Slashdot Mirror
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?
You're away on holiday.
An important vote you care about gets put up.
You want to change your vote, but can't because of whatever reason (no Internet, etc.)
Do you end up voting by default the way you voted last time? Or do you have to put in a vote between a certain window?
Oops. You either have a stupid situation, or you're back to the old way of voting.
Not to mention that it requires electronic voting which - in any significant amount - is still not as provable, prevalent or as tamper-proof as it could be.
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.
Generally, the electorate isn't informed enough on issues to make good decisions. One of the reasons we have elected representatives in office for 2, 4, 6, etc. years is to provide some stability. People's views change on a whim. Watching one news special about a particular issue can swing views wildly.
This kind of direct voting would result in utter chaos. Nothing's more fickle than public opinion, and it's impossible to get anything done when changing direction at the speed of the news cycle.
.
I'm not sure applying such a concept to anything important is a good thing.
Its a nice fantasy - but even if you could solve the technical issues, do you really think our current political class would give up their power? There are millions of people that make a good living by being government overhead - they would never willingly give up their jobs...
Peter.
A fundamental tenet of democracy is that voting is secret, and that the counting process is transparent. E-voting provides none of these. I'm aware that there are cryptographic protocols that would allow this in theory, but this does not resolve the issue of the voters being coerced by their spouses, families, communities or big brother to vote a certain way. Only casting your vote anonymously inside the voting booth prevents this. Further, having a verifiable paper trail and manual counting makes fraud MUCH more difficult. In E-voting, you only have to alter a single number to sway the election in your favor. In traditional voting, throwing a whole election becomes much harder.
Even if we assume that we go the E-voting path, how can we trust the software running on the system? Who wrote it? Me? Then I know who the next president will be! We can cook up all kinds of hashes etc, but how can you verify that a system that claims to run a particular version of the code is, in fact, running this version? Particularly on a remote connection? Even if all this were, in some fictional universe, in place, this system is highly complex: In code, in technology, in infrastructure. I may be able to grasp this, but my mother (a smart woman, but not tech savvy) won't have a clue. This is fundamentally undemocratic.
See this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
Because as bad as politicians are, they are still better-informed than the general population.
I don't want government looking like a Facebook feed.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
you'd need some kind of honest government or administration to process and present all information on a matter that's up for vote in a transparent, unbiased and easy to understand way, so that everyone could make an informed decision without spending too much time on research. something like the swiss do with their referenda only on a much larger scale. i'm not sure, that this could work in reality without the oversight of neutral robot overlords. at least the problem is a a few numbers of magnitude more complex than just putting together some software for continuous voting. but maybe not more complex than the current political systems & bureaucracy.
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?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Huh? That sounds like how we do it in Britain, but we're most definitely not a republic.
We gave it a try, but it turned out a bit shite.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
1-you have to spend time keeping up to date on the issues. 2-either you go to the polling station (inconvenient) or electronic voting (endemic vote buying and intimidation issues). 3-the news media become the new politicians, swaying public support for their "clients".
"Protip: it's generally a good idea to read all of something before commenting on or replying to it, even if your finger gets tired."
The vote would be based upon the latest headline flashed at the most people. However the latest twitter celeb of the hour felt, would become the law.
And, of course, being able to "change your vote" means that, somewhere, the way that you voted is recorded... so that you can be tracked down if you voted "the wrong way".
The current system, which limits the number of entitlement programs voters can vote for themselves, has created an $18.8 trillion national debt and what's far scarier, over $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities: http://usdebtclock.org/
If those limitations were removed, I'd expect such an orgy of debt that the U.S. would have no choice but to default or careen into hyperinflation.
As they say, "A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Every citizen should have a vote on every topic, which they would give to their representative to use on their behalf. For most mundane issues, the representative would cast the votes given to him, but at any time any citizen could take their vote from their representative and cast it any way they see fit.
Yes, direct democracy could be saved from the tyranny of the active minority if for each citizen who didn't vote on an issue, their elected representative was given such a proxy vote. But I'd make representatives' proxy votes only fractional, so that the system wasn't a dead duck unless 50-75% of citizens cast a ballot.
But the net effect is the voting population acts like children. They vote for services but vote down paying for them.
Politicians shouldn't always do what the popular vote tells them to do. (The fact the voters tend to vote in morons is a complete separate topic).
In addition he doesn't understand other people's reasoning (and isn't interested in trying), can't think straight (leaves gaps in reasoning and lacks the stamina to address them) is far too emotional to deal in a sane way with complex policy issues. jumps to conclusions, and has the attention span of a goldfish (and therefore hardly never learns, except the most basic facts).
That is the reason we have a representative democracy, not a direct one. Elected politicians look after the medium-term tactics, and direct the professionals. That doesn't always pan out, but more often than not it works quite well.
Technical issues aren't important. If desired we could have set up nation-wide monthly referenda since the advent of the telegraph.
The thing the average voter can sort of be trusted with is (a) judging people (running for office) (b) choosing between to opposing world views, and (c) choosing to adopt or reject certain fundamental ideas.
That's sort of doable for almost anyone: if people make a mess of things, vote 'em out and go with the competition. It also allows people to decide on questions of principle (but only after they have been assessed by functionaries and elected officials)
The electorate (in our case) works like a final court of appeal, but also as a "noisy" arbitrator: individual opinions run the gamut from smart, insightful, and perhaps even noble to dumb, blind, and venal with terrible extremes. Fortunately _on average_ our electorate seems to have done fairly well over the past few centuries.
Direct democracy would be terribly noisy, incredibly volatile, over-emotional, and would in general serve us very very badly.
So lets leave day-to-day affairs to officials, short-term politics to representatives, and genuine questions of principle to the electorate.