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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: 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.