I am on the shitter instead of the shower. So, sorry if I babble crap. But imagine something like GitHub but for the purpose of restructuring society.
I am on the shitter instead of the shower. So, sorry if I babble crap. But imagine something like GitHub but for the purpose of restructuring society.
I’ve always considered open government to be registered opinions in real time. People log an opinion, and if it’s a majority opinion for that jurisdiction or electorate then the government must consider it as a bill to be reviewed.
I’ve been thinking about this concept for quite a long time now.
4 years election cicles had sense in the XVIII century when the fastest way of communicating was letter delivered by horse.
But with internet it makes no sense that old fashioned system.
Forget about elections every 4 years, forget about having an official month of political campaigns that decide the fate of the country for 4 years, and the 4 years of the president doing whatever they want without consequences.
We have the technology to make a direct democracy. Every citizen should be able to vote on any issue or who is their representative at any point of time.
Voting on opinions is a very bad idea, because opinions doesn’t have to be backed by facts or reality. I can have the opinion that it should be law that all people should wear green socks on Tuesdays. Should there really be a vote about a opinion like that? If yes, then then floodgates will be open and the system gets overwhelmed with input to vote on. If not, who decides what kind of opinion is valid to vote one, and how can a misuse of that power be prevented.
Why not. A good system should be one that it’s easy and cheap to put a vote out. If the voting you put on its ridiculous, people simply wont vote it and that’s it
It’s not like that doesn’t existe now. I don’t know in the US, but in most european countries and in the european union itself people can try to raise a vote on anything, they just have to be backed up by X number of people.
Just make that easier, 100% online, and instead of sparking a debate of representatives, if the thing had enough support an online referendum is held and if people vote hes it automatically become law.
I don’t really see an issue.
We don’t have this already only for one reason. The people that would need to allow this (the representatives) would be the ones that would be jobless and powerless if direct democracy where to be implemented, so they won’t.
There are more reasons, for example that all systems that use online or digital voting can be easily manipulated and lack the possibility to be monitored or validated by independent 3rd parties. I really wish it would be different.
I am a huge fan of direct democracy, but I don’t see a good way to implement it.
It could be different.
I’ve been thinking a long time. And I think it may be one scenario where a public ledger would actually make sense, aka a blockchain.
Instead of economic transaction, votes are casted. It could be anonymous using one way pseudonyms for the public key. So the caster may be able to verify at any point that their vote was correctly casted, but no one could know who the caster is. The signature keys could be issued by the government same as it’s already done in most european countries with digital signatures.
The ledger would be public and anyone could be able to verify the votes in a similar manner as most cryptocurrencies.
I really think there is not a technological barrier here. It’s not only more democratic but probably safer that the current way of casting votes. As it could be proven at any point that all votes are casted and valid without interference, no moron could say that “election was stolen” because it could be proven that it was not.
And with the idea of “permanent open polls” would mean that even if somehow your vote was stolen, you could just change it again. So any malevolent actor should need an insanely amount of work to keep constantly tampering election results (while nowadays the malevolent actor only need to tamper one election and their work is done for years).
To do a informed vote on something you should have at least some basic idea what the topic means and a understanding of the implications, benefits and risks of that.
So let’s say 0.001 percent of the people in a country with for example 40 million people in the valide age group have some great ideas that they want to get voted about every year. That would be 400 votes, so more then a votes every day. That means that you either vote blind on lots/most of the topics or do nothing else then to keep up on the needed data to do a informed decision. Even with only 40 votes, so about one vote every ten days, you would be forced to invest a huge part of your time to keep yourself up to date on all topics.
Oh and such a voting system would be extremely easy to manipulate by influencers, celebrities or other people with a high parasocial or charismatic power.
The elections we have nowadays are already manipulated that way, so there is not a change on that regard.
People should not need to vote on every issue, you should be able to still delegate on a representative. But if on some things you don’t agree with your representative you should be able to vote it by your own way.
I remember a proposal someone made a long time ago. About a voting system where every delegate have a “power of vote” and by default is 100% percent. But whenever a voting is made in a representative chamber the vote is also open online. And people’s vote would rest value from the representatives votes. So if it’s a matter where a lot of people cares and vote directly the people’s vote would decide. If people don’t care and don’t vote the representatives vote would have more power and they would decide.
I thought it was very interesting.
Yes, a system like that where you can split your voice based on topics, my personal strengths is with financial and technical topics so those I would vote for myself, and delegate everything else to different people or parties sounds much more practical and useable.
That I would find very interesting and possibly a huge step forward.
Honestly? I don’t think that’d work. We already have a problem with not enough people voting once a year as it is.
People don’t vote because why bother.
You vote a representative that says “I will do this” and then they don’t do it. Representatives lie. And you can’t do anything about it within the current political system.
Or even if they don’t lie, nobody agree 100% with a representative. You may agree in some topics but disagree in others. And having to vote for something you don’t want to happen is very frustrating and many people don’t vote because of that.
We need a system where popular vote can make decisions directly.
People dont vote because they dont feel like their views are properly represented. If each individual issue was open to referendum or voting, the only people who would take part in that specific vote are likely people who are well informed and passionate about the issue. I think this would end up being a far better system than having to vote based on nebulous campaign promises that are hardly ever fulfilled, or when they are, your issue is tacked on or bundled with a whole bunch of irrelevant and even harmful legislation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy