By no means all people with the franchise pay (income) tax currently; would you propose a similar deduction from pensions and benefits? (Or an "attributed" allocation from VAT?) On the other hand, of course, by no means all income-tax payers are entitled to vote, so your proposal would mean the non-voter paying less tax than the voter. Neither situation seems attractive or likely to conduce to a deeper engagement with the political process or more accepting and inclusive communities.

I must admit I don't understand your first stage allocation. The idea of parties making "retrospective" claims can work, though it is biased ,as has been said, towards the status quo. On what basis could individuals do so? As for your second stage, what proportion of the electorate, even with the incentive of allocating money, packaged as a bet that could affect the outcome, is likely to perform such an exercise and what miniscule percentage of that would do so upon the basis you propose? (I take it you're not envisaging a franchise restricted to people around this website, though manifesto-reading is, I imagine, by no means universal even among us, still less that of candidates' personal statements.) What would happen to all the unallocated money?

This all does seem to be getting terribly complicated and unreal.

It's very useful to have a figure for the levy, though difficult to see £2 as sufficient incentive to read several manifestos even for the poorest voters. What about the not insignificant proportion of voters who are illiterate or functionally literate at that level of performance? I think we ought to strive to accept the electorate as it actually is, with the very wide range of reasons or motivations from the deliberative through the self-interested (rational/well-founded or not) and the maintenance of traditions and quasi-communal identifications to the arbitrary,  it has for voting or not, in this exercise, just as have to accept very different capacities, interests, identities and life-histories.

We are in danger here of ending up with arguments for restricting the franchise -you have to pass a test on what the parties say, if not what the facts of the matter are, to vote-out of perfectionism.

If the freedom to engage in politics does not also include the freedom not to engage, then it's a pretty impoverished and shrunken thing, that excludes important modes of human flourishing, if not a self-contradiction. I would not support compulsory voting myself. We have, I think, to be very wary of the mantra of "rights and responsibilities" in this, as in so many other areas, not least because of the tendency to end up with an appreciable extension of burdens and restrictions upon individuals, rather than enablements or arights.

Answering the question of party funding is only meaningful if it contains within it the aim of increasing the democratic legitimacy of those who serve, or aspire to serve, in political office. Any reform designed to do that will need to achieve at the very least two objectives: (a) a substantial increase in voter turn-out at both general and local elections, and (b) significantly increased political participation through party membership. Both are measurable and are key indicators of a system's democratic legitimacy.
In the absence of compulsory voting, voter turn-out can only be increased either through party funding, or by providing extra incentives for citizens to vote - or indeed a combination of both. Increased political participation (membership) on the other hand can be achieved through regulation and laws, and/or through monetary, and/or other incentives.
Since the options put forward by the facilitators so far are based on common denominators rather than policy objectives, and since none of them addresses the issue of democratic legitimacy explicitly, I would like to propose a new option (family or both), incorporating the following elements:
- Citizens receive incentives (e.g. tax-credits) for voting at national elections.
- State funds parties. No corporate funding (donations, membership, etc).
- State funding is linked to (a) a party’s share of the vote, and (b) the size and diversity of its membership base.
- Parties are allowed to generate additional income through the sale of individual memberships.
{Ed. Your idea is encapsulated pretty well in option J, which not many others have complimented. Peter Emerson.}
Option J does not capture the essence of my idea as Peter Emerson suggests since it does not take the size and diversity of a party's membership base into account. My proposal should therefore not be dropped. What might be possible though is to merge Option J with Option C, which promotes party membership. If this was done, the prefix 'ethno' (as in ethno-diversity) would need to be dropped to broaden the concept and allow for things like gender diversity as well. NB: Facilitators should not interfere in this way, as it biases the process toward their own preferences.

{Ed. Facilitators try not to have any preferences. Peter Emerson.}