This is the wrong soution to this problem. The _right_ solution is to quadrouple the number of senators and house members. This effort shows that yes via technology we can have more people voting on the important business of the country , but it doesn't mean we should ignore the benefits of representative democracy and pretend everyone will know everything about everything. The right solution is to water down congress, it amazes me that we have allowed the voice of so many people to be condensed into so few representatives. My parents had twice as much representation ( in terms of votes / constitutant ) then I do. My grandparents had almost four times as much [0]
As a fun by-product you would completely eliminate the effect of large donors on the government. Lets see the Koch brothers or George Soros donate $1 Million dollars to ~1600 Congressmen every two years.
Let me make an alternate proposal. Suppose that we want 600 congresscritters and the population of voters is 300M. Dividing A into B, we get a simple ratio of 500K to one. Let's allow them to sign up directly. No reason for it to be limited geographically. If you like Representative Archie, sign up with him. When Archie gets 500,000 registrations, he gets a seat. Even better, we'll let more people sign up -- if Archie is so popular that a million people sign up for him, then he gets two votes. We'll stop there to prevent too much power concentration -- more people can sign up for him if they like, but he doesn't get extra votes.
Once per period, all of Archie's constituents are surveyed to determine if they still like what he's doing. They can change registration at any time, but this is the most convenient time to do it.
If Archie drops below 1M at any time, he goes back to one vote. If he drops below 500K at a survey point, he's no longer a Representative.
I think we could come together with both Ideas and make a system that works. I like some aspects of your plan , but I would want to see a few modifications. Your extending into voting systems as well and I don't necessarily think your doing it the best way , but i _love_ the idea your putting forth.
Edit:
So i realise why I like aspects of your proposal. Because it has a few of the principles of the Mixed-Member proportional [0] System mixed into it. I like MMP I really like it. I think that combined with a radical expansion of the number of representatives ( I think we should be closer to 100k then 500k, maybe as low as 50k ) would allow us to do many amazing things as a country. Also I would toss this wrinkle in. MMP is done at a state level and only state level political parties are recognized, and they are now official. They must follow rules to elect their leadership.
I also believe that this is the wrong solution, but I agree with the spirit of it. The people need a voice on individual laws, but the vast majority of the American public will not (and should not have to) educate themselves on the ins and outs of every issue brought before the legislative branch.
I think the right solution would be to allow the public to overturn laws. Let the House and Senate do their jobs, but enable an electronic voting system by which the public can automatically overturn any law that enough of the public feels is wrong at any time. This is a more balanced approach, and would also curtail the divisiveness that we see in our political system. The public wouldn't spend the time in between elections either pouting about or praising the results of the last election. Instead they could put their energy toward helping us craft a better country regardless of who is in office.
I think if you did that you would get into much the same situation you see with the discussion over the tax/budget changes that are happening today. Its really easy to rally people _against_ something. Its a bit harder to get them to support it. I think you would find with a public veto that nothing substantial would pass through congress.
I disagree. The current tax debate is largely over whether or not to raise taxes on, at most, 2% of the population. That isn't remotely close to enough of the population to overturn anything under my proposal. If you set the percentage required high enough, only those laws that are truly objectionable would wind up in the trash bin.
but there are many more people opposed to it then just the 2%. Take for instance me. I am no where near close to that 2% in income, and unless you want to give them official representation in proportion to their tax burden then I claim what your doing is tyrannical. I bet I could convince enough people to a. Care and b. Vote about it that we could overturn it.
I think state level misses the point. The underlying ideology is applicable at all levels, which is that a representative can better represent fewer people rather than more people. You trade off accuracy of representation for protection against popular interests. Currently, we are at an absurd extreme in terms of human history (one president for 320 million, then in Cali its 1 senator per 25 million people).
We already have governmental overhead of 1 person on public payroll for every 6 people. I figure you could easily have 1 direct representative per 1,000 people if you change the system to an elector tree like the old US Senate rather than direct voting for too many positions.
The senate was never intended to represent the people, it was intended to represent the states. The 17th Amendment usurped the states rightful representation in the federal government and would be best if repealed. But it's harder to control the state governments if the federal government can't enforce mandates such as withholding money from states that refuse to pass or enforce laws. Those in favor of such centralized power are often unaware of their Authoritarian support. No state senator would pass such mandates laws and vote to limit their state governments if the senators had to answer to and were elected by the state legislatures. Each state can elect their senators as they see fit.
> to an elector tree like the old US Senate rather than direct voting for too many positions
I mentioned this. The senators are still one of the largest divergent points from public interests that are direct elected. I'm all for abolishing the 17th amendment amongst other things (I disagree with the policy of 2 senators per state in principle anyway).
