What about the bias introduced from the initiative name and/or description?[1] Who decides this? Who writes the laws that are proposed by initiatives? What if there's no counter side to a law proposed, or it's very complex, and hard to understand? Right now we have people whose job it is to keep track of these laws, make sure small provisions don't overstep, and come to an agreement on what should be acceptable to vote one. We elect those people (or we elect the people that employ and control those people). Who does this in a direct democracy? Do we still elect officials, and they do everything except they don't vote?
> Giving people access to information, while at the poll, will increase the number of truly informed constituents when voting.
If we have a direct democracy, there will be a lot more initiatives. 15 things every day, if we are keeping up with congress, according to to the flashforward link you supplied (thanks, I'm listening to it in the background right now). Looking up all the relevant information for each initiative to make an informed decision will take quite a while. Assuming a minimum of 15 minutes per item to research and consider each item, that's close to four hours, each day. Even halving that is a significant time investment. I think people will naturally defer to authorities they suggest. There's even less incentive for the random authorities people might choose to be accountable for their speech, and I'm also quite worried that people would choose non-qualified people for their queues on what to vote for very poor reasons (pick your Kardashian or their relation). If we want to defer to someone for our vote, why not our elected official?
What I think would be interesting, was a way to wrest my vote from my representative on a by-vote basis. That is, we all get a chance to have a direct vote, but if we don't, our share goes to our representative. For example, if I'm in CA, and my senators are voting on a bill, and I vote specifically a certain way, then their votes count for (CA vote eligible population -1)(CA vote eligible population) each, and my vote counts for 2/(CA vote eligible population), one for each senator, and assuming nobody else votes directly. For important issues, we can wrest control from our legislators, but otherwise the system will perform as it has. I'm still not entirely sure it would be a good idea given our predisposition as a species for poor judgement in certain situations, but I think it's a lot more feasible than a direct democracy on everything (and it keeps people around to design and present bills, and still incentivizes them to do so).
1: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/dec/10/states-ballot-l...