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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: 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.