> No state senator would pass such mandates laws and vote to limit their state governments if the senators had to answer to and were elected by the state legislatures. Each state can elect their senators as they see fit.
I wish we could have unified state congresses that directly elected all federal representatives from within their own ranks. The citizenry shouldn't even be involved in the fed, which shouldn't be nearly as large as it is. They should be involved locally, and their local choices should influence larger groups through representation. The way republics are supposed to work.
I mostly agree with you. I however disagree that the citizenry shouldn't be involved in the fed. If the fed (and states) wish to approve some law or program that requires increases or creating new taxes, the citizens who ultimately pay those taxes should have a say... currently they do via the House of Representatives.
A nitpick: I don't know how you can say the 17th Amendment "usurped" states representation in the Senate. The states ratified the 17th Amendment, and willingly gave up their powers in that sense.
They were mostly bullied with federal funding, as they always are. It is why federal dependence and welfare is so dangerous, not because of flawed ideologies of who "earned" what, but because they can easily use their services as carrots on a stick to drive people the way they want them the same way a gang might extract loyalty through "protection". It already happens all the time with the elderly in the US and social security / medicare.
The only potential catch is that this is a lot MORE targets for espionage. You only need to find one person with some life circumstances (new kid, long commute, conflict of interests, etc) and spearfish/blackmail/torture/teach scala accordingly.
Granted, your proposal does address a lot of things, but this is something that would need to be addressed. Thoughts?
It does give more targets to potentially get an insider into office, but the benefit gained by corrupting you local congressman by lets say forcing him to learn clojure is now limited as he is only responsible for .0003125 of the congressional power. If you managed to convert your congressman to be a lisp hipster you would control .001 of the congress ( and potentially more due to the current power arrangement )
There are many, many more people with access to sensitive/classified information in the executive branch. Increasing the size of congress by an order of magnitude will not meaningfully impact that number.
"As a fun by-product you would completely eliminate the effect of large donors on the government. Lets see the Koch brothers or George Soros donate $1 Million dollars to ~1600 Congressmen every two years."
I think that's more than a tad optimistic. If you quadruple the number of seats you also shrink the size of each district. With smaller districts the costs of campaigning would likely shrink, as would the amount each individual Congressman would need to raise.
A more important step would be removing the direct election of senators. Senators should be selected by the state legislators to represent the views of the state.
Am I the only one who thinks this is a terrible idea? Normal people don't have the time to vote on every single issue; we have our own jobs to do. A system like this just means he'll be voting with the loudest minority for everything that comes up.
> Normal people don't have the time to vote on every single issue
It's really easy to have both direct democracy and the convenience of not having to vote on any given issue. You could grant the use of your vote to another citizen or a group of citizens. If you don't like how they vote you could instantly revoke their right to cast your vote on your behalf and go back to voting on every single issue.
You could also grant use of your vote to different parties depending on the subject matter, maybe you like Bob to cast votes for you on environmental issues, but prefer Susan to do it if it has to do with foreign policy. Which bucket an issue falls into could be handled similarly, a third-party you op-it to trust to categorize issues before your vote is handed off to other parties that are voting on your behalf.
Those are just some that come to mind, you could do much better. But the point is that with modern technology it would be easy for everyone to choose where they want to side on the direct democracy v.s. representative democracy spectrum, and they could do so on an issue-by-issue basis.
The problem isn't that it's infeasible, it's just that nobody's tried because it would take power away from those that are currently holding it.
People seem pretty conflicted about democracy. They want 'the people' to be in control, but not really -- because they're not very smart and somewhat irrational. Yet they're all for voting. Maybe because they knew their vote doesn't matter? It gets confusing pretty quick.
> You could grant the use of your vote to another citizen or a group of citizens.
This idea is common in a lot of new ideas about representation (eg the German Pirate Party's Liquid Democracy http://liquidfeedback.org/) yet I'd argue it is also a really bad idea.
One of the key values of any democracy, and direct democracy in particular, is that it values and promotes human autonomy. Instead of being subject to arbitrary powers, the 'people' rule themselves - we are only subject to laws that we ourselves have authored (or delegated to others to author in our current cases). But allowing everyone to vote on everything violates autonomy.
Most people recognise that autonomy requires having some/equal say in matters that materially affect them. Yet few realise that giving others a say in matters that don't affect them undermines the autonomy of those affected. So while laws apply relatively equally to all those in a jurisdiction, the distribution of effect is far from equal.
