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this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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politics
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Direct voting has some definite drawbacks mostly involved with the amount of time it takes to fully read and digest each instance of bill making. Everyone has an opinion but just check around here and you will see how often people will comment without doing so much as an easy google search to bring up the specifics about how programs work. I don't think that I would want that principle dictating my life. Legislation requires briefs and budgets to be read and attempted to be understood and that means time. If you didn't put a stipulation on everybody having to sit through the brief then basically you are voting continually on unnuanced, pop culture ideas of how something works. If you put the stipulations of having to participate in the brief then you have a system that favors people with free time... Time for that kind of pursuit favors people who don't need to spend every minute trying to work to make it to the next rent payment.
Like it or not the act of voting on legislative matters to make a body of government run should be a full time gig. I personally throw my lot in with the idea of Democratic lotteries where anyone can volunteer for a random chance at a seat for a term but winning requires that you accept all responsibility to do the job properly. If you slack off, try and break the rules or can't show up you lose the spot. I have more trust that the demi random sample of people in the system will more represent a reasonable approximation of the overall will of the people then the politicians that get elected usually because the can sort of perform like parrots saying the best catchphrases they think people want to hear to solicit votes.
Also since the system would have no campaigns it would partially eliminate the possibility of having politicians and outside business interests in bed together. It would mean you'd have to crack down on the possibility of winning candidates being bribed for kickbacks upon exit from political power... But our current elected system has this problem anyway.
You have a phone in your hand. Voting and tabulating is viable. Banks and the military use very secure methods.
Is so simple it's stupid. But no one has wanted to hear that for the decade I have been saying it. Democracy can change with the Internet.
As a web developer,
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No software is perfect. The military can keep their systems secure by having strict standards for troops to adhere to. If you are a soldier and decide to livestream your troop movement on Tik Tok, there WILL be consequences. If you're lucky, you'll just get kicked out of the military.
As for banks, again, they can control most of their usage from bank to bank. When it comes to the user to the bank, they have procedures in place but it isn't 100% secure. Hackings can happen. One of the common hacks is to send users a notice of some banking problem and a link to "the bank's login page." The user types their information in, the hacker stores this, and the user is then sent to the bank without any clue that they've just been compromised. The hacker then logs in at their leisure and transfers money. Banks have systems to claw that money back, but it's not foolproof.
If we had voting for political offices online, you'd have systems hacked, showing that they were voting for A when the vote sent in was really for B. You'd have text messages sent to users telling them to check their voting status, those users' usernames and passwords would be harvested and used to cast votes regardless of what the person wanted. You could even break into servers and change vote tallies.
This is all difficult to impossible because the voting systems aren't online. You would need to go to each system to do this. It would take a long time and would result in you being spotted, stopped, and arrested. Put it all online and any hacker in any country could determine who our elected officials were.
There are plenty of ways to do zero trust voting without too many hoops. It's not like we need to completely eliminate other forms of voting either. But I'd argue that letting me sign an email with a PGP cert and publishing the email's hash for me to verify is more secure and more "secret" than mail in voting is now.
But can you do it in a way that an ordinary voter can understand? And well enough that scammers won't be able to take advantage of their confusion? Start saying "certs and hashes" to your average voter and their eyes will glaze over. Meanwhile, scammers will add "National Electronic Voting Committee Approved" stamps to their emails to fool people into thinking that this means it can't possibly be a scam.
The primary rationale behind representative democracy is that it fosters a certain level of technocracy by default. To the extent that our collective "goal" is to collectively implement evidence based policy, then there needs to be a mechanism for expertise in that framework. Representative democracy accomplishes this in two ways - by allowing the direct election and appointment of subject matter experts to policy making positions, and via fair and transparent expert advisory pipelines to elected officials.
Regardless of whether you believe that humans are good or bad or dumb or smart or free, the individual human focus simply does not have the capacity to delve deeply into every possibly complexity of every possible policy. So either we restrict society to a much simpler form, or we require representative democracy.
