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> "Liquid democracy is a voting paradigm that allows voters that are part of a social network to either vote directly or delegate their voting rights to one of
by photochemsyn 4y ago
> "Liquid democracy is a voting paradigm that allows voters that are part of a social network to either vote directly or delegate their voting rights to one of their neighbors. The delegations are transitive in the sense, that a voter who decides to delegate, delegates both her own vote and the ones she has received through delegations. The additional flexibility of the paradigm allows to transfer voting power towards a subset of voters ideally containing the most expert voters on the question at hand. It is thus tempting to assume that liquid democracy can lead to more accurate decisions."
Well, first of all you have to ask if the 'decision to delegate' can be monetized or not. If American citizens could sell their vote directly to the highest bidder, then many likely would (most elections have relatively low turnout). How much would the average US citizen want in return? $100? $1000? $10? Would votes be purchasable only by other US citizens, or by corporate bodies, or by citizens of foreign nations?
Beyond that, this is already supposedly how representative democracy works. People ideally elect representatives, who go to Congress and sit on committees, where they make 'expert-assisted decisions' about budgets and projects. If the state wants to hire an expert to design a bridge, hopefully it's not the committee chair's lazy incompetent relative who gets the job, rather there's some kind of competitive merit-based assessment.
However, given the kind of people we have running Congress... this system doesn't seem to work that well. Geriatic insider traders who owe their positions to various corporate conglomerates (finance, energy, defense, pharmaceuticals, etc.) have ended up running all the committees, and the evidence that this is a failure can be easily seen by looking at America's crumbling domestic infrastructure.
P.S. 'Liquid democracy' is a rather meaningless choice of words. Should we be comparing it to 'gaseous democracy' or 'solid-state democracy'?
- guerrilla 4y ago> Well, first of all you have to ask if the 'decision to delegate' can be monetized or not. If American citizens could sell their vote directly to the highest bidder, then many likely would (most elections have relatively low turnout). How much would the average US citizen want in return? $100? $1000? $10? Would votes be purchasable only by other US citizens, or by corporate bodies, or by citizens of foreign nations? You're making up problems. The same exact problem, vote buying, exists in every form of democracy. Secret ballot is supposed to solve that. And has nothing to do with direct, liquid or representative democracy. > Beyond that, this is already supposedly how representative democracy works. No, you misunderstood liquid democracy if that's what you think. The difference is that anyone can withdraw their vote at any time for any reason and cast it on their own. It has nothing to do with committees. You can read more about liquid democracy in Wikipedia if the article wasn't enough for you [1]. > However, given the kind of people we have running Congress... this system doesn't seem to work that well. Geriatic insider traders who owe their positions to various corporate conglomerates (finance, energy, defense, pharmaceuticals, etc.) have ended up running all the committees, and the evidence that this is a failure can be easily seen by looking at America's crumbling domestic infrastructure. Yeah, this is what liquid democracy solves. Please make sure you understand the concept before arguing against it. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
- MichaelZuo 4y agoI don't understand how it can be kept secret, after all the person who is receiving the delegated votes must know how many and who gave it? And the person sending obviously knows how many and who they're giving it to.
- guerrilla 4y agoThe same way it is today. Nothing about voting would change, only who votes on what and when.
- raxxorraxor 4y agoWouldn't it be far easier to just vote by yourself then?
- guerrilla 4y agoNobody has time, energy ir interest to vote on ebery single thing. That's why you entrust your vote to somone else for things you don't care about as much.
- raxxorraxor 4y agoI believe if you don't have an interest in informing yourself about political issues, your vote should just be voided. Democracy has a problem that it can degrade to a popularity contest and I believe this mechanism would only exacerbate that issue. If people are not interested they might also be inclined to sell their votes which would shift political power to wealthy individuals even more. With representatives people usually don't vote on every single issue, on the contrary, the democratic will is already heavily delegated to a party, even if the logistical problems of collecting opinions would be pretty small these days.
- guerrilla 4y agoI mean you don't, so I guess your vote should be voided. There are many things representatives vote on for you that you have no idea about.
- __s 4y agoWhen I vote for a representative in the current system, their political sway only matters if they gained a majority Consider instead where everyone in the running got through, only their votes were multiplied by the number of votes they received. Suddenly there's a much higher value to high voter turnout (because winning by a large landslide matters for voting against opposition from opposing landslides, & one doesn't need the majority of votes for their vote to have weight) Aside, the idea of selling your vote is explored in Philip K Dick's Solar Lottery
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago> Consider instead where everyone in the running got through, only their votes were multiplied by the number of votes they received That's simply called proportional electoral system, has existed for a long time and it's adopted in many countries. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation