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Internet-Based Political Party Opens Doors
AlamedaStone writes "New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Thomas L. Friedman writes (edited for brevity): 'If [...] idiocy by elected officials [...] leaves you wishing that we had more options today [...] not only are you not alone, but help may be on the way. Thanks to a quiet political start-up that is now ready to show its hand, a viable, centrist, third presidential ticket, elected by an Internet convention, is going to emerge in 2012.' Currently it looks like more liberal-inclined individuals are registering, but it would make for a healthier system if more viewpoints were represented."
Wake me when the US voting system actually gives a third party a chance to play any role.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It is really difficult to have enough contempt for this man; Glenn Greenwald's "The Tom Friedman Disease" is a good example of the kind of half-digested pap he routinely emits. Instead of looking at this gimmick and calling it a gimmick, he pats himself on the back with this unbearably asinine summary:
So, um, Tom, shall we ask a few slightly important questions, such as, how does this party hope to get candidates on the ballot when they aren't even registered as a party in the many states? Politics are nothing like distributing books or drugs. The fact that he glosses over this entirely is why I hold the man in such low esteem.
He is a thirteenth-rate thinker who, for reasons that are entirely unclear, has been drastically wrong about a very great deal and yet continues to hold his position on the New York Times' opinion pages.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Let me get this straight...a party where mostly liberals are signing up so far is centrist...because they say so? And they are viable...because TFA says so? Anybody else see the problem here?
Full disclosure: I work in the Agora Ciudadana Voting System.
In Spain we have created a "tool" political party which doesn't have and will never have any any ideals called Partido de Internet. The idea behind it is that its elected representatives will always vote in the representative chambers proportionally to what the people previously voted via Internet, with support for vote delegation so that you don't need to vote in all votings (6600 only in spanish congress per year or about one per hour). This is what is called liquid democracy = direct democracy + delegation. Using this together With legislative initiative, the people can execute 100% their legislative power through this liquid democracy setting.
The vote will be secret and secure, we will use our electronic national identity cards for authentication (hey, they are good for some things =), and the votings will be universally verifiable, we're using elgamal encryption based anonymization mixnets via Verificatum. The software is not finished yet, mind you. We're in contact with security researchers to make it as secure as possible, the secret of the vote is subject to a set of athorities in charge of the votings, who create a combined ElGamal encryption key for the votations. There's a good overview in a well known spanish security web site, Security by Default, but unfortunately it's in spanish, maybe you can read it translated with Google Translate.
I'll tell the people in PDI (Partido de Internet) contact with this other USA party, because AFAIK spanish Internet Party was the first such as a party in the world. It'll be nice if the idea spreads out through all the world. Will it work? I don't know, but we'll never know we don't try.
Sorry, it was me who posted that, I forgot to login =)
Check where this initiative originates from, indeed, and observe how it follows a pattern. This is something that we are seeing more and more, like in UK with the creation of the Lib Dems. The creation of new parties, so-called centrists but mostly taking votes on the left, ensuring the election of conservatives, or at least of a coalition government dominated by the conservatives.
The usual response to this observation is that the targeted party, here the Democrats, is anywhere but on the left. Well, considering where are the Conservatives in your country, way out to lunch, and considering how they are actively taking hostage and destroying the democratic institutions, I would pay some attention before voting for a third party...
First things first.
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This will turn out to be just another problem party.
Go and read George Washington's farewell address. He predicted the civil war and basically said that everyone should consider that they are Americans first and stop dividing themselves according to geography and party lines.
How about instead, we create a law that legally prevents the formation of any political party of any kind. Lets make people actually have to learn about who they are voting for instead of just looking for the D or the R on the ballot. At the rate things are going, we will probably choose the better candidate on accident than we ever will intentionally!
The problem is, politics is more than one dimensional. It is even more than two dimensional.
In fact, it is (at least) fully cartesian: The X axis is one's desire/tolerance for state control over individuals in general (order vs individualism), the Y axis is one's fiscal ideological inclination (spending/taxation tolerance), and the Z axis is one's social ideological inclination (charity vs non-involvement).
Most folks only think in one-dimensional left-right terms, which is IMHO stupid and dangerous.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I'd settle for being able to vote "Yes" or "No" (or abstain) on each candidate.
Subract all of a candidates "No" votes from their "Yes" votes. The candidate who has the largest total above zero wins.
If none of them net above zero, you hold another election, but none of them are eligible to run again.
That way you can vote for Carter *and* Anderson or GHW Bush *and* Perot or Gore *and* Nader or GW Bush *and* Pat Buchanan, and not feel that you "threw away" your vote for Anderson or Perot or Buchanan or Nader.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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Have you ever been on a jury? Only because the jury is governed rigorously by laws and an authority in the judge, with both sides of an accusation defended by a professional with interests conflicting with the other's, and an actual person at stake who can go to media with their story, does the drafting of random people from the community work at all.
But the "none of the above" vote is important. AFAIK it's already part of every ballot: just don't answer that question. But what should change is that those "abstain" answers should be counted, and the total including them should require someone get a majority to win. Otherwise a runoff election excluding the lowest vote getters. Or just "Instant-Runoff Voting", where voters pick their top choices in order, and the winner is chosen by the mutually agreed most popular, even if not simply the most common #1 pick.
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make install -not war
The criticism to direct democracy does not apply to PDI. Partido de Internet is NOT about direct democracy - it's about both direct and representative democracy. You get what you want when you want. The most probable use-case is you stablish a voting delegate, and then once in a while you check that your delegate is doing right. If there's an important voting you can always check the vote your delegate will proxy as yours, and if you don't agree you can emit a direct vote for a specific voting and continue delegating in the rest. And of course if that happens a lot, then you can change your delegate.
Oh and you cannot stablish a voting delegate and forget about it for years: the authorities in charge of the secrecy of the vote need to be many and will have a period of renewal, which could be say 2-4 years. When they change, the votes (including the delegations, which are treated as a special kind of vote, where the options are not YES/NO/ABSTENTION but DELEGATE 1,DELEGATE 2,etc) need to be re-emitted too. So in the end it can function as regular representative democracy where you vote (i.e. delegate) every 4 years, BUT you can change your vote at any time, and you can emit a direct vote if needed for important matters, working as direct democracy when the user wants only (which can be always, never, or anything in between). This is useful because some people always want to vote for X party, but in reality they don't agree 100% with it. For exmaple in spain 50+% voted for Partido Popular, but ~97% was against irak war promoted by Partido Popular. All of them could have voted NO had liquid democracy been in place. People voting to a traditional party and then also voting in Ágora "virtual parliament" is a non-issue for us: we want more users, and those must naturally come from those voting traditional parties, so that's a "transitional" stage, and as marketing. If lots of people from another party try our system, we believe we will gain lots of people that otherwise wouldn't have known our system and wouldn't have a chance to vote to our party.