5 ms·

If there's any way we can bring some direct democracy influences into our representative democracy, it's exactly this. Allowing say 100,000 to 1,000,000 people,

If there's any way we can bring some direct democracy influences into our representative democracy, it's exactly this. Allowing say 100,000 to 1,000,000 people, who are outraged enough, to be able to at least postpone a bad bill when Congress tries to pass it quickly. If these people oppose a bill it should immediately be put through a process of public debate for a period of at least 6 months, and it should all be done openly and fairly. I don't know what the exact balance should be, but I would start low, rather than high. The number of people necessary should be low enough that 80% of the "bad bills" don't pass anymore, but also high enough that you don't have 80% of these oppositions as abuses of the law. The reason I would start with a lower number first, is because we've already tried the "more representative" version of the Government, and it hasn't been working that well lately, and because it's much easier to get them to raise the number later if it gets too abused, than it is to get them to lower the number, because that would mean giving even more power to the people, and it's not something they'd like to do. I'm not entirely sure how this opposition should happen - through signatures, I guess? But they should give a lot of information about themselves to verify them easily, or it needs to be done in such a way that a politician can't easily manufacture these to stop an opponent's bill. Maybe this is a good suggestion, maybe it isn't. But I do believe that in the future we'll need more direct democracy influences on the Republic, for it to stay healthy. The Republic needs to be a lot more bottom-up than it currently is. Voting every 2 or 4 years to change a candidate, from the very few options, when in 98% (fact) of the cases those with the most campaign money win anyway, and then allowing them to do whatever they want when they get there, is just not enough anymore, and it's clear it hasn't been working well. This is why so many people are frustrated with the voting process and don't vote. They know it's mostly useless. The Republic needs to be upgraded for the 21st century.

DanielRibeiro 15y ago
We even have the crypto theory for safe e-voting, which is being implemented in Norway[1], which can help direct democracy to turn into a reality. The hard part is the culture change. [1] http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/195 http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/195
- radicalbyte 15y ago
  > The hard part is the culture change. No that's good. At a Macro level change can only lead to reduce the power of the incumbents. Anything we can do to fight the kind of people who actually believe that the internet is really a "series of tubes" (again, at a Macro level, this'll be the Boomers) is a GOOD thing.
molmalo 15y ago
I have always wanted a more direct democracy, but I think the big problem with this is that a LOT of people just don't care about anything. When I asked a friend of mine, just before a presidential election, who was he going to vote, he asked me that he didn't care. He said "I don't care about politics or economics". Even when I responded that eventually, that decisions affected him, he still didn't care. And in the other side of the spectrum, there are very heated subjects, like abortion. If you enable a way to postpone or kill a bill, based on say 3M online votes, I can bet that every church will ask their parishioners to vote. (please, I simply put this as an example) How do you stop that? On the other hand, I can bet that some corporations are going to put incentives to vote in favor or against some legislation. (e.g.: giving bonuses to the ones who vote the desired option). Everything becomes much more harder to analyze to detect corruption.
- nextparadigms 15y ago
  Yes, this is why asking a national referendum for anything is not the answer. You need a minority group of say 1 million, who is very knowledgeable about the issue to know that it's a terrible bill, and which has the initiative to act against it. But of course this could be easily abused, too, if not done carefully. That's why they shouldn't be able to veto the bill - but only postpone it and force Congress to hold a public debate about it over a number of months. The only threat to this is getting this happening way too often, and making Congress very inefficient (not that it's extremely efficient now) by postponing everything. This is why it needs to be thought through a little bit, and as soon as there are signs of this, the numbers should be altered to balance the law.
henrikschroder 15y ago
> Allowing say 100,000 to 1,000,000 people, who are outraged enough, to be able to at least postpone a bad bill when Congress tries to pass it quickly. That sounds nice when you only think about "good" people opposing "bad" bills, but you can say goodbye to any kind of social reform under that system. Repealing DADT, Repealing the Defense of Marriage act, same-sex marriage are some social reforms that would never happen under such a system because you can easily find millions of americans that are extremely outraged about those issues. The protests against SOPA and PIPA worked because the absolute majority of the american population didn't care and didn't have an opinion either way, but the tech community had an expert opinion against it based on facts and technical knowledge. But if you open up your suggested system to issues where everyone has an opinion and noone really knows the effects, the results are going to be abysmal. I wonder what the US would look like with a proportional representation system instead. Where you would have an actual Tea-party party with as many seats in congress as they actually have nationwide support for. And where the other "factions" of the Democrats and the Republicans formed parties in their own right, and people could have a more active role in shaping the policies of the "block" of their choosing, instead of just voting for it because they don't want the other side to win. I wonder what it would look like if every vote counted, if there were no swing-states, no gerrymandering, if the electoral college votes where also proportional, so that voting for a third candidate is meaningful, or a fourth, or a fifth. I wonder what would happen if the election results showed the "purple" America that actually exists, instead of the red vs. blue illusion.
- tjoff 15y ago
  Repealing DADT, Repealing the Defense of Marriage act, same-sex marriage are some social reforms that would never happen under such a system because you can easily find millions of americans that are extremely outraged about those issues. How is postpone and force a public and (hopefully) fair debate about a subject the same as stopping it from happening?
  - dodo53 15y ago
    A lot of opinion on that kind of thing is pretty much axiomatic and not changeable by reasoned debate

