> the crowdsourced moderation methods employed in public forums (like for example HN, Reddit, Wikipedia) have evolved to a point where they work very well.
That's an interesting thought, but I have to wonder how resilient they really are to manipulation. I think it's a matter of expected return on investment. As of right now, there is really very little usefulness to gaming the moderation system in these sites. You get internet points, but those points are worth very little (reputation within that system only, really). If internet points could be traded and had some market where they could be monetized, we might have stories about how it's much harder to keep things from being gamed. The closest we probably have to this is Twitter and followers. I'm fairly certain there are companies that sell followers by tricking people into following. It doesn't conceptually map to moderation exactly, so it's a stretched comparison at best, but I think it should cause concern.
Additionally, the idea that a foreign power could game, or outright hack, either the law moderation or the voting itself, is fairly worrisome. I'm not too worried about millions of foreign agents showing up to skew an election, or the buying of enough legislators being persuaded to vote a specific direction to significantly affect us (it might change the outcome of a vote, but it would have to have significant support anyways, legislators rotate out of office, and it only takes one to talk for it to all fall down).
> The group is politically neutral - assigned based on political sentiment (not party affiliation)
> The vote from each node counts as a whole for that node.
Does that mean each group ends up with one "vote", sort of like the electoral college, but more direct? If so, I really don't think we want it to be forced to be neutral. Any smoothing you do might end up having odd unintended consequences.
> Anyhow it's all doable just a matter of prototyping and iterating in a test environment. And the political willpower to implement it. Probably wouldn't become reality in our lifetimes, at least at the national level
Indeed. It has to be made as constitutional amendments, which requires a two-thirds majority vote by people that would be voting away their own power and authority, and weakening a system that they generally buy into as working (thus their current position). That is to say, not very likely.
> but a fun thought exercise nonetheless
Yes it is! To be clear, if we could find ways to mitigate a lot of our current technological and psychological shortcomings, it would be very interesting to implement. As it stands right now, I have serious misgivings about the ability of the average citizen to make informed decisions on the scale required, the ability of the population as a whole to sanely assess issues, the functionality of the social constructs required, and the technology involved. Multiple decades in the future, that may be a different story. Then again, maybe buy that time some nations will have less cohesive identities, and we'll have free-floating blocks of political identities with exert more or less power based on the issue, and people will generally have membership in multiple of those, and those will be the guiding and warring force in politics that craft the majority of the laws and individuals then vote on.