Repeal The 90% rule

[Tim Weaver]

Here's my beef with the 90% voting rule:

During tonight’s General Assembly at #OccupyChicago, a vote was put forward to change the voting system.

Currently we operate under a nine-tenths super majority system. All proposals must have a 90% approval in order to be implemented by the group. This evening we voted whether or not to change this to a 75% majority.

One of the dissenting voices against the 75% proposal said that it represented mob rule.

He is correct. a 75% majority constitutes mob rule. Then again, so does a 90% majority, and a 99% majority, and a 99.99999% majority.

Folks, we live in the real world. I think it’s great that we want everyone to agree but we cannot allow the perfect to get in the way of the very good. It’s very rare when 90% of a group agree on anything: it’s inevitable that someone will feel left out or oppressed. This is a sad fact of life and democracy.

It speaks to our generous, sweet natures that we don’t want anyone to feel left out by the process- in fact it’s what sets us apart from those ruling the corrupt system we are trying to revolutionize. However this same instinct will cripple us from actually getting anything done. Democracy is messy. We have learned this first hand during our first 15 days of Occupy Chicago, it’s a very very very very very messy business. One could even call it unfair. One can call it mob rule. But it’s all we have.

When the proposal to institute the 3/4 law was shot down tonight by a roughly 24% minority I walked out on the meeting. This is alienating to the majority. This is downright silly.

Thanks.

 

P.S. I just read the list of grievances that were to be proposed at tonight's GA. I strongly agree with all of them and hope they were voted on and passed.

[blacklite911]

FIRST of all, the people who were against the 75% majority rule proposal numbered greater than 24%. Its misinformation or in the least bit "hear-say" (unless you have evidence of the count) to say that it was only 24%.

How do you know it wasn't 26%, funny how your perception of the number conveniently fit your argument.

 

Second of all. Think about what our Spanard friend said, when we get larger numbers in the thousands and we have this 3/4 vote rule in place. out of 4 thousand thats 1 thousand people that get left out. Neglecting the needs of 1/4 of anything spells destruction for the entire body, a schism would be inevitable. Lastly, he said he did it and it WORKED, are you def?

The whole point of the occupy movement is to draw people from different backgrounds and beliefs. We have a lot of things in common, evidence of that is when tonight, MOST of the things were agreed upon except 2 things.  So when you say its very rare to get the 90% majority, thats just plain WRONG. Its not impossible to reach that majority. (if you stayed maybe you would have seen that, just sayin....)


Third, yea 90% is mob rule to but we have to lessen the blow if a controversial issue gets proposed. Again with my 4 thousand analogy, only 400 people get left out vs 1 thousand. In practical terms, 400 people are easier to deal with and amend whatever part of the proposal they had grievance with.

 

Lastly, during the debates, no one who was in favor of the 3/4th rule cited any examples of when the 9/10ths majority rule failed for us at getting something that needs to be done passed. Thats either one of 2 things: 9/10ths rule works exceptionally well or these people were just plain bad at getting their point across. 

[cyberconnect]

I choose to obstain tonight from the vote on the 90% rule. It was my first day at the protest, and I wished to get accustomed to the system before sticking my nose in it. However, I do understand the issues both sides are presenting.

 

First off, the pro-75%. Plain and simple, this is a more efficient and productive method. However, as stated above, and at the GA, this poses the risk of exclusion as well as a minority being created in the group. However, at the same time, I feel that the concern of being a minority, as well as the desire for 'everyone to be happy' is completely over played.

 

A good example of this, would be from tonight's GA, and the discussion on the message about the war. I don't think anyone there disagreed with the 'message' of the statement. However, people continued to bring up technicalities, such as the Founding Fathers issues, the 'Ask us to' issue, etc. All of this cumulated into the turning down of the message, and using ~30 minutes of time. This right here is a LARGE problem. Small technicalities, individual disagreements with word phrasing, and similar issues, seem to be blocking the potential of progress this movement has.

 

For anyone here who knows some BASIC statistics, you would know that in majority of large enough samples of a population, statistics behave in a 'normalized' fashion. This means that only ~67% of the sample falls into the IQR. The rest fall at least 1 Standard Deviation away.

