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Tom Monto

Proxy Voting - power based on votes received

In addition to STV as presented in many other blogs, there are other reforms that create btter democratic accountability or reduce damage done by gerrymandering, etc. Proxy Voting is one of these.


The Proxy Plan of representation (now known as Interactive representation) is a governance system in which elected officials have the same number of votes as the number of people that voted for them.


It was proposed in Oregon in 1912 by that state's pre-eminent political reformer William S. U'ren and in Virginia in 2001 by Bill Redpath.


The 1912 Oregon experience went like this, according to "Government by Proxy Now: Oregon Plan Would Present Ideas of Representative Lawmaking", New York Times, June 30, 1912. (link at bottom of article)

The People's Power League, led by William S. U'ren, proposed an amendment to the Oregon Constitution to allow each legislator to cast a number of votes equal to the number of votes he received in the last election. Under this scheme of "Government by Proxy," a legislator who receives 25,000 votes would have more voting power than two legislators who receive 12,000 votes apiece.

Being a constitutional amendment, to be approved the proposal had to receive a majority of all the votes cast at the preceding election to pass.


This proposal also included several other constitutional amendments. One allowed a voter to cast his vote anywhere in the state, allowing thinly spread parties to centralize their vote on one candidate. [This had the advantage that it prevented district boundaries from splitting voting blocks, one of the bad effects of gerrymandering.]


It also would have abolished the Oregon Senate and placed the state's legislative power in a single assembly of sixty members serving four-year terms. The Governor of Oregon and his defeated rivals would have been ex officio members of the Assembly and would have been allowed to cast as many votes as his unsuccessful party candidates had received in the previous election. If a Socialist legislative candidate were defeated, for instance, then the votes of his supporters would have been cast in the Assembly by the Socialist candidate for Governor. [This prevents the waste of votes that bedevils winner--take-all elections but appears to mostly, or at least partially, negate the effect of holding an election in the first place.]

The measure was put to a referendum vote, ("Abolishing Senate; Proxy Voting; U’Ren Constitution"), where it failed by a vote of 71,183 to 31,020.


A different but probably-related proposal was also voted down by a majority of voters:

"Majority Rule on Initiated Laws" 35,721 in favour, 68,861 opposed. (This may have been a law that would have given voters in Oregon the right of Referendum - the right of voters to vote on legislation passed by the state government before being put into law.)


That same year, Proxy Voting was contained in a proposed new Portland city charter called The Short Charter.

Article 22 provided simply, "A majority of all the votes cast at the election and represented in the commission, as in this article provided, shall be necessary to pass any measure. Each member of the commission shall represent in the commission the voters who elected him; and in voting on any ordinance, resolution, charter amendment, or other roll-call in the commission, each member shall cast the number of votes for or against the same by which he was elected."

(This proposal, unlike Oregon's proposal, would not have seen votes cast for unsuccessful candidates represented in city hall.)


Another form of Proxy Voting is done in a specific form of STV called the Gove plan. This is where a voter casts a vote for a candidate, then if that candidate cannot be elected (due to low popularity) the vote is transferred according to the preset directions of the candidate. Under the Hare STV system, the voter casts a preferential ballot, where he or she marks the first choice and a number of back-up preferences, dictating how the vote shall be transferred if transfer is necessary.


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*(web|url=https://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=980CEED91E3CE633A25753C3A9609C946396D6CF|title=Government by Proxy Now: Oregon Plan Would Present Ideas of Representative Lawmaking|work=New York Times|date=1912-06-30.

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Thanks for reading.

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