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The Dangers of Moving All of Democracy Online:
To protect governments as well as people's rights from coronavirus, we need to use tech as a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
[...] Governments around the world are struggling to deal with the public health and economic challenges of coronavirus. While many have pointed to how authoritarian regimes exacerbated the pandemic, we've so far paid dangerously little attention to coronavirus's challenge to democracy.
In a democracy, citizens need to be able to vote, politicians to deliberate, and people to move about, meet, and act collectively. Democratic politics is a mixture of mass involvement and endless meetings. All this is hard when people can be infected with a potentially deadly virus if someone simply coughs nearby. The obvious answer might seem to be to move democracy to the internet, but some parts of democracy translate badly to an online world, while others are already being undermined by emergency powers (for example, Hungary's parliament just passed a law that allows the prime minister to rule by decree) and by the rise of digital surveillance.
[...] Democratic politics also happens in the streets, at political rallies, public meetings, and demonstrations. It is hard to see how such mass gatherings will return any time soon if they continue to be dangerous, or even banned, on grounds of public health.
[...] state efforts to fight the virus by tracking citizens might undermine democracy by concentrating power in the hands of an unaccountable authority. This might even happen from the bottom up. Citizens in fear of contagion might start liking the idea of ubiquitous and decentralized surveillance as a service, as evidenced by the popularity of coronavirus symptom-tracking apps in the UK and elsewhere.
[...] Some pundits argue that information technology is the answer to democracy's problems. There would be no risk of catching coronavirus if physical democracy became virtual.
[...] online voting systems, such as Voatz, which was used in the 2018 midterms in West Virginia, have critical security vulnerabilities. As cryptographer Matt Blaze says, many experts believe internet voting is a bad idea.
Online voting may one day provide the illusion of democracy while actually destroying it.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday April 03 2020, @02:57AM (11 children)
I've been working for a while on an idea of a new form of democracy that would be at least resistant to many of the ills of the current forms - including security.
The basic idea is that instead of (in addition to?) voting for a representative once every few years, you'd "follow" them, and can change who you are following at any time.
When a legislative vote comes up, it wouldn't be the votes of the Representatives themselves that really mattered, but the votes of all their current followers.
Potential benefits include
- Nobody's vote is ever "wasted" by voting for the losing candidate in an election. Every individual (indirectly) votes in every legislative action - so as long as there's even one representative you find tolerable, you can give them the power of your vote.
- Greater consequences for Representatives caught in a scandal/corruption/incompetence, since followers can immediately follow someone else instead of probably forgetting about it by next election
- Weaker party politics, since your most like-minded political allies also present the biggest threat of luring away your followers.
- No more gerrymandering, since every individual indirectly votes in every legislative action.
I don't see how a truly secret vote could be preserved when you have to be able to change your "vote" at any time - though pseudonymity might be (Any ideas?). However, once you give up on secrecy, one of the easier ways to implement the "follower" system would be to keep a public ledger of who every voter ID is currently following, allowing you to immediately know if your vote has been tampered with. By adding an alert and grace period before a change to your vote becomes official, you could make tampering with the system extremely ineffective. Such a system would also mean that everyone could independently verify how many followers (and thus voting power) each representative has at any time.
Possible variations
- allow each voters to follow multiple representatives, splitting their vote between them if they can't decide on one "perfect" representative
- weight votes by residency or other criteria, e.g. to preserve the Senate's disproportionate representation for citizens of sparsely populated states
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday April 03 2020, @03:15AM
I should add that while this is clearly directed towards enforcing a truly representative a legislative body, it might also be harnessed to select a President or other single office in an organic manner, effectively acting as continuous official polling throughout a primary season until a final "election deadline" locks in the winning candidate.
In addition, such a system could also be easily leveraged for continuous "opinion polling" on any number of topics. Support for something like quadratic voting on topics needing legislative action might also serve as an extremely effective petition system to guide representatives in popular directions as they pursue more followers, and the greater personal legislative power they bestow.
(Score: 2) by DrkShadow on Friday April 03 2020, @05:16AM (1 child)
It surely sounds interesting.
