I came up with almost exactly this idea several years ago -- I called it augmented representative democracy.
I figured that software programmers would immediately latch onto the concept, because they are familiar with the concept of inheritance. You elect a legislator to vote on your behalf, and in many situations that legislator's vote is the same as your own, yet you retain the right to cast your own vote on any given issue.
But there are several objections that I could not overcome:
1) In our free, open, representative-style government, each legislator's voting record is a matter of public record, but each individual citizen's voting record is confidential. If we were to switch to augmented representative democracy, the question arises: Do we make each citizen's voting record public or private? Both options come with potential problems. For instance, if all votes are private, we lose out on transparency, and anonymity tends to embolden people to make some pretty nasty choices. (Exhibit A: Any online forum.) But if all votes are public, it could invite retribution that the average citizen is not equipped to handle.
2) It's hard enough to monitor roughly 535 federal legislators, to make sure they're not taking bribes or kickbacks in exchange for their votes on particular pieces of legislation. Could you imagine if you had to instead monitor all 207.6 million eligible voters? True, it also becomes more difficult to influence a significant number of them through nefarious means. (Suppose you need to bribe five senators to tip the scale in your favor on a particular piece of legislation. So you offer them each $1 million. Now suppose every eligible voter got to weigh in. You'd need to bribe more than 10 million of them, assuming they all voted. And a $1 bribe isn't nearly as attractive as a $1 million bribe.) But on bills where the vote is really, really close ... there is really no viable way to keep everybody honest.
3) A legislator's workload is (or should be) a full-time job. It takes a lot of time to read through bills and understand them. It takes even more time to fully consider its broader implications and its potential unintended consequences. As part of that process, you'll likely have to engage in discourse with fellow legislators; evaluate expert testimony; listen to the concerns of constituents, trade groups, lobbyists, and other organizations; and weigh the potential for the law to be challenged as unconstitutional. All of that takes time, and it's unrealistic to expect every eligible voter to assume that responsibility for the purpose of voting on policy directly.
4) In practice, the cases in which this augmented representative democracy would result in a vote different from the legislator's would be relatively few -- and yet there would be a whole lot of extra effort required to support the system. Basically, you would need an issue where the legislator's vote is different than what the people who elected him would expect (and the legislator, if he wants to be re-elected, is only going to do that sparingly), and you would need a substantial turnout of people willing to overrule him. Considering how few people vote in general elections, that's a tall order.
5) When you break it down, augmented representative democracy is really direct democracy, and not true representative democracy. And one objection to direct democracy -- take it for what it's worth -- is that there's a danger of mob-mentality policy decisions. If you look at some historic decisions, at least here in the U.S., the legislature was a bit ahead of the curve, compared with the population at large. So ... I guess the question is ... could direct democracy have derailed or delayed something like the civil rights legislation of the mid-20th century?
For many of these criticisms, can't we strike the balance by designing rules based on an individual's proxy-power (ie the #people for which they proxy). For example:
re:1) For any individual exercising a proxy-power <10, all votes are explicitly private. For any individual exercising proxy-power >=10, all votes are explicitly public.
re:2) Monitoring, transparency, ethics rules, etc increase in proportion with proxy-power.
re:3) Budget and staffing increase in proportion with proxy-power.
Additionally: Proxy-power is capped (e.g. 0.5% of national population). If you try to assign proxy-power to someone who has met the cap, then the assignment is rejected.
1. How about a compromise? You can choose to be available for delegation; if available for delegation, your votes are public.
2. Nope, but there are ways of analyzing voting patterns for fraud / tampering after the fact. Especially if some algorithms are used - I'm thinking specifically a form of collaborative filtering. 'For citizens who have a similar voting record..'
3. Definitely. It's a tough nut to crack. A tool like github could actually be part of the answer. What happens when industry trade groups and lobbyists have a closer ear to an individual representative than their constituents do (and they almost always do)? What happens when those groups' interest conflicts with their constituents (see also: the environment; the internet)? You'd hope that the representative/senator would vote in the interest of their constituents, keeping in mind the input of the special interests... But how often is that actually the case? Seeing a commit log laid out with the reasoning behind each change could lead not only to smaller & more comprehensive bills, but to better and more effective citizen input as well.
4. How much do people look into the voting history of their elected official now? Not very often, I'd wager. Something like this might actually be prophylactic to legislators voting in a different manner than people would expect though, if you're alerted when your delegate votes and you have the chance to cast a different one.
5. It's representative democracy except when representative democracy would vote against a person's interest. The more people against whose interest the prevailing representative vote consensus is, the more direct it is. Things that have a wide consensus would be delegated - and things that don't would probably be hammered out more. This isn't about what system would have been best for the 1960s or the 1850s, though, so I'm uncomfortable talking about it in context of the civil rights movements. What new systems of government are enabled by the availability of technology today? Which of those would be better equipped for the digital era than the ones we have available to us now? Which ones would lead to more freedom instead of less?
I'd like to think a distributed workload model would help take the pressure off of needing to have the bottlenecks that come from #3. I imagine a valve like bazaar system - with groups forming spontaneously as the need for leadership arises - might work out.
