Peter K. Harrell's Blog

Who Is The Boss? We The People?

The Consent of the Self-Governed. The Sovereignty of the People.

Bio: The purpose of this blog "Who Is The Boss? We The People?" is to consider anything and everything that affects the democratic nature of elections with the intent of aiding those who want to establish democratic government in the United States and elsewhere in the world. My qualifications: I invented Yes No 'Maybe So' Voting (YNMS) in 1975. YNMS Voting is one of only two voting procedures designed to select a single alternative from many alternatives based upon the consent or dissent of the voters. The other consent-based voting procedure is called Category Scale Power Voting (CSPV), which I derived from YNMS in the 1990s. But at the time I felt CSPV might lead voters to focus too much on the expression of their opinions at the expense of the deliberate and effective exercise of their political power. In 1989 as a result of this consent based approach to voting I discovered the Majority Rule Voting Paradox (MRVP). MRVP demonstrates that a majority of people in a group can prefer one alternative (A) to another alternative (B), while at the same time the preferred alternative (A) is opposed by a majority of the people in the group and the other alternative (B) is supported by a majority of the people in the group.