What if you apply it to Instagram content producers? Who gets the most followers on Instagram? Would you say it would significantly differ in that respect? (Yes, you can follow only "one", or you said an alternative of "a few"..)
It may be better, actually. It doesn't fix the propaganda aspect. You'd have to have some way of registering yourself to a candidate, more than just an e-mail address. This would need to be able to be re-registered quickly (to change your vote on an issue).
The Republicans said years ago that they didn't want the Tea Party to represent them, and that that cost them an election to Obama. They insisted that Democrats were switching parties in order to undermine their primary candidate vote. How would you fix swaths of SJW's, say, from bouncing in large groups from candidate to candidate on a given day to overwhelm a vote in a small focus group? If Such a group could dominate a series of votes or cause chaos.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Friday April 03 2020, @06:15AM
I would hope that the fact that your "follow" grants a politician a sliver of real power over your own life, will help to temper a lot of the transient whims that sweep through social media of all sorts. Doubly so when coupled with a grace period that adds inconvenience and delay to the system. Having to subdivide the power of your vote to follow multiple representatives also means that you inherently have to remove power from the candidate you liked yesterday in order to give it to someone new, which I think would have a moderating effect. Who do you actually want representing you in congress this week?
As for special interest groups overwhelming a focus group - my preferred solution would to simply make it impossible by having every focus group, committee, etc. mimic the operation of the whole and represent the entire citizenry - you are able to select a committee member to follow in each committee, independently from your choice of Representative and preferred members in other committees. If you abstain, you follow your Representative's choice by default. That way every citizen is equally represented in every committee - the only question is whether you made the choice yourself (perhaps as part of that special interest group), or trusted it to your Representative. We could even leave out the option to make the choice yourself for simplicity - but I think the overhead would be low and it would be a good way to keep some fingers of democracy deep in the political machine.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday April 03 2020, @05:24AM (1 child)
If that were wee to come about, then why would we need "representatives"?
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday April 03 2020, @01:55PM
Because we have good reason to hire other people to do the job for us - government is a whole lot of tedious work, and trying to get 300 million people to work together to hash out the verbiage for a bill, etc. just isn't practical. Not to mention not many people are going to give it the time and attention it needs when they're only wielding 1/300millionth of the total power. And of course, sometimes there may be legitimate need for secret hearings and deliberations whose details can't safely be shared with everyone.
Of course we don't necessarily need to elect Representatives independently from the system - you could possibly let your vote follow *anyone*, and then only give the N most popular a seat on the council that gets paid to do the job. If your chosen representative isn't actually on the council they could still wield power by guiding their follower's votes to the council member that best reflects their position. That could put council members at the top of a fluid hierarchy, having to continuously cultivate the support of numerous lesser representatives, each of which is able to better represent the will of a smaller group of voters.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @04:11PM (3 children)
I'd be really curious how much political theory was known when this proposal was put forward. Some immediate issues I can think of are:
1) Voter apathy. People don't even opt-out of receiving spam emails and phone calls (and then complain about all the spam they get). That has a direct impact on their day-to-day quality of life. How many people will just pick somebody and forget about it? For that matter, how do you know who the default pick is?
2) Voter transparency. A key point of voting is not only that a decision is made, it's convincing everybody that the decision was correctly made. ("The most important thing of an election is convincing the losing side that they lost.") How would this be at all understandable to the average person? How would the average person audit it, or know it is being properly audited?
2b) It wasn't clear in your proposal, but it sounds like everybody could see who everybody else followed. You only need to look at how mobs controlled Chicago in history (or how company towns ran, etc) to know why allowing people to know who others voted for at the individual level is a bad idea.
3) Susceptible to knee-jerk reactions. Look at all the flood of donations after a natural disaster. I imagine that the majority people who cared (not most people, see #1) would whiplash between follows after each newspaper headline, which would lead to a lot of instability in governmental policy.
These aren't necessarily problems, but they seem problematic and would need to be considered, among other things.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday April 03 2020, @06:30PM (2 children)
Well, I'm working on it as I go, and have no special background in political theory - I'm just trying to come up with the skeleton of something that could address the endemic abuse of power in basically every "democratic" institution out there, and hoping to get others both inspired and to pick it apart. My goal is to capture much of the corruption resistance of direct democracy, while sacrificing as few of the benefits benefits of representation as possible.
