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Paper voting doesn't allow for much more citizen involvement than most "democratic" countries have today. You can hold elections every few years, maybe a refere

by barnacs 10y ago

Paper voting doesn't allow for much more citizen involvement than most "democratic" countries have today. You can hold elections every few years, maybe a referendum once or twice a year at most, but any more than that and it becomes inconvenient, inefficient and not so cheap. As a citizen, I want to be more involved. Even in a representative democracy, I want to hold my representatives responsible for their actions. I want to be able to recall them. I want to support some bills and oppose others. I want to have votes in my local community about building a playground or whatever. I may even want to propose policies and have other citizens vote or maybe even crowdfund it. While I do not support this specific proposal, I think we should move on from paper elections.

ianstormtaylor 10y ago
Is that actually a good thing though? (I'm honestly not sure.) I would think that as the response time becomes shorter and shorter, the system starts being more and more volatile. One of the benefits of the current system is its stability. It's unfortunate (depending on your point of view) that certain causes don't move faster, but at the same time it also prevents bad ideas from moving fast. Not only that, but as the involvement is more and more frequent, it might have the effect of numbing people more. Right now national elections are a big deal because they are so rare, so it adds a bit of "moral weight" to the whole process. If they are as easy as pulling out your phone and tapping a button from your couch, is that actually going to result in more "correct" (in terms of long-term viability) decisions being made? These things might not actually matter though, because they might have equal and opposite benefits that balance things out. I'm sure many people smarter than me have debated this topic from both sides. If anyone knows of any articles/papers on these ideas I'd love to read them!
- barnacs 10y ago
  Initially it would probably be a mess. But I also think more involvement is the only way to build a more responsible, informed, interested citizenry. People need to feel that they can affect things, that they have a say in policies. I think a lot of people are indifferent because it doesn't seem to matter whether they vote for the red or blue team every few years, <insert favorite cause> doesn't seem to be improving. If they had a slider to set their preferred allocation of public spending and they could vote on specific proposals about <their favorite cause>, they would probably be more inclined to participate and do so in a more responsible manner. You can't force people to participate though. Maybe you could optionally delegate your vote, and then it would be effectively the same level of involvement as with the current hands-off representative system. But at least you could still withdraw or reassign the voting power at any time.
  - noobermin 10y ago
    One of the ways to help that feeling is to get people more involved in local government. Local government has a lot more of an impact on them and they have much more power in such matters.
badsock 10y ago
Some context: Switzerland has votes on issues about four times a year, and they managed to do this with paper, mostly via mail (if someone local knows otherwise, please correct me). Recently they tried out e-voting, with what I consider predictable results: http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/voting-with-a-click_hacking-fears-jeopardise-e-voting-rollout/41635672 http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/voting-with-a-click_hacking-fear... Also, I agree with ianstormtaylor in that I don't think that what you're proposing would necessarily be good. You need a political system that you trust will promote wise decision makers, and then you need to not micromanage them. If the people who get elected can't be trusted to make good decisions on a scale of several years, then the political system needs to be corrected, not expanded.
- noobermin 10y ago
  Switzerland has a population of 8.4M, about the population of NYC. US has >300M and a land area two orders of magnitude larger than Switzerland.
  - nickik 10y ago
    The US also has more people that work on that sort of thing. I don't see why it should not be able to scale. Sure it might get harder with increase scale, but I don't see it as a huge problem.
  - pooper 10y ago
    > Switzerland has a population of 8.4M, about the population of NYC. US has >300M and a land area two orders of magnitude larger than Switzerland. Can we start with the city? Bill de Blasio (bless his heart) won 282,344 votes in the 2013 Democratic Primary. What's worse is Lhota won his primary with just 32,236 votes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_mayoral_election,_2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_mayoral_election... I hate to agree with President Obama on this topic but I have to agree with him. The first problem we need to tackle is not to fix the electoral process. The first problem we need to tackle is getting people to actually care enough to show up and show up in large enough numbers so we can effect change.
kevhito 10y ago
It sounds to me like you would like to be a representative on your local city council, or a town board. Why not run for election? Then you can do everything you mentioned. In principle, frequent voting might sound nice. But I don't know if it really would be in practice. (I'm not arguing a position here, just thinking out loud.) I'm not really interested in most politics, I don't really feel qualified, or compelled to become qualified, to deal with a lot of the questions that come up. I'm pretty happy to instead vote for a person (or even just a party) to represent me in most cases. I don't want to propose policies. Lots of people in my town are retired and/or seem to have endless time and energy to devote to meddling in town business. It would be exhausting if I had to keep constant vigilance every few weeks or months to make sure these people can't enact policies, rather than just voting every few years to make sure they don't get into office.
- barnacs 10y ago
  See, that's just it. There's a spectrum of involvement. I may not want to run a campaign, go door to door to collect signatures or spend days in council meetings. At the same time, I do want to vote directly on issues I have a strong opinion about, I'm willing to put in the effort to find different people to delegate my votes to in domains I'm not competent in. Occasionally I may have an idea I would like people to discuss and vote on. If people like the idea, they may even delegate their votes in that specific domain to me and I would be further motivated and empowered to come up with and champion similar ideas. I think technology would allow everyone to find their sweet spot of involvement in this spectrum.
theptip 10y ago
An interesting proposal in this area is Google's "Liquid Voting", which implements an idea that I've wanted to see tried for a long time. Essentially votes can be cast on every subject (for the very interested voters), or delegated to another representative (for the less interested voters). This could have some interesting side-effects, not all positive; I'd expect volatility and cult of personality to increase. But then that's the trajectory of politics in general recently, so perhaps there's not much more to lose. Benefits would include the ability for voters to actually enact the legislation that they want, but which no legislators will choose to implement (e.g. anti-corruption/insider trading laws). [edit: link is here: http://www.tdcommons.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1092&context=dpubs_series http://www.tdcommons.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1092&co...]
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  I wonder how this compares to the Pirate Parties Liquid Feedback voting system. On first glance they seem similar.
te_chris 10y ago
So get involved then. Voting is a blunt instrument.
walshemj 10y ago
your missing the point of representative democracy
pedrocr 10y ago
Electronic voting is strictly more expensive than paper voting. All those machines are expensive and you still need the voting places and staff. If you're willing to do away with the requirement that you can't prove to someone else who you voted for then you can implement mail-in voting. Still paper and you can have an election every day if you want. Some US states use that. Once you go that route a simple HTTPS website run by the government that you authenticate to is all you need for electronic voting with the same guarantees.
BeingIncubated 10y ago
After Brexit, I'm not sure I and many others would be comfortable allowing "greater citizen involvment" such as directly voting on bills or policies. I am politically against such a motion and am a proponent of greater technocracy; letting experts decide what policy is best rather than the masses who can easily be duped by demagogues or other post-truth elements.

