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> I just don't get the draw of an electronic voting system. Make elections cheap. For those that wish to experiment with majority rules a reliable system would

> I just don't get the draw of an electronic voting system. Make elections cheap. For those that wish to experiment with majority rules a reliable system would allow the people to technically be able to vote in their government on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. So further to this if elections are easy to run and are cheap what does it matter if someone breaks one election? You can just run the next one fine. It changes the variables somewhat and requires a sustained and persistent threat to be engaged to subvert the democracy. Combined with a team that investigate irregularities you can create a vaguely stable system, especially if you consider ideas such as binding authentication to geography instead of identity making it more difficult to stuff ballot boxes as teams can easily verify how many votes should be possible from a specific gps co-ordinate. I'm not saying its a great idea, its probably awful but it opens up an option to society that previously hasn't been available and that's interesting.

bjackman 10y ago
You make good points but as I understand it, Switzerland has a relatively direct form of democracy and already runs referenda very often. > what does it matter if someone breaks one election? You can just run the next one fine This assumes it's easy to detect manipulation which I think is very unlikely. Edit: according to Wikipedia, Switzerland has 13 national referendums (not "referenda" apparently) in 2016 so not as many as I thought. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_referendums,_2016 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_referendums,_2016
- tribaal 10y ago
  Well, many things are decided by elected comitees, but referendum are required to change the constitution (we're ok with it changing, it's not seen as an untouchable artifact here). Citizens can also decide to submit things to referendum, and that has absolute decision power. To do so you need to gather a set number of signatures depending on the level of the decision (communal, state-wide or federal). This is very often used by political parties as a "weapon" to counter their opponent's decisions - they organise signature gatherings, and if they reach their goal the people gets to have the final word on the topic at hand. Of course, anyone can submit a referendum on anything, as long as you gather the required number of signatures. You don't need to be elected or in a party or anything like that. The system does lead to some ridiculous things being put up for nation-wide discussion, but that is usually seen as the cost of living in a direct democracy. I can think it's stupid, but it's your right to bring it to my attention if you consider it important (a bit like freedom of speech and the old "I'll fight your your right to say it even though I disagree"). EDIT: doh' I did repeat the "referenda" mistake here :/ Edited out.
VLM 10y ago
The problem is so many government decisions can't be rolled back, like military, treaty, supreme court appointments, some environmental regulations... You'd have to change everything else and every other country first to tolerate a "by bad, we're gonna redo" attitude and then implement "my bad, redo". An interesting simpler direct majority rule scheme is to halt elections completely and use jury selection techniques to select decision makers. What we'd lose in expertise we'd more than gain in the lack of sociopaths and psychopaths. A government completely of jury duty/draft would be far more effective than the one we have, which is probably why no one in power wants it.
- aninhumer 10y ago
  >What we'd lose in expertise we'd more than gain in the lack of sociopaths and psychopaths. I think far more likely these people would mostly just end up taking advice from whichever experts are left further down the hierarchies, who would then effectively run the country.
  - VLM 10y ago
    OK, I'm not saying no, but you'd need to explain how that's different than the current situation other than the top leadership would be less crazy and less corrupt on average. Or aside from being different, how would having better leadership make the situation actively worse. Surely you can't be implying we have subject matter experts running the country now. Or that the subject matter experts we do have from law and show business who are in charge now are only in charge of their areas of expertise specifically law or show business? I'm just saying there's nothing wrong with having congress leading the American Bar Association, its just that having lawyers in charge of, say, nuclear power plants, is about as dumb as having plumbers in charge of source code.
- amalcon 10y ago
  So, using the US Federal government as an example, the sociopaths would need to convince 600-ish random people to do what they want on a continuous basis. Currently, the sociopaths need to convince ~100M random people to do what they want once every two years. The former might be superior, but it's not obviously so.
lostboys67 10y ago
I would not want to live in any country where elections are run on the basis of cost.
- Quarrelsome 10y ago
  I wouldn't want to live in a world where people's imaginations were bound by their current reality. I don't make this argument as a "right", its a what if. AND if they're cheap you can run em all the time, that's interesting isn't it?
  - lostboys67 10y ago
    Interesting in the Chinese way :-(
    - Quarrelsome 10y ago
      well yea, you might not want to live there.....
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    No, I think being able to run more elections is dangerous, because there are a lot of reasons republicanism works better than direct democracy at scale, but people are self-entitled idiots and will want to weigh in on things they have no idea about or useful input on because they're important.
    - Quarrelsome 10y ago
      There are many forms of democracy and to act as if we've got it all figured out today and have the best system is potentially another form of being self-entitled and silly. Our system very much "sucks least".
      - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
        We have plenty of evidence that governing by asking a large, diverse population over and over about local issues just leads to exactly the sort of tragedy-of-the-commons that government is meant to reign in. Having too many votes simply doesnt work, because the voters can't put in the required effort per vote to decide on a prudent course of action. The only reason to switch off paper ballots is of you're running so many elections you're just influence laundering by pretending to be democratic when you're not.