1) You don't need to vote any more often than you already do - but if your chosen representative pisses you off you can *immediately* pick someone else. Or similarly you ccan follow someone else more inspiring at any time. I suspect voter engagement would be considerably higher being able to vote whenever the mood strikes you, rather than every couple of years at the end of a political circus. Not to mention politicians would have far more incentive to engage with their (potential) constituents on an ongoing basis, rather than pandering to them during election season with promises they have no intention of keeping, and mostly ignoring them the rest of the time.
As for the "default choice" - I'm assuming you're referring to committee members I mentioned in a later comment - in which case I'd say that *every* representative's vote on every issue should be a matter of public record, so that anyone can independently verify that all the "follower votes" were tallied correctly, and so that you know who your Representative is supporting and can choose to back someone else on the committee if you don't approve of their pick (and are paying enough attention).
2) A public ledger of who every (pseudonymous) citizen is currently following means *anyone* can just sit down and count the votes for themselves, as well as verifying that their own is properly credited to the right representative. You'd probably want to use software to do it, but it'd be simple software with many alternate sources, so you can verify that they all reach the same counts. Also, there are no losers, just people backing more or less popular Representatives.
2b) I agree, at least some sort of strong pseudonymity is probably important - and it's something I haven't come up with a good solution to, especially where organized crime is involved and the threat of severe felony charges for mere possession of de-anonymizing data is unlikely to be a major deterrent (though that would likely at least discourage most employers, ministers, etc. from abusing it) One possibility that might help is to have "following" facilitated by some sort of hardware dongle that proves your identity - and then going to "dongle-swap" parties to trade voting IDs. Though that would probably only be really effective if done right before you were all planning some major changes in who you were supporting. On the other hand, there are a lot of people arguing that vote secrecy and vote integrity can't both be preserved, especially with digital voting. So if we're going that way anyway, we may as well get some real value for the loss.
3) Mob mentality is indeed a potential risk inherent with any move toward more direct democracy (though there's not actually much evidence to show it'd be a problem at national scales), but as you say yourself I suspect most people wouldn't engage in such behavior, due to either apathy or wisdom, which means it would only create an ongoing minor shift of power between representatives rather than major instability. It could make for strategic headlines to gather enough temporary support to win a close vote, but I'm not sure how big a problem that would really be - especially if rules were altered so that even a modest supermajority is required to win."Yeah, they managed 60% support to pass the bill, but only 50% of the populace truly supports it" sounds like a*huge* win in my book, espeailly compared to the current state of affairs where bills are routinely passed despite 70+% popular opposition, while other's languish interminably despite similar levels of popular support.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @07:53PM (1 child)
Fair enough. It's good you acknowledge your limitations and that you are still working on it. Definitely keep poking around. There's definitely some good ideas in your proposal.
I would recommend you look into some of the ideas behind political theory, though. Going into any field blind with the mentality of "how hard can it be?" is making things harder than they should be, and risks the "but have you considered what happens if you flash a flashlight on a moving train?" type mistake [xkcd.com].
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday April 03 2020, @08:15PM
That's a fair point, though my impression is that political theory, like economic theory, is largely a mutual admiration club - it only works well to describe what happens within the system created by adherents to the ideology, and is primarily promoted by those who benefit dramatically from that system. And even there, its predictive power is extremely limited to the point that it would be laughed out of the room by competent scientists.
Still, no reason to deny the wisdom that can be gleaned from their narrow perspective.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @04:27PM (1 child)
That sounds good. Now go look up why we eat bacon for breakfast. Or why women until ~1950 did not smoke. You will find it eye opening. Then consider they have had 70+ years to get better at that very thing.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday April 03 2020, @06:19PM
You think they're any less aggressive at marketing the current candidates? The difference is that *keeping* people's opinion swayed is a much bigger ongoing expense than swaying it long enough to get you to vote for a candidate that will pander to their desires until they have to put on a good show for the next election circus.