by barnacs 10y ago

ianstormtaylor 10y ago

Is that actually a good thing though? (I'm honestly not sure.) I would think that as the response time becomes shorter and shorter, the system starts being more and more volatile. One of the benefits of the current system is its stability. It's unfortunate (depending on your point of view) that certain causes don't move faster, but at the same time it also prevents bad ideas from moving fast. Not only that, but as the involvement is more and more frequent, it might have the effect of numbing people more. Right now national elections are a big deal because they are so rare, so it adds a bit of "moral weight" to the whole process. If they are as easy as pulling out your phone and tapping a button from your couch, is that actually going to result in more "correct" (in terms of long-term viability) decisions being made? These things might not actually matter though, because they might have equal and opposite benefits that balance things out. I'm sure many people smarter than me have debated this topic from both sides. If anyone knows of any articles/papers on these ideas I'd love to read them!

barnacs 10y ago
Initially it would probably be a mess. But I also think more involvement is the only way to build a more responsible, informed, interested citizenry. People need to feel that they can affect things, that they have a say in policies. I think a lot of people are indifferent because it doesn't seem to matter whether they vote for the red or blue team every few years, <insert favorite cause> doesn't seem to be improving. If they had a slider to set their preferred allocation of public spending and they could vote on specific proposals about <their favorite cause>, they would probably be more inclined to participate and do so in a more responsible manner. You can't force people to participate though. Maybe you could optionally delegate your vote, and then it would be effectively the same level of involvement as with the current hands-off representative system. But at least you could still withdraw or reassign the voting power at any time.
- noobermin 10y ago
  One of the ways to help that feeling is to get people more involved in local government. Local government has a lot more of an impact on them and they have much more power in such matters.

