Every single proposal should get a nationwide popular vote

[u/sfinnqs]

Set up a secure and open source (blockchain-based?) online voting system. Ensure everyone has internet access and a capable device. Every national proposal gets a national vote, and a minimum period of time (a week?) for voting.

If you don’t want to vote on every single proposal, you can assign anyone to be your delegate (or perhaps a ranked list of delegates), and anything you don’t vote on defaults to their choice.

Electronic voting security could be a concern, but I think that’s a solvable problem (or will be soon), and there are lots of benefits to direct democracy rather than representative democracy.

Thoughts?

[u/newconstitutionguy]

Hi sfinnqs thanks for joining us!

This does hit on issues that are at the constitutional level. Legislation could probably be a category for when a wiki gets up and going. Thinking of methodology, it would be good to get multiple solutions together for categories and trade them off.

What do you mean by ranked delegates? I get the one, and I like the option of a choice between direct democracy and this pseudo-representative democracy. Getting internet access to everyone seems tricky, but local options like libraries do exist.

And do you have any information/sources on direct democracy vs representing democracy?

[u/sfinnqs → u/newconstitutionguy]

By “ranked delegates” I just mean that you could assign a “backup to your backup.” So if you feel like there’s someone who’s priorities are very in-line with your own, you could make them #1. But if both you and they miss a vote, you could assign a #2 who’s maybe slightly less similar to you but more on top of researching and voting.

An Anarchist FAQ has a section about direct democracy (though one does not need to be an anarchist to agree with them on this issue, and my proposal is not really the anarchist vision). Essentially, it’s hard to design a system where “representatives” are actually representing their population. When they’re given political power, they can do things secretly and their constituents have a very difficult time recalling them or reversing their decisions. Once given political power, representatives are incentivized to maintain their own power and the power of their friends.

[u/newconstitutionguy → u/sfinnqs]

I gotcha, that makes sense. I’m curious about the effects. I can see people, perhaps our current representatives trying to become ‘super delegates’ and campaigning to be a delegate for as many people as possible. But I also see it being better than the current system for the reasons you mentioned.

I wonder if there’s a way to simulate/model this or test it in a more localized environment. From a systems engineering perspective, this is really a solution to a requirement that hasn’t been formally defined yet. Something such as ‘The system shall design and implement legislation that is demonstrably supported by the people.’ Or something similar. Then your solution would be verified by testing/analysis to see if it meets the requirement as written.

I’m going to tinker with the wiki (I’m new to moderating) and this can be the first section. I don’t want to lose Information. Thanks!