vote

by Ghandi of North Strand Fri May 05, 2006 10:35

Terence should pehaps read the Eire Nua Policy documents

by Terence Fri May 05, 2006 10:27

We are so frequently told that we live if a democracy and whenever anyone asks why is that so, we are told it is because we can vote. That is we can vote for our government who will lead the country.

An even cursory glance at the whole thing reveals it is a badly flawed form of democracy. First of all each elected TD is supposed to represent approximately 20,000 people or so. We know from bitter experience that they do not represent the people who vote for them, but in fact their loyalities lie with their financial backers and their political party. And we know that many times on important issues, TDs frequently vote with the party because they are compelled to do so by the Party Whip and they do it against their own wishes. Within political parties the TDs will rarely go against the party whip because they know it would be putting their political career at risk and the prospects of a future cabinet position greatly disminished. Besides a TD cannot know all the 20,000 people he/she supposedly represents, let alone take on board their view or possible choices, alternative suggestions, in the range of decisions that they will take in the following 4 years.

Not only that the manifestos of political parties tend to be vague, are rarely actually implemented and there is zero mechanism to hold politicans accountable to their change of promises, changes of direction and so forth.

But the central point about national elections that is flawed is this idea that by just ticking one or two boxes on a ballet boxes out of a choice of say 10 or so choices that the people now have a say or role in all the decisions that will take place over the next 4 years.

In mathematical or information theory parlance, you have reduced what are tens of thousands of decisions down into around 10 decisions and even within those 10 there is no information provided as to how they condense. Then you are further encouraged to just pick one or two of these choices -and I say one or two because I am trying to account for 1st and 2nd preference votes. And here then is the main assumption. The "democracy theory" is making the assumption that the single/dual choice you make now expands back up to those tens of thousands of decisions.

This is simply not the case. Effectively the reduction process has destroyed the information and you cannot extract it again. We hear things like the people have decided. Decided what? What is it they are being asked?

In physical terms this means you cannot extract more information from a signal than minimum information used to describe it. This is based on the theory of Factor Analysis and Principal Component Analysis. In essence they say, if a particular signal can be described by say 5 principal components, even though 100s of factors may have gone into it, then the information content has been reduced to what you can extract from only those 5 components. So whether you are looking at spectral images of Earth, radio signals, brain scans, opinion polls or whatever, you cannot extract more the signal is telling you. Another good example might be census data. The collected data is very detailed as it is from each househould, but the final figure on say population is just one figure, which we say is 4 million. From that single figure you cannot work backwards and determine the population in each region, county, town and village. You must have the data to do this. In the election process, because the decisions are after the election, we have condensed all this data down into a tiny (election) result and we cannot determine what those people would have decided from those summary results. Nor is there any mechanism for their input afterwards. Well actually sometimes governments setup "Consultation Bodies" for the people to make submissions, but they are under no obligation to pay any attention or adher to them. And that's exactly what they do. They ignore them, but use them as PR exercises. The recent Disability Act is a case in point, as are 1000s of similar other episodes worldwide.

What this is telling us, is that if we want to retain the information and this is what the so-called democray claim is saying that we have a say in society, then what needs to happen is that those decisions by the people need to be made closer to each of the individual decisions rather than very remotely (every 4 years) where all information is effectively lost. This is saying that decision making especially of local issues needs to be massively decentralised but not to councillors where a very similar effect operates but right down to the community level.

If every community or housing estate basically had a council of residents, that met say weekly or bi-weekly in their local community hall, then you would be coming closer to a realistic model of what real democray should look like. It wouldn't be perfect but it would be a lot more perfect than the present system which is a total sham.

For decisions on a more national level like ones affecting particular sectors of society, then different types of organisations in combination with the proposed above would be more democratic.

No doubt the defenders of the status quo will now attack this and call it unworkable, yet they will still try to spout the line that what we have is democratic and it's the best that we've got and it works. Well it isn't the best and no it doesn't work. Society could be made to work a hell of a lot better. Such pundits also tend to be totally lacking in any imagination or vision. Back in feudal times, they would be saying the same: It isn't perfect but its the best we got and it works. Yes it worked for the local Lords and the current system works for the wealthy few but ulimately at the cost of the Earth.

by Seán Ryan Fri May 05, 2006 07:00

An interesting article.

I like the way you spotted that our government is elected by an even smaller majority than was previously imagined.

I disagree with this voting against politicians you don't like idea though.

The government becomes a creature of random chance using this methodology.

By all means register to vote - it'll make the statistics very interesting the next time a capitalist dictatorship takes over. But don't vote if you cannot find someone who represents you. It is the duty of the Irish people to elect a government that represents them, I concede it is also their duty to prevent a government that doesn't represent them from being elected. But voting against somebody does not accomplish this. A randomly elected government is a non representative government. Twould be fairer if every Irish citizen were included in this lottery. But I still don't think it could produce an effective government.