Proxy voting allows those with little skin in the game to drown out those significantly affected by proposed laws. The fact that people don't have the time to vote on every issue, and so will only likely vote on matters important to them, is one of the major strengths of direct democracy.
That's a very good point, and thanks for the link to liquidfeedback. It's very interesting, especially how it seems to do almost all of the logic needed in PostgreSQL.
> Proxy voting allows those with little skin in the
> game to drown out those significantly affected
> by proposed laws.
But that's exactly what you'd get today in a representative democracy. If there's a fringe issue that 1% of the population really cares about they'll have to convince their representatives to vote their way on it. Since the representatives go for the popular vote they'll probably vote with what the 99% wants 100% of the time.
You'll only get minority issues through if the minority cares enough about it and it doesn't negatively impact everyone else, or if the negative impact from not giving the minority what they want would be greater than just giving them what they want.
I think you'd be more likely to reach a consensus like that using proxy voting than you would be in a direct democracy. With proxy voting any fringe issue will by default go to some general issues political party of your choice, which is likely to have a reasonable position on miscellaneous issues like this.
With direct democracy where 1% really cares about some issue but the 99% doesn't care either way (so much that they can't be bothered to vote either way) you might never end up passing it because you have another 1.5% population of voters that just votes "no" on everything out of general principle.
Anyone who has lived in California at some point in the past decade knows that direct democracy is a disaster. Ballot initiatives create service (and corresponding spending) increases and forbid tax hikes, leaving the elected legislature unable to balance the state budget.
I can understand how cultural homogeneity could impact the decision-making process (though Switzerland is a country of four official languages, so it's not that homogeneous), but I don't see how size matters. Care to elaborate?
Among other things, it has to do with the practical allowances for different communities of opinion, or factions within the polity. The smaller the group, the less opportunity there is for distinct subgroups to form, especially ones in opposition to others. There's also a more uniform experience of the polity that tends to shape opinion. The overall effect is that there's less variety of opinion, which makes direct democracy a closer approximation of the polity's feeling on something.
Just as you have economies of scale, there are diseconomies of scale, many of which result from combinatorial explosion in communication channels, and are as applicable to political as to industrial process: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseconomies_of_scale
Exactly. We have representatives for good reasons. Almost no one cares about most bills (which means they also won't know all the intricacies that often make the difference between a good bill and a bad bill). Even with the high-profile ones that we do care about, people will often vote for what they want now instead of what they need in the longterm (though our legislators aren't much better since they constantly are looking to the next election, especially in the House). California's ballot proposition system has shown that people will vote for flawed bills that sound good and be very reluctant to ever approve tax increases.
If this were implemented, for probably 90% of votes that he casts, we would see very low turnouts with voters coming from two groups: special interests--the small group of citizens who are deeply affected by the outcome of the vote and thus find it worthwhile to vote; and political junkies who get satisfaction out of voting on every issue, but who probably don't actually have time to really be informed about every single bill, especially as they evolve.
Implementation would also be extremely challenging. How do you ensure that Oregon residents (and which residents?--those who are eligible to vote? Those who are registered to vote? All, even children, felons, etc?) can vote once, and all others cannot vote? How do you handle people whose credentials for voting (whatever they may be) are compromised? What happens when a bill is amended--do people who have already voted on it have their votes stand by default? Are they able to change them? If they're able to change them, is that at the expense of anonymity? Do you actually have anonymity anyway? How does the Senator vote if someone DoS's the voting system? And obviously if there are any security vulnerabilities in the system, lots of problems could arise. These are very hard problems; there's been quite a bit of research into evoting, yet it is still very much an unsolved problem. If someone wins on a direct democracy platform, these problems will become very apparently very fast.
Assuming successful election, a large number of people would have shown interest in this, and those people could be engaged through a variety of outlets to vote. Senators also have a sizeable budget to send mail for free to voters.
Senators have access to a list of registered voters, which could help curb fraud.
It's not ideal (what is?!) but I'd take that over deciding based on what their richest donors want - which is how most people in Congress vote these days.
Besides, voting based on what most vocal/active constituents want is usually a pretty good idea, because they are the ones who usually research the topic the most, and have good solutions, and want their voices heard. And a senator would still have to make a judgement call and think about the whole population he's representing.
voting based on what most vocal/active constituents want is usually a pretty good idea, because they are the ones who usually research the topic the most, and have good solutions, and want their voices heard
Faulty syllogism there, in my view. The most vocal/active constituents can also be the most easily manipulated or the most extremist ones. Consider that there have been several Congressional attempts at immigration reform in the last decade or so, all of which have been derailed by a hardline nativist lobby which insists on deportation of all illegal aliens, which nobody in their right mind considers sensible, ethical, or practical.
