Upon expiration of the public comment period and a final review, the Humane Party Board of Directors has ratified the full design of Class A for the Humane National Committee (HNC) as published on October 19, 2018. Development of the design of Classes B and C will now resume.
Benefits relative to traditional geography-based systems
Class A of the HNC represents a significant advance over the traditional model of geography-based representation. Under traditional models, exemplified by the U.S. House of Representatives, each voter has exactly one representative in the given decision-making body.
For instance, as shown, a voter in district 3 of a given state will be represented by the House member who represents district 3, but the voter will have no other representatives in the House. This model gives rise to certain risks. For instance, if the voter’s representative does not have a clear vision with respect to a given issue, the voter has no “backup” representative to turn to for help. Meanwhile, the voter’s representative has a political incentive to focus on issues that are particular to that given district only, perhaps to the detriment of “bigger picture” issues.
By contrast, in Class A of the HNC almost every voter has four layers of representation: district, ecoregion, continent, and planet. This overlapping, multi-layer approach gives voters more options regarding whom to contact when facing a given issue that they feel should be addressed by the HNC. This approach also allows a given issue to be viewed from several different levels of specificity or generality, making it less likely that certain types of issues or insights will be overlooked.
Another advantage is that inclusion of three layers defined by naturally occurring phenomena—ecoregion, continent, and planet—enables more effective focus on issues and natural convergence on solutions than anthropocentric divisions provide. Anthropocentric boundaries are often almost completely artificial; many states, for example, are simply big rectangles that have no relationship whatsoever to the actual geographic or ecosystemic features of the given area. Such artificiality impedes rather than promotes effective making and implementation of policy by introducing unnecessary and irrational boundaries between naturally aligned political interests.
The Humane Herald 