There is one incredibly interesting video I have seen which lays out a major root cause of corruption in the US, and the rise of lobbying and corruption since the 1970s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY (Cardboard Box Reform)
It is long, but well-reasoned and supported by a lot of evidence. Definitely worth a watch...
The author was in Africa, thinking about how E-voting could help to reduce the costs of voting. Which sounds great, but then, why is the formal voting process today, with voting booths, neutral polling places, private voting, etc. so sacred to democracy?
Two major problems come up when votes are not secret: intimidation, and vote buying. Leading to harassment and electoral fraud. We have already fixed this problem now here in the public, using the secret ballot. We are taught it in school and use it wherever we need a fair democratic process.
Except in one place - Congress. All votes are recorded and public, just see govtrack.us to see how your Congressman voted. But hasn't it always been this way? Even from the first Congress, with Yea or Nay votes recorded? No, it hasn't...
There is a little-known bill called the 'Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970', which introduced the electronic vote buttons into Congress, and records the vote for each bill by each Congressman. Before these buttons, they would mostly not record each vote individually. This bill overwhelmingly passed at the time, with no discussion about the problems this total transparency in Congress would introduce.
There has been no discussion since either! No pieces anywhere discussing this bill as a root cause since the bill passed in 1970. Kennedy was the only one that mentioned anything about the danger of transparency - as it would turn Congressmen into 'seismographs of public opinion.' But what actually happened was worse.
Since it takes a lot of money to run for elections, it is easy to turn to lobbyists to raise money. With transparency, lobbyists can directly see if the bills they want propped up are being voted for. Endless congressman admissions of the problems: “There aren't any poor PACs, Food Stamp PACs, or Medicare PACs.” A more complex tax code has ushered in a huge increase in complexity in the financial system since the 1970s, and led to even more lobbyists from Wall Street. “But once lobbyists knew your every vote, they could use it against you.” Almost all giant lobbying organizations (ALEC, Heritage Foundation) were founded only a year or two after this bill. Congressmen cannot vote their conscience anymore, they are pressured to vote for whatever the lobbying firm or corporation wants. Bills are basically introduced by special interests now.
The nice thing, is that there is an easy solution - reintroduce the secret ballot in Congress. AKA, a $5 Cardboard Box to have Congressmen vote in private. It's a tough pill to swallow as it goes against the nice idea of having transparency, especially at the highest levels of government. But we must reintroduce it if we ever want to have a Congress that is not controlled by lobbyists and corporations, one that is truly democratic.
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Really interesting video, definitely merits some discussion somewhere about the problems that total transparency in Congress can create.
Then the 17th Amendment changed Senators to be elected by popular vote and the states lost their voice in the federal government.
Don't we want intimidation/vote buying of members of congress, in a sense? As a voter, it's important to be able to verify that the people I voted for actually represented my interests, rather than just paying lip service in the campaign. A citizen at the polls has no constituency.
Doesn't seem to me like there's an easy answer, although I'm open to the idea that closed votes are the lesser issue.
I think this vastly overestimates the degree to which voters actually look at how representatives voted rather than what they say on television. The only people actually looking at votes are lobbyists and party leaders.
The whole idea of representative democracy rather than direct democracy is that you elect people you trust to represent your interests. If you don't trust them then vote them out, because individual voters clearly don't have time to micromanage untrustworthy members of Congress.
The actual votes are all choreographed anyway. Everybody knows ahead of time whether or not a bill is going to pass and by exactly how many votes. Which means every bill that passes or fails with a margin of more than one vote (which is almost all of them) would have allowed anyone to change their vote from the one they preferred to the one their constituents or donors would have preferred without changing the outcome, and party leaders generally only care about the outcome. And if it would have changed the outcome then that means the vote was close and it shouldn't be hard to find someone on the other side that you can trade votes with so that you can both vote the way your respective constituencies want to see you vote even though you each effectively voted the other way.
The only thing revealing the votes does is allow the exact thing we wanted to prevent, i.e. it allows a representative to be rewarded or punished for voting a certain way but only by the people who know enough to distinguish when the vote is only for show and when it really changed the outcome.