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

Republic vs Democracy

[slasher999]

Here in the US at least, and honestly it should be the same elsewhere, we don't want an actual Democracy due to the downfalls of that system. In effect a true, pure democracy will always devolve into anarchy and eventually a dictator will rise to power and effectively enslave the population. The US system is designed to provide a modified democratic system with protections against the outcome I just described. This is well documented elsewhere, I've provided a pointer in what I believe is the correct direction for finding the answer.

Re:Republic vs Democracy

[SumDog]

I have always been in favour of people voting on individual issues rather than for representational democracy. We have the technology; that is if we can get citizens to keep up with passphrases and singing keys. There is lies the problem. That old Winston Churchill quote about people will be dissuaded from democracy by a six minute conversation with the average voter.

But if you start creating basic logic tests for voters, you get into Jim Crow era.

Democracy is a broken system. To every person who says, "It's worked great for n years," you need to take a step back, look objectively at the West and realize the US and UK overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran, twice, to maintain oil reserve. The US is the largest state sponsor of terrorism in South America and heads of state that are elected on the premise of returning wealth to their nations often die in airplane crashes.

Giving ever individual the power to vote on ever issue would distribute that injustice on a wider population. People are very easily persuaded by advertisements. Elected officials often come into power because they can afford their campaigns. In the most progressive election systems like in Australia (order of preference; no first past the post; mandatory voting -- it is literally impossible to throw your vote away unless you go in and put an X on your ballot) they still elect idiotic parties like that one that put Tony Abbot in power.

It would probably be easier to industry to persuade the general population than just a few congressmen, and non-profits don't have the energy to take that on every day. ...you know .. now that I think about it. Maybe that system wouldn't be worse at all. In reality, it would be no better or worse than the situation is currently. It's mostly because your vote doesn't really matter. If you think it does, remember that from the early 1980s until 2012, there was always a Bush or Clinton within 5 people in the line of succession for the presidency. In America, we elect kings and queens.

Why not direct democracy?

[Locke2005]

I think the 2-party system is seriously flawed when the parties can lock out people like Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders. Why not move from representative democracy to direct democracy now that we have the technology in place? Would it be more or less susceptible to corruption than the current system? The electoral college is a curious anachronism, a remnant of times when it took days to collect votes and transport them all to one place, so at least some of the current system is seriously outdated. Is it possible to make it instant but still secure? One form of security would be to allow each voter to verify their vote online after the fact. Any other ideas?

Re: SIgh

[Grishnakh]

-1 Dumb.

First, a constitutional republic IS a representative democracy. They're two names for the same thing, though the former is more accurate because it describes how the government is set up better (like having a constitution for one); "representative democracy" is more general but distinguishes it from direct democracies.

Secondly, the bit about the founders makes no sense. There haven't been any true direct democracies running nations since the Ancient Greeks. Britain didn't even have a constitutional republic, it had a monarchy with a parliament bolted on to deal with some of the more mundane stuff the King didn't want to waste time on. These days, it's no different except the Queen doesn't really do anything as far as governing and Parliament does it all along with the Prime Minister et al.

As for states voting on same-sex marriage, how's that any different from the federal government voting on same-sex marriage? The whole "states' rights" argument is an argument over how much power different levels of government should be allowed to have, but they're all basically the same, since they're all representative democracies, whether it's the federal government, the state government, or your town council or board of aldermen or whatever. It's just the the higher up you go, the less power your vote has, and the more you're subject to laws passed by people voted in by a larger number of people from farther away. Sometimes it works out well (from your perspective), other times it doesn't, and it entirely depends on the issue and your opinion.

So while I do agree that same-sex marriage should be legal, as a counterexample look at marijuana: the only reason it's legal (either fully or medical) in many states is because those states thumbed their nose at the federal government and legalized it themselves, and refused to enforce federal drug laws. One of those states is Washington State, which fully legalized it a while back, and that's not exactly known as a conservative state or one involved in the Civil War. More recently, their neighbors Alaska and Oregon joined them. Alaska's pretty conservative (but not like the South), but Oregon's a seriously liberal place; you can't even pump your own gas there!

So, are you opposed to legal pot because the federal government hasn't legalized it yet? With all the Republicans in Congress (especially the ones from the South), it probably would never have happened if those states hadn't pushed the issue themselves. It's looking like the Federal government is going to stop the ban really soon and just let states decide, though with the election coming up it's impossible to say what'll happen.

Also with same-sex marriage, that was done first in a bunch of states because the SCOTUS finally ruled on it. It probably would never have been legalized at the federal level if it weren't for the Court; there's no way all those Republicans would vote for it. So yes, that is an example of tyranny of the majority, but that's the problem with large governments and making decisions at the top level: you can only pass stuff that everyone agrees with. If you're a social liberal/libertarian and you're sharing a nation with a bunch of backwards religious conservatives, then you're not going to have much luck getting socially-liberal legislation passed, since you're forever going to be fighting against a bunch of morons who want to mandate that science classes teach your kids that the Earth is 6000 years old.

Notice that the nations which have much more effective democracies (excuse me, "constitutional republics", since some dipshit will probably jump in here to say these aren't "democracies"; it happens every single fucking time I use the term here) are small European nations which have small populations (like the size of one of our small-to-medium size states) and are culturally and ethnically mostly homogeneous. There's a reason for this: they don't have radically different blocs of voters constantly fighting each other on every l

Re:Representative Proxy Votes

[Rei]

This is a serious issue, and why I think that "liquid" democracy - the hybrid of direct and representative democracy - is critical.

There are way too many issues that come up for consideration every day for every citizen to be expected to vote on them. Some people might be that hardcore but few actually ever will. So if you don't want representatives then on the vast majority of votes only a tiny fraction of the public will vote. The smaller the percentage of the population that votes, the easier it will be for vested interests to get basically whatever they want. It's a recipe for basically giving corporations and wealthy individuals everything that they could ever dream of.

In liquid democracy, you can direct-vote whenever you want and choose representatives - who you can change whenever you want, and who can be anyone at all - to fill in for you when you can't. You may even be able to pick different people for different categories of votes. And if a person you pick isn't active enough for every vote, they too can have representatives - votes "flow" in the order of assignment, and if a person ever doesn't like it, they can change it at will.

Direct democracy without something like that would be IMHO one of the worst systems imagineable.

Re:SIgh

[Grishnakh]

The early USA had a government that resembled China's more than it does today's government. Remember, back then, only white male landowners were allowed to vote. That effectively kept a good portion of the population away from the voting booth, so that only the elites could choose the governmental leaders. It wasn't until later that non-landowners were allowed to vote, and later women, and later black people (the last one didn't really happen until the late 1960s).

Remember, China isn't a dictatorship, it's basically a cabal. The elites of society are the ones who run the "Communist" Party, and they choose the leaders. Not that different from the early USA.