DanielRibeiro 15y ago

We even have the crypto theory for safe e-voting, which is being implemented in Norway[1], which can help direct democracy to turn into a reality. The hard part is the culture change. [1] http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/195 http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/195

radicalbyte 15y ago
> The hard part is the culture change. No that's good. At a Macro level change can only lead to reduce the power of the incumbents. Anything we can do to fight the kind of people who actually believe that the internet is really a "series of tubes" (again, at a Macro level, this'll be the Boomers) is a GOOD thing.

molmalo 15y ago

I have always wanted a more direct democracy, but I think the big problem with this is that a LOT of people just don't care about anything. When I asked a friend of mine, just before a presidential election, who was he going to vote, he asked me that he didn't care. He said "I don't care about politics or economics". Even when I responded that eventually, that decisions affected him, he still didn't care. And in the other side of the spectrum, there are very heated subjects, like abortion. If you enable a way to postpone or kill a bill, based on say 3M online votes, I can bet that every church will ask their parishioners to vote. (please, I simply put this as an example) How do you stop that? On the other hand, I can bet that some corporations are going to put incentives to vote in favor or against some legislation. (e.g.: giving bonuses to the ones who vote the desired option). Everything becomes much more harder to analyze to detect corruption.

nextparadigms 15y ago
Yes, this is why asking a national referendum for anything is not the answer. You need a minority group of say 1 million, who is very knowledgeable about the issue to know that it's a terrible bill, and which has the initiative to act against it. But of course this could be easily abused, too, if not done carefully. That's why they shouldn't be able to veto the bill - but only postpone it and force Congress to hold a public debate about it over a number of months. The only threat to this is getting this happening way too often, and making Congress very inefficient (not that it's extremely efficient now) by postponing everything. This is why it needs to be thought through a little bit, and as soon as there are signs of this, the numbers should be altered to balance the law.

henrikschroder 15y ago

> Allowing say 100,000 to 1,000,000 people, who are outraged enough, to be able to at least postpone a bad bill when Congress tries to pass it quickly. That sounds nice when you only think about "good" people opposing "bad" bills, but you can say goodbye to any kind of social reform under that system. Repealing DADT, Repealing the Defense of Marriage act, same-sex marriage are some social reforms that would never happen under such a system because you can easily find millions of americans that are extremely outraged about those issues. The protests against SOPA and PIPA worked because the absolute majority of the american population didn't care and didn't have an opinion either way, but the tech community had an expert opinion against it based on facts and technical knowledge. But if you open up your suggested system to issues where everyone has an opinion and noone really knows the effects, the results are going to be abysmal. I wonder what the US would look like with a proportional representation system instead. Where you would have an actual Tea-party party with as many seats in congress as they actually have nationwide support for. And where the other "factions" of the Democrats and the Republicans formed parties in their own right, and people could have a more active role in shaping the policies of the "block" of their choosing, instead of just voting for it because they don't want the other side to win. I wonder what it would look like if every vote counted, if there were no swing-states, no gerrymandering, if the electoral college votes where also proportional, so that voting for a third candidate is meaningful, or a fourth, or a fifth. I wonder what would happen if the election results showed the "purple" America that actually exists, instead of the red vs. blue illusion.

tjoff 15y ago
Repealing DADT, Repealing the Defense of Marriage act, same-sex marriage are some social reforms that would never happen under such a system because you can easily find millions of americans that are extremely outraged about those issues. How is postpone and force a public and (hopefully) fair debate about a subject the same as stopping it from happening?
- dodo53 15y ago
  A lot of opinion on that kind of thing is pretty much axiomatic and not changeable by reasoned debate