bjackman 10y ago

You make good points but as I understand it, Switzerland has a relatively direct form of democracy and already runs referenda very often. > what does it matter if someone breaks one election? You can just run the next one fine This assumes it's easy to detect manipulation which I think is very unlikely. Edit: according to Wikipedia, Switzerland has 13 national referendums (not "referenda" apparently) in 2016 so not as many as I thought. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_referendums,_2016 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_referendums,_2016

tribaal 10y ago
Well, many things are decided by elected comitees, but referendum are required to change the constitution (we're ok with it changing, it's not seen as an untouchable artifact here). Citizens can also decide to submit things to referendum, and that has absolute decision power. To do so you need to gather a set number of signatures depending on the level of the decision (communal, state-wide or federal). This is very often used by political parties as a "weapon" to counter their opponent's decisions - they organise signature gatherings, and if they reach their goal the people gets to have the final word on the topic at hand. Of course, anyone can submit a referendum on anything, as long as you gather the required number of signatures. You don't need to be elected or in a party or anything like that. The system does lead to some ridiculous things being put up for nation-wide discussion, but that is usually seen as the cost of living in a direct democracy. I can think it's stupid, but it's your right to bring it to my attention if you consider it important (a bit like freedom of speech and the old "I'll fight your your right to say it even though I disagree"). EDIT: doh' I did repeat the "referenda" mistake here :/ Edited out.

VLM 10y ago

The problem is so many government decisions can't be rolled back, like military, treaty, supreme court appointments, some environmental regulations... You'd have to change everything else and every other country first to tolerate a "by bad, we're gonna redo" attitude and then implement "my bad, redo". An interesting simpler direct majority rule scheme is to halt elections completely and use jury selection techniques to select decision makers. What we'd lose in expertise we'd more than gain in the lack of sociopaths and psychopaths. A government completely of jury duty/draft would be far more effective than the one we have, which is probably why no one in power wants it.

aninhumer 10y ago
>What we'd lose in expertise we'd more than gain in the lack of sociopaths and psychopaths. I think far more likely these people would mostly just end up taking advice from whichever experts are left further down the hierarchies, who would then effectively run the country.
- VLM 10y ago
  OK, I'm not saying no, but you'd need to explain how that's different than the current situation other than the top leadership would be less crazy and less corrupt on average. Or aside from being different, how would having better leadership make the situation actively worse. Surely you can't be implying we have subject matter experts running the country now. Or that the subject matter experts we do have from law and show business who are in charge now are only in charge of their areas of expertise specifically law or show business? I'm just saying there's nothing wrong with having congress leading the American Bar Association, its just that having lawyers in charge of, say, nuclear power plants, is about as dumb as having plumbers in charge of source code.
amalcon 10y ago
So, using the US Federal government as an example, the sociopaths would need to convince 600-ish random people to do what they want on a continuous basis. Currently, the sociopaths need to convince ~100M random people to do what they want once every two years. The former might be superior, but it's not obviously so.

lostboys67 10y ago

I would not want to live in any country where elections are run on the basis of cost.

Quarrelsome 10y ago
I wouldn't want to live in a world where people's imaginations were bound by their current reality. I don't make this argument as a "right", its a what if. AND if they're cheap you can run em all the time, that's interesting isn't it?
- lostboys67 10y ago
  Interesting in the Chinese way :-(
  - Quarrelsome 10y ago
    well yea, you might not want to live there.....
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  No, I think being able to run more elections is dangerous, because there are a lot of reasons republicanism works better than direct democracy at scale, but people are self-entitled idiots and will want to weigh in on things they have no idea about or useful input on because they're important.
  - Quarrelsome 10y ago
    There are many forms of democracy and to act as if we've got it all figured out today and have the best system is potentially another form of being self-entitled and silly. Our system very much "sucks least".
    - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
      We have plenty of evidence that governing by asking a large, diverse population over and over about local issues just leads to exactly the sort of tragedy-of-the-commons that government is meant to reign in. Having too many votes simply doesnt work, because the voters can't put in the required effort per vote to decide on a prudent course of action. The only reason to switch off paper ballots is of you're running so many elections you're just influence laundering by pretending to be democratic when you're not.