One of my interests is "new democracy" -- concepts of governance that could only exist due to the revelution in the technologies of organization that computers have brought. (I feel that one way to view the purpose of government is as a technology of organization.)

Imagine a legislative house of 100 members composed as follows. Each voter would be able to declare their support (vote) for one delegate. After the voting, the top 100 delegates become the members of the house. The #1 delegate would get no more than just under 2% of the vote, down around #100 we probably see somebody getting perhaps half a percent.

This house represents minority opinion. Almost any serious minority group can put together enough support to get a delegate, as it only takes between .5% and .9% of the vote. (1% gaurantees a delegate but in practice you would not need that much.) Parties with large support would just get more delegates. So there would always be some libertarians, some greens, along with the more mainstream groups.

The trick is that you could change your vote frequently. If your delegate did things you don't like, you could switch to another. This would not cause the upheaval that frequent elections cause today, because all the change would be at the lower end. Candidate #101 would one day replace Candidate #100. To prevent chaos at the bottom, candidates would get some minimum term before replacement, unless they dropped really low.

Without secret ballot this would be easy to do. Each person would have their named delegate on file, and could go and change it when they wish. There would never be (or rarely be) general elections.

With secret ballot it's harder...One idea might be to have general elections, but frequently. However, these general elections are conducted by computer agents. Your agent is programmed by you to vote for your chosen delegate. It sits in an election building. You can go in and change it, and then at the next "election" (every month), it is queried and a new vote tallied. If you don't change it it keeps voting as programmed.

Even without computers your "agent" could be a box to which only you have the key, where you can write your ballot in a way it shows on the other side of the wall to the counters. The room on the other side of the wall would be sealed except on election day. Each time you come in you could move your box to a different slot so nobody would know which box was yours, except you. With computers we would try to get a similar result.

The goals are to get a house that truly represents the pluralistic opinions of modern society, but which is not subject to the vagaries of election and election financing. Because there are no general elections, raising support is a constant task, hopefully more dependent on voting record than on ad campaigns. Support would be raised not from the general population but from the virtual constituency the delegate is trying to represent.