badsock 10y ago

Some context: Switzerland has votes on issues about four times a year, and they managed to do this with paper, mostly via mail (if someone local knows otherwise, please correct me). Recently they tried out e-voting, with what I consider predictable results: http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/voting-with-a-click_hacking-fears-jeopardise-e-voting-rollout/41635672 http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/voting-with-a-click_hacking-fear... Also, I agree with ianstormtaylor in that I don't think that what you're proposing would necessarily be good. You need a political system that you trust will promote wise decision makers, and then you need to not micromanage them. If the people who get elected can't be trusted to make good decisions on a scale of several years, then the political system needs to be corrected, not expanded.

noobermin 10y ago
Switzerland has a population of 8.4M, about the population of NYC. US has >300M and a land area two orders of magnitude larger than Switzerland.
- nickik 10y ago
  The US also has more people that work on that sort of thing. I don't see why it should not be able to scale. Sure it might get harder with increase scale, but I don't see it as a huge problem.
- pooper 10y ago
  > Switzerland has a population of 8.4M, about the population of NYC. US has >300M and a land area two orders of magnitude larger than Switzerland. Can we start with the city? Bill de Blasio (bless his heart) won 282,344 votes in the 2013 Democratic Primary. What's worse is Lhota won his primary with just 32,236 votes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_mayoral_election,_2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_mayoral_election... I hate to agree with President Obama on this topic but I have to agree with him. The first problem we need to tackle is not to fix the electoral process. The first problem we need to tackle is getting people to actually care enough to show up and show up in large enough numbers so we can effect change.

kevhito 10y ago

It sounds to me like you would like to be a representative on your local city council, or a town board. Why not run for election? Then you can do everything you mentioned. In principle, frequent voting might sound nice. But I don't know if it really would be in practice. (I'm not arguing a position here, just thinking out loud.) I'm not really interested in most politics, I don't really feel qualified, or compelled to become qualified, to deal with a lot of the questions that come up. I'm pretty happy to instead vote for a person (or even just a party) to represent me in most cases. I don't want to propose policies. Lots of people in my town are retired and/or seem to have endless time and energy to devote to meddling in town business. It would be exhausting if I had to keep constant vigilance every few weeks or months to make sure these people can't enact policies, rather than just voting every few years to make sure they don't get into office.

barnacs 10y ago
See, that's just it. There's a spectrum of involvement. I may not want to run a campaign, go door to door to collect signatures or spend days in council meetings. At the same time, I do want to vote directly on issues I have a strong opinion about, I'm willing to put in the effort to find different people to delegate my votes to in domains I'm not competent in. Occasionally I may have an idea I would like people to discuss and vote on. If people like the idea, they may even delegate their votes in that specific domain to me and I would be further motivated and empowered to come up with and champion similar ideas. I think technology would allow everyone to find their sweet spot of involvement in this spectrum.

theptip 10y ago

An interesting proposal in this area is Google's "Liquid Voting", which implements an idea that I've wanted to see tried for a long time. Essentially votes can be cast on every subject (for the very interested voters), or delegated to another representative (for the less interested voters). This could have some interesting side-effects, not all positive; I'd expect volatility and cult of personality to increase. But then that's the trajectory of politics in general recently, so perhaps there's not much more to lose. Benefits would include the ability for voters to actually enact the legislation that they want, but which no legislators will choose to implement (e.g. anti-corruption/insider trading laws). [edit: link is here: http://www.tdcommons.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1092&context=dpubs_series http://www.tdcommons.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1092&co...]

ajmurmann 10y ago
I wonder how this compares to the Pirate Parties Liquid Feedback voting system. On first glance they seem similar.

te_chris 10y ago

So get involved then. Voting is a blunt instrument.

walshemj 10y ago

your missing the point of representative democracy

pedrocr 10y ago

Electronic voting is strictly more expensive than paper voting. All those machines are expensive and you still need the voting places and staff. If you're willing to do away with the requirement that you can't prove to someone else who you voted for then you can implement mail-in voting. Still paper and you can have an election every day if you want. Some US states use that. Once you go that route a simple HTTPS website run by the government that you authenticate to is all you need for electronic voting with the same guarantees.

BeingIncubated 10y ago

After Brexit, I'm not sure I and many others would be comfortable allowing "greater citizen involvment" such as directly voting on bills or policies. I am politically against such a motion and am a proponent of greater technocracy; letting experts decide what policy is best rather than the masses who can easily be duped by demagogues or other post-truth elements.