The trouble then becomes figuring out who's qualified to chime in on certain issues - a free-for-all could mean anyone with a vested interest could form these groups and we lose the ability to put in checks and balances to help stop feedback loops due to mob mentality. Proving you even read the article in question could be difficult.
The number of people who were spouting outright mis-information over the obamacare documents was mindblowing.
Perhaps the first step is to reduce the scope of these laws and stop bundling everything together.
Yes. All decisions should be separated into subject focused groups. Then individuals must qualify themselves for voting into those groups by participating in discussions, doing research and having articles they've written or submitted upvoted by other people who have already graduated to decision makers within that group.
So any representative wouldn't have a single "score" that represents how many followers they have but a number of individual scores as they pertain to the focus that individual has chosen for themselves.
SO, do this to vote for full-time legislators. There could be a tree of proxy voting, where some folks proxy with a trusted relative, their minister or a local politico. They could vote their bloc on up the food chain, until somebody wins say 1M votes - they become a legislator?
Isn't this more or less how the current system works? At least in the UK, it is allowed to nominate someone to vote on your behalf in a general election. The only difference is that candidates have to choose to stand for election under the current system and it seems unfair to vote someone into a political office if they don't want it!
Unfair perhaps, but I have a hunch that such people would make much better politicians than those who seek power. I'd even suggest that this could be the definition of citizenship: if you want to be a citizen (and vote), then you need to be willing to accept that you might be elected to serve.
One counterobjection to #1: Most ballot initiatives and referenda these days are done by secret ballot, and it doesn't seem to be a big deal; what matters is the result, right? Transparency with elected officials is key, because you want to make sure the guy you voted for is actually voting the way you want him to vote (so you can vote him out if he goes rogue), but maybe transparency isn't so big an issue with direct democracy, since each of us knows what our own vote is.
There other side of the coin is that transparency with elected officials makes them susceptible to concessions, bribes and coercion.
In the most benign way it creates a legislative environment of favors. "If you promise to allocate more funds to my district's naval base, I promise to vote on your education bill".
2) But to some degree it is similar now - people as well can try to bribe others to vote for a particular person. The only difference is it is not as formal as delegating your vote.
private citizens should never have their votes revealed, we do this for the simple reason that intimidation is a long practiced activity by those in power.
It is the reason why unionization drives are wholly secret on votes. However if you really really want proof, revealing those who supported a recent prop in California that revealed people's support when it was previously guaranteed private is all we need.
Take away privacy of vote is the same as taking away the right to vote.
I figured that software programmers would immediately latch onto the concept, because they are familiar with the concept of inheritance. You elect a legislator to vote on your behalf, and in many situations that legislator's vote is the same as your own, yet you retain the right to cast your own vote on any given issue.
But there are several objections that I could not overcome:
1) In our free, open, representative-style government, each legislator's voting record is a matter of public record, but each individual citizen's voting record is confidential. If we were to switch to augmented representative democracy, the question arises: Do we make each citizen's voting record public or private? Both options come with potential problems. For instance, if all votes are private, we lose out on transparency, and anonymity tends to embolden people to make some pretty nasty choices. (Exhibit A: Any online forum.) But if all votes are public, it could invite retribution that the average citizen is not equipped to handle.
2) It's hard enough to monitor roughly 535 federal legislators, to make sure they're not taking bribes or kickbacks in exchange for their votes on particular pieces of legislation. Could you imagine if you had to instead monitor all 207.6 million eligible voters? True, it also becomes more difficult to influence a significant number of them through nefarious means. (Suppose you need to bribe five senators to tip the scale in your favor on a particular piece of legislation. So you offer them each $1 million. Now suppose every eligible voter got to weigh in. You'd need to bribe more than 10 million of them, assuming they all voted. And a $1 bribe isn't nearly as attractive as a $1 million bribe.) But on bills where the vote is really, really close ... there is really no viable way to keep everybody honest.
3) A legislator's workload is (or should be) a full-time job. It takes a lot of time to read through bills and understand them. It takes even more time to fully consider its broader implications and its potential unintended consequences. As part of that process, you'll likely have to engage in discourse with fellow legislators; evaluate expert testimony; listen to the concerns of constituents, trade groups, lobbyists, and other organizations; and weigh the potential for the law to be challenged as unconstitutional. All of that takes time, and it's unrealistic to expect every eligible voter to assume that responsibility for the purpose of voting on policy directly.
4) In practice, the cases in which this augmented representative democracy would result in a vote different from the legislator's would be relatively few -- and yet there would be a whole lot of extra effort required to support the system. Basically, you would need an issue where the legislator's vote is different than what the people who elected him would expect (and the legislator, if he wants to be re-elected, is only going to do that sparingly), and you would need a substantial turnout of people willing to overrule him. Considering how few people vote in general elections, that's a tall order.
5) When you break it down, augmented representative democracy is really direct democracy, and not true representative democracy. And one objection to direct democracy -- take it for what it's worth -- is that there's a danger of mob-mentality policy decisions. If you look at some historic decisions, at least here in the U.S., the legislature was a bit ahead of the curve, compared with the population at large. So ... I guess the question is ... could direct democracy have derailed or delayed something like the civil rights legislation of the mid-20th century?