying to
: >get reelected.
:
: Why would that change anything? If a politician doesn't devote full time
: to winning the next election there will certainly be somebody else who will
: and toss him out of office as a result.

When politicians are seen as interchangeable, selected only for ability
to bring home the pork, I suspect you're right: the permanent campaign
is inevitable. But if they're decoupled from districts, they can
represent ideological factions; such representatives, I suspect, would
have less competition for their "market segment".

: The Constitution lasted a long time not because of its perfection but
: because an infrastructure was already in place for it to thrive.

Interesting!

Anton Sherwood *\\* +1 415 267 0685 *\\* DASher@netcom.com