Re: Condorcet Voting and Supermajorities (Re: [CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT] Disambiguation of 4.1.5)
Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:
> I'm not sure this is an ideal way of looking at things from Debian's
> perspective. The usual decision making process in Debian is (supposed
> to be) one of reaching consensus on an issue, not one of democracy,
> per se. I tend to look at consensus as an attempt to disenfrachise
> (by ignoring their objections) no one, and voting as an attempt to
> disenfranchise up to 50% of the people concerned (and dictatorship
> as an attempt to disenfranchise everyone else but one).
Um, I agree with your motive that we should strive for consensus, and
I agree with the substantive points in you post.
But *PLEASE* watch language more carefully.
When the majority rules in a democratic decision, the minority is not
"disenfranchised". That term refers to people who don't get to vote,
who don't get to speak. To be "enfranchised" is not to get one's way,
it's to get a voice in deciding what the group will do. To be
"disenfranchised" is not to fail to get one's way, it's to be deprived
of an equal voice in making the decision.
You slide over into dictatorship, in which only one person casts a
vote, and describe that as the limit of voting systems, but it has a
critical and qualitative difference. In a dictatorship, only one
person votes; the others are truly disenfranchised. In a democracy,
everybody can vote; everybody is enfranchised, and the poeple who came
out on the minority might well come out on the majority tomorrow when
the next decision comes up.
Which means that the "majority" is not a stable thing; it's a term
specific to the one decision, unlike a dictator, who is always the
dictator, for every decision. In a democracy, the makeup of the
majority changes from vote to vote.
The reason I bring this up is that people often think that the
advantage of democracy is that one will get one's way, and that if you
don't get what you wanted, the system must somehow be unfair, as, for
example, a dictatorship certainly is unfair. Democracy is not where
everyone gets their own way, it's where the group decisions are made
by majority.
Thomas
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