 

What does this mean? It means that statistically, and based on probability, we are hardly ever going to agree on 90% of things. I am sorry if you feel that 75% is an 'unfair' number, or presents the possibility for a minority... but guess what... there will always be some form of minority, as stated above. It is true, that a 10% minority is easier to 'make happy'... but is that what this is all about?

 

Tell me this. Of the decissions we vote on, things that we actually need to decide on, etc... are you willing to let a stubborn 15% prevent possible results? This may sound horrible, but that is what it boils down to.

 

99% of the 99% is probably on the same page, in terms of generalities. However we are going to let small-insignificant details, possibly prevent the progress.

 

Also, as a final note about the idea 'when our numbers increase'. Remember, when they increase, that '10%' minority (or even '25%') would increase... but so would the 90%/75%. So with the idea of 5000 people, as opposed to 300 or so... yes, you would have 1250 'in the minority' but you would also have 3750 in the majority.

 

All in all, I feel this movement has great potential. People simply need to come down to earth, realize that unrealistic expectations are just that... unrealistic, and focus more on the overall message and methods of Occupy Chicago.

[blacklite911]

Again, @joseph, you still ignore the fact that everything else was agreed upon by 90% except these two: the issue of the majority and the afgan message, and for that example the 3/4ths vote wouldn't have fixed that anyways because that particular issue only had half agreement.

This 'statistical evidence" you bring up is anecdotal and is not showing itself.

Also on the Afgan message issue, I think the problem was that the message itself was too specific with the language, you can easily make a general claim about how you don't want to fight in bs wars without talking about founding fathers or supporting UN. In that particular issue, the problem was that one person authored it in the first place instead of first figuring out what everyone agrees on. To make myself clear, I thank that person soooo much for stepping up and trying, he actually did a good job considering the process was poorly planned!

Another solution would be to have multiple people write things and vote on the best, this doesn't have to get a majority but instead whichever one is most popular THAN we can amend that one.

 

What we should have done is outline it like a student would do an essay and vote on the individual details we wanted to get across. then once that outline is finished, the actual writing would be streamlined.

 

I'm not saying 90% is easy but to say its impossible or is hurting us is wrong. It just takes more planning and I think as more people get involved in the planning process (the committees) beyond just showing up to the marches, then it will be easier to help everyone. 

[cyberconnect]

Well, on the note that 'everything else was voted in' aside from the Afgan and 75% issue... tell me... what WAS voted in? If I remember correctly, only 3 actual topics (the 3-part voting issue, the one that got pushed to tomorrow, and the Afgan message) were talked about (although I could be missing one).

 

The only two things that I remember passing, was the first, which simply stated that the process went 'Read proposal, discuss/amend proposal, vote', and the one that stated discussion time was limited, but could be extended by a majority vote. I am sorry, but who among the group actually voted against those issues? I believe the first one had <10 votes, with the second one being right along the same lines. So unless there is a vote I missed and/or forgot about, your statement about 'everything else getting 90%' is actually just 'everyone agreed that we should read, discuss, then vote... and in the interest of time, be able to limit the discussion time, unless we think we should talk more'. Those two are very-basic, and have essentially 0 controversy behind them.

 

Now I do agree, the Afgan message could have been simplified. However, I do also feel as I stated above: people need to except that not everyone is going to be 100% happy with wordings. The comments about the Founding Fathers being removed, while having historical accuracy, did not really do anything in my opinion. It was simply a bunch of people getting way to up-tight about wording, and what people can portray it's meaning as. I am sorry, but saying that you believe in the FFs does not lead most people to think you mean you believe in slavery. Sure, there will always be people who spin things out of context, but that happens with EVERYTHING. Statements, books, movies, pictures, songs, etc. They put their own spin on what they believe the author meant, and it causes a bunch of people to get upset... when they are really, at the end of the day, taking a guess.

[nathan7]

I completely agree.  I understand that when we get to a larger crowd (talking in the thousands) 3/4 majority leaves out a large amount.  But take today as an example.

The anti-war grievance was voted down.  Even after a second revision it still is not 'good enough."  To be entering the anti Afghanistan war protest later today and not having a statement on it after 15 days and 2 revisions is downright embarrassing.  I understand people had some issues with the technical wording but issues like that could have been amended and altered after a vote.  To downright vote it dead was a complete waste of time.  And is thus proving this 9/10 majority is going to stall a lot of work.  


