Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd
That's not really any different than a straight up election - which indeed originally often were done with tokens. The feature that makes a more complex proxy system much more than a trivial variation on an electoral one is dynamically reassigning the proxies. And that's the information processing heavy part - unless all members of your society have enough magical ability to summon their tokens back or something, they don't help with that, and even if they do you still need to recount all the tokens every vote in the legislature to determine the instantaneously correct weights.
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The main difference is that legislators in practice will not be equal because they wield the proxies they have into the legislature. Theoretically there can be a write in (indeed I voted write in last time) and someone can write in themselves. But in practice legislators will be from an organized cluster of party machines as in a typical state. It would have to be at periodical times, though of course if so that would make reproxying difficult and reproxies might be an appropriate oil for fueling an executive branch. However it is not difficult for the parties to agree among themselves that there will be a time when proxies will be gathered. In fact the difficulty of digesting it would normally be made more difficult by having local chiefs and dons and bosses wield a lot of the power and have votes semi-permanently assigned to them until officially yanked. It could be government by patronage As you point out it would be difficult to keep track of. But there could be unwritten rules to slow it down as well as only using this on periodical elections (I originally only intended it for periodical elections and reasonably regulated referendums anyway). A lot of the system would have to just adjust to a quirky form of a familiar electoral state with the familiar characters such as the party boss, the scandalmonger, the
lobbyist, etc.
One problem not brought up is that officially everyone would have to have access to the assembly chamber while it is in session as legislators have no theoretical authority. That would make security difficult.