Ask Slashdot: We've Had Online Voting; Why Not Continuous Voting? (iamnotanumber.org)

periegetes writes: This idea has been bugging me for a while. It takes months to organize a physical election, and several days to count the results, so it makes sense that we don't organize elections every day. However, with the computing resources at our disposal, it would be child's play to setup a site where every citizen could vote for (or against) proposed laws themselves, and could even change their vote at all times, cutting out the middle man and restoring true democracy to the world. That last part may be a stretch, but I, for one, would feel more involved in my government if I didn't have to watch it screw up for years before getting another say in it. I've found precious few articles discussing the matter, which usually means I'm missing an obvious problem. Why, in the age of Big Data and petaflops, don't we consider continuous voting?

Comments

Re:SIgh

[mlts]

This basically puts control of an entire nation directly into the hands of whomever can hack the results of the voting system. With the issues of security that have popped up with e-voting, even normal voting requires paper receipts, via a Chaumian system, so people can verify their vote actually applied.

A constant voting system will be a big target for every single blackhat on the planet. All they need to do is just flip a few votes, and they can fundamentally change the direction the government goes in extremely subtle ways.

Voting is too sensitive to have it be on the Internet without a verifiable paper trail as it stands. Adding continuous voting just makes things worse.

Re: SIgh

[meglon]

In a direct democracy, that's exactly what would happen. We live in a constitutional republic, which is basically indistinguishable from a representative democracy. https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Several of the founding fathers had very negative feelings towards democracy, give the only democracies around at the time were direct democracies. They saw tyranny of the majority play out, where what they believed to be inalienable rights could be stripped from people purely by the vote of the majority. A great example of that is these people who claim that states should have the right to vote on whether or not to allow same sex marriage. That is a classic example of tyranny of the majority.

The constitution doesn't empower the majority, it restricts them from committing tyranny of the majority and subjugating the minority to the majority's whims.