SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.