So? People can vote for the bills they want, and ignore the ones they don't. They'll still have more power than they do now.
Funny. You use "allowing other people to make decisions for you" as though it's a drawback to direct voting when that's all a representative democracy is.
The problem isn't "other people make decisions", it's "not everyone has the time or energy to make good decisions".
Take Brexit. That was as direct a decision as I can think of, yet no one knew what it really meant, and many were intentionally mislead. I'd love to live in a country were everyone has the time and will to research and verify all the facts, but that's a losing proposition when people are working multiple jobs and still going hungry. Buying people's votes could be even easier, especially for those who don't care.
That's what I pointed out when I said people can only vote for the bills they care about and ignore the ones they don't.
Brexit is an example of the will of the people going against their own interests, but what about when Congress goes against the will of the people with a detrimental effect?
Is direct voting perfect? No. You will always be able to find issues with anything suggested. Is it better than a representative democracy? Probably, but not enough nations have implemented it so we don't have much data to go on.
This is when you start going into fantasy world territory. There's no way in hell it's cheaper or easier to buy individual votes than lobbying and campaign contributions. First of all, it's illegal. How would you set something like that up so it's easy for people who 'don't care' while keeping it away from law enforcement? You can't. All that may happen is small-scale vote buying, which already can occur.
Anyways. Thanks for being a fine example for why we don't make progress. Better the devil we know, right?
Advertising is how you biy the votes of people who don't really care. If they wont read up on it, then you tell them such-snd-such bill is bad for them, just like attack ads about candidates today.
I'm not saying direct democracy is intrinsically bad, I'd love to use it more. A few yes/no questions alongside a normal vote could be useful. I'm saying direct democracy isn't a drop-in replacement for representative democracy, especially a 100% direct version.
Direct and representative have shared weakpoints, and their own weakpoints, and we need to use each to cover eachother. Perhaps using a direct veto over representitive decisions, or direct decisions over representitive oprions.
With full direct democracy, laws won't mean anything anymore, and it's just mob rule. Controversies will get people executed, bad studies will get people killed, entire peoples and regions will be exiled, if not lynched. If you can whip enough people into a froth, you can control the whole country. Lots of people will listen to orhers for guidance anyway, basically recreating representitives but this time with no risk of responsibility on them; they can't lose their job for giving bad advice, as long as their following likes them.
And that's the problem I have with large amounts of direct democracy. We need more responsibility and accountability now, but removing representatives will give us less. If we can use direct democracy to hold representatives accountable, then sure, but who takes accountability for the majority when everybody pays?
Ultimately, I think a certain amount of funds should be set aside for social science experiments, where whole towns get their laws changed in radical ways for a decade, to see if something works without risking an entire nation. I've always be frustrated by how laws are rarely tested before applying to millions of people.
I would rather the people making choices on my behalf be held to some basic level of account then basically leaving it to a series of Facebook polls. In a democracy at some level someone else is always determining the rules that bind the individual. You as an individual are beholden to whatever principle fuels the majority of vote casters. I actually have no issue with allowing people to make the vast plethora of nessisary mundane decisions for me in a government setting but I would like those decisions to be backed up by accountability and be presented so that all side of the issue can be weighed appropriately and care be taken to make sure binding law is made carefully.
Direct voting takes a very simplistic stance regarding law. It imagines that by chipping in for the things you personally care about things will get done... But behind every law there is a web of things that require careful consideration as to things like exact wording, how it dovetails into previously existing law structure, giving chance for expert opinion to be consulted and to present their case in regards to predicted outcome, reasonable debate towards reaching concensus... For everything. A staggering amount of minutiae designed to keep the process stable and fair.
That's the thing. They're not making choices on your behalf.
Hence the "see how often Congress ignores the will of the people."
Ah. I am Canadian. We have a parliment. The American system's imploding nature due to partisan politics utilizing it's own neurotic infrastructure to essentially cheat is something that negatively effects my daily life but I do not get to vote on that.