Frankly, I think there's an inverse correlation between political passion and expert knowledge.
It is a terrible idea. Too many decisions would be based upon an over-reacting emotional response to the latest disaster. The Patriot Act is one such stupid response that happened right after 9-11.
Direct democracy permits the majority to trounce the rights of the minority.
A better answer would be that candidates for public office could only accept campaign contributions from registered voters in the candidate's district. This would beholden the candidate to his voters.
The patriot act wasn't a result of direct democracy, but getting rid of it would be much easier under direct democracy. Government involves both the creation and ammendment/removal of statutes.
Direct democracy is no more likely to lead to tyranny of the majority than representational democracy (slavery and segregation was an act of representational democracy if you recall). You are confusing two dimensions: direct <--> representative with majoritarianism <--> constitutionalism. Direct democracy is perfectly compatible with all the checks and balances of liberalism and a constitution.
Ideally that wouldn't matter. People who care about an issue would vote on it.
That opens another can of worms, though - not enough people know or care about issues that will directly or indirectly affect them. People who do usually have some vested interest at stake.
The key to success IMO for a system like this is preventing the real-world equivalent of bots and voting rings. Bots are one thing, but I'd imagine voting rings would be very difficult to mitigate in a system like this. I guess it depends on the parties involved raising awareness effectively.
Hollingsworth would be running against Jeff Merkley, considered one of the more liberal members of the Senate, who won in 2008 by just 3 points. Essentially, he'd be running as a spoiler for the GOP.
If you really believe that the populace are so stupid as to think that they can get services without paying for them, why would they not elect representatives that promise the same thing?
Representation rather than direct democracy does not help at all here.
Even though a balanced budget is in everyone's general interest, it is often specifically against a huge number of people's interest. Direct democracy of the kind Hollingsworth is putting forward is possibly an improvement, but it doesn't solve the issue of people voting for other people to pay.
I'm with ms4720. We should repeal the 17th Amendment. The short reason is because State governments no longer have representation in the Federal Government. There are other benefits to repealing it as well such as less money and noise spent on Senate elections.
Politicians don't really poll what everyone wants. They poll to see how to boost their numbers for a specific group, such as NRA or unions. They now that certain people will always vote for them.
As was stated by jrs235 it takes the state governments out of the picture at the federal level. This has lead to a much more powerful and invasive federal government for internal matters in America.
I heartily support this idea; however, the problem I see is that the secret ballot is not enforced, either in the process, or through the threat of legal enforcement.
If I can reliably observe someone voting, even with their consent, votes can be influenced through purchase or coercion. And unless new laws get passed to cover online pseudo-voting, such things wouldn't even be illegal, and I could roll around poor-income neighborhoods with a bullhorn advertising $10 per vote.
It's a solvable problem, and maybe I'm overstating the risk, but I think it's a problem worth paying attention to while pursuing these (worthwhile) experiments.
Plenty of places let you vote by post, which has this problem. And with people taking their camera phones into voting booths, arguably manual voting does too.
Really defeats the purpose of the Senate. It is bad enough we have direct election of Senators when the Senate was supposed to be the way the states kept the federal government in check.
At this point given technology and travel times, I would be more apt to support an amendment to replace the two Senators with the state's Governor. At least some fiscal control and concequences for state budgets would be discussed.
I think this is a brilliant idea! Elect officials should be like secretaries -- the public decides the course of action (though informal discussion, debates real-world and online forums) and after the decision is taken the senator is told what to do.
The key idea is to have a public debate in which all issues can be thoroughly considered, conflicting interest groups can have their say until an agreement is reached.
The beauty of the "senators as secretaries" ideas is that we can measure their performance in much more detail. Did they implement each of the decisions the people chose? If not, then they get the boot.
Democracy works when the citizens care. We might not care about all things, but we care about the things that concern us. Discussion and debates + project development by interested volunteers is MUCH MORE IMPORTANT than some stupid polarizing vote.
Sounds like a great idea. The senators wouldn't be forced to vote based on the population's "feedback" in all cases, so you'd still have a republic, not a real "direct democracy", and in the same time they'd get much better and more accurate information about what their constituents really want, compared to how they get it now through the "experts" (lobbyists).
I see a great opportunity in this for some sort of voting mill mechanical turk like system for people who aren't political and need money to sell their vote to some fascist with an agenda.
As a fun by-product you would completely eliminate the effect of large donors on the government. Lets see the Koch brothers or George Soros donate $1 Million dollars to ~1600 Congressmen every two years.
0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_app...