If it takes 3+ revisions for every grievance, we will have 30 separate votes on those alone.  (Not even mentioning other proposals to come to the floor...)  I think this voting topic needs to come back to the floor AGAIN...  We can set permiters stating 'once we reach x number of people, the majority changes back to 9/10s.'  But to keep doing this is a waste of time.   

[blacklite911]

The afghan statement still wouldn't have met your 3/4ths vote though, so whats your solution then?

And again its because the writing wasn't a collective process from birth that made it fail. We must fix that.

Now, on the issue of how many got voted in, I know the one thing about the procedure in which debates are held before voting rather than after was voted in fast, and the two i told you about were voted out.I think there was another issue that i can't remember, but don't hold me to that.

 

It is a small sample that we have from today but you guys saying that its impossible to get a 90% majority is still proved wrong even if its a 1 out of 3 chance. To put this in perspective, there's gonna be a lot of proposals that are gonna be far out there anyways so if you project 1 out of 3 to that, batting .333 isn't bad at all imo. To compare, in the last ten years congress has passed around 1/6th-1/10th of the bills introduced each year and they have a 2/3rd majority requirement. So anyway you cut it, guys are gonna be frustrated with the process but we have to make sure that we get things right the first time, or else the media can place us into some kind of narrow box.

[cyberconnect]

Although I was upset that the Afgan vote got shot down (even if the 75% would have went through), I did understand some of the rational behind it. I may not agree with people being over technical, but I do understand the lack of major revision after the first shoot down of the proposal.

 

As I stated above, there were a total of 4 things which were voted on yesterday:

1) Debate before voting - Passed by ~100% (less than 10 people voted against)

2) Debating can be extended by the majority, which is defined in proposal #3 - Passed by an extremely large margin, but not QUITE as large as #1.

3) 75% is the majority instead of 90% - Did not pass, was somewhere around 70% for, 20% against, 10% obstain.

4) Afgan grievances - Did not pass, by about 40%.

 

So in the end, 2 passed, and 2 did not. Take a look though at which passed. As I stated above, who is going to argue against the ability to debate before a vote? Who is going to feel it should not be allowed to extend the debate if a large percent feel we should? These were not controvercal votes. They were landslide victories. If somebody put up the proposal "We should not steal from each other", how many people would vote against that? Really, no one, because there is no debate on the topic.

 

Look at the 2 that didn't pass though. They had controversy behind them. People could argue for/against both sides. These are issues which actually NEED a vote.

Please tell me BlackLite... where above did anyone say it was "Impossible" to get a 9/10 vote? I didn't see it anywhere, nor should it be. It all comes down to the topic that is being voted on. If we are voting on something so logically sound (such as the 'we can debate before a vote') then of course 9/10 is fine. But when you start to add simply a tiny bit of controversy, that chance of 9/10 working begins to fail. No group will always agree on things 100%, and you are right that the minority has to be protected. However, to put such strong limitations on the ability to pass a vote, prevents this.

 

Also, simply because the 9/10 worked for 2 things, and not for 2 things, yesterday, you cannot begin to derive probability based on such a small, uncontrolled, sample. THIS is how incorrect statistics is done. People believe that just because they see an event occur a few times, that they can derive valuable statistics from it. Heck, the fact that the number of voters changed from vote to vote, as a result of people leaving, leaves an issue with deriving statistics and probabilities from GAs.

[Nicefishmartin]

The only thing that the 9/10th rule does is ensure that very little will get done. Anything that does get done will take longer than it should. There are a wide range of opinions here. Getting 75% to agree is hard enough. Even with 75% we can only agree on very general things. Any time details become involved, we will simply be unable to move forward. Things like disagreements over language will ensure that debates drag on and on. As our movement grows and more "centrist" type people get involved we will begin to see that 90% will simply never work. 

 

Rather than voting on specifics in language we need to decide upon a set of principles which we use to decide. Deciding that "forcing others to suffer for profit is wrong" is not only easier to agree on ,but will allow specifics to be decided based on the agreed upon principles.

[skeptical]

I am for lowering the 9/10ths to 7/10ths.

To me, it is ineffective to have the minority rule the majority.