These slogans are well known. They form the basis of much of modern democracy. It is said, however, that "Democracy is a very poor form of government. We just have not thought yet of anything better". It is merely a mechanism for making political decisions. From time to time, all mechanisms need servicing, checking to see if they are doing the job as needed. The requirement may have changed. A new specification may produce an improved mechanism.

The fundamental trouble with many democracies is that for most levels of government, citizens each have exactly one vote per vacancy. With that one vote they are expected to do two things simultaneously: vote for a person, and vote for a Party. This may be no problem for those people would vote for a monkey, if it belonged to a particular Party. It creates a real dilemma for what I would hope to be the majority of conscientious voters who have both their local and national interests at heart. They may wish to elect a good constituency representative, who does not belong to the Party they would wish to see governing. In the UK there once were so-called "Independents": good local people formally affiliated to no Party. They have gone the way of Dodo.

To resolve this problem electors could be allowed to vote several times. I would suggest up to 3 times on each ballot, as follows:

A. First choice of person;

B. Second choice of person (optional);

C. The Party of whose overall policies you most approve.

For a vote to be valid there must be choice made for at least A, or C, or both, but not necessarily both. If there were a choice expressed at A, then one could, if one wished, make a second different choice for B.

Representatives would be elected by some form of transferable system. Parties would gain power via a proportional scheme. For example, a transferable system could be designed whereby after the first count only the two candidates with the highest A votes were to be considered in the second count. The B votes, if any, of all those who voted A for lower candidates, would then be redistributed, but only as they applied to the first two.

There would need to be a predetermined scheme for resolving the unlikely event of ties. Perhaps, if there were a first-count tie for second place, each of the possibilities could be considered, the one producing the most votes for the eventual winner being accepted. Similarly if there were to be a tie for the winner, on the second count, the so far unconsidered B votes of each of the two candidates involved would be applied to the other. A third-count tie could be resolved by referring back to the original A votes.

Another scheme would be to have only a single count over all the A and B votes. The B votes, however, would be multiplied by a proportional fraction before adding them to the overall count. By national agreement, this fraction or factor, could be fixed beforehand. It may be a half, a third, or whatever. More interestingly voters using the B-vote option could indicate on the ballot paper their own factor, between 0.01 and 0.99. Ties could be split using A votes only.

Whatever method were devised, it would determine the person quite independently from the Party. Nationally, or regionally, all the Party votes, C, would be added, across all constituencies, to determine the proportional power each Party would have in the governing assembly, be it Council, Congress, Parliament, or Senate. All the individuals elected would have a voting seat in such a body. Their voting weight, however, would reflect their Party vote in the region as a whole.

Suppose there were 1000 constituencies. Suppose 500 candidates from Party X were elected, with 400 from Party Y, and 100 from Party Z. Suppose further that the total regional C votes were split 40% for X, 36% for Y and 24% for Z. In the regional assembly, the X-party members would be allowed 0.8 votes each, the Ys 0.9 votes each, but the Zs 2.4 votes each! Believe it or not at first sight, if you check the arithmetic you will find that result to be exactly fair. Independents, if any were elected, could be given a single vote each. This would create a dynamic and sensitive legislature.

It should not be beyond the wit of mankind to devise some extension of this method to take some account of minor Parties whose candidates captured no seats whatever. If their total popular C vote were to pass some threshold, say a few %, their leaders, or a Party member delegated by each leader, depending on the issue involved, could be allowed to participate in assembly debates, but with no voting rights. At least their voice would be heard.

I believe that the above system, or one similar, would result in many more "local" candidates being elected to regional or national assemblies. This would reduce the undignified chase for "safe seats" that can occur in the UK system today. Potential candidates sometimes come from miles away, even from a different country.

Let me also review the concept of "No taxation without representation". That every person should be regarded as of equal worth to society is a logical and humane survival strategy. Nevertheless, as I have said before, each person is of different value from time to time . Today, in practice, like it or not, the way value is expressed is by how much money society rewards people. Under the UMT, (Use-of-Money Tax), described in the previous chapter, that amount of value is directly proportional to the amount of tax individuals are credited with having paid.

I would propose that our voting system take into account, not only a person’s worth, but also their current value. It would be "One man, one vote" for worth, for we are all of equal worth. There would be up to one vote more depending on how much tax a person had paid in a given period, say during the previous tax period, or since the previous election.

The mechanism for this could be some kind of bar code, or Smart Card, issued by the Inland Revenue Office. It would be read by a scanning device at the voting centre. A person’s vote would be recorded as "one plus Tax divided by Max", multiplied by a factor if the B-vote option described above were involved. "Tax" would be the Inland-Revenue-recorded amount of tax paid by the individual.

For the A & B votes, "Max" would be the most tax recorded by anyone in the constituency. For the C vote, "Max" would be the maximum tax recorded by anyone in their regional assembly catchment area. This simple aptious concept "Representation proportional to taxation" would be the carrot to encourage people to pay their taxes in full. The greater their empirical value to society, the greater they will be able to influence it in the short term, to a small but morale-boosting extent.

It may be that some may object to several of the above concepts on arithmetical grounds. Fractions and decimals are beyond current vote-counting methods, at least in the UK. I am assuming that, in our aptious society, all tax records, vote recording, and vote counting will be by computer hard-ware and soft-ware. To a computer, a number is a number is a number. Whether it is 1 vote per elector, or 1.413796 x 0.33, makes little practical difference. Moreover, it is easy to avoid the computer errors people may fear. Duplication is the simple answer. The counts would be all done twice, simultaneously on different computers, using different but equivalent programmes written by different people. The final answers would have to be identical for them to be accepted as correct There would be no need for any recounts for close results.

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