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Comment by barnacs | Hacker News Reader

Paper voting doesn't allow for much more citizen involvement than most "democratic" countries have today. You can hold elections every few years, maybe a referendum once or twice a year at most, but any more than that and it becomes inconvenient, inefficient and not so cheap.

As a citizen, I want to be more involved. Even in a representative democracy, I want to hold my representatives responsible for their actions. I want to be able to recall them. I want to support some bills and oppose others. I want to have votes in my local community about building a playground or whatever. I may even want to propose policies and have other citizens vote or maybe even crowdfund it.

While I do not support this specific proposal, I think we should move on from paper elections.

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Some context: Switzerland has votes on issues about four times a year, and they managed to do this with paper, mostly via mail (if someone local knows otherwise, please correct me).

Recently they tried out e-voting, with what I consider predictable results:

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/voting-with-a-click_hacking-fear...

Also, I agree with ianstormtaylor in that I don't think that what you're proposing would necessarily be good. You need a political system that you trust will promote wise decision makers, and then you need to not micromanage them. If the people who get elected can't be trusted to make good decisions on a scale of several years, then the political system needs to be corrected, not expanded.

Switzerland has a population of 8.4M, about the population of NYC. US has >300M and a land area two orders of magnitude larger than Switzerland.

The US also has more people that work on that sort of thing. I don't see why it should not be able to scale.

Sure it might get harder with increase scale, but I don't see it as a huge problem.

> Switzerland has a population of 8.4M, about the population of NYC. US has >300M and a land area two orders of magnitude larger than Switzerland.

Can we start with the city? Bill de Blasio (bless his heart) won 282,344 votes in the 2013 Democratic Primary. What's worse is Lhota won his primary with just 32,236 votes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_mayoral_election...

I hate to agree with President Obama on this topic but I have to agree with him. The first problem we need to tackle is not to fix the electoral process. The first problem we need to tackle is getting people to actually care enough to show up and show up in large enough numbers so we can effect change.

Preferential voting and (and I realise this is pretty much impossible to get implemented if not already so these days....) compulsory voting.

Maybe they should try splitting the US into smaller, self-governed districts. Maybe call them "states"?

> If the same security demands were required when postal voting was introduced in 1990, it would never have been allowed

He has a point there. Transportation, heavy machinery, power grids, cruical infrastructure, healthcare, economy and so on all increasingly run computer systems with questionable security. Lives and world order depend on them. Are we really going to draw the line at voting? (edit: expanded on this point a bit)

Trust on the scale of several years is a difficult thing. People go from lovers to archenemies in that time. But yes, some long term projects do need stability and long term support to become fruitful. You could introduce constraints to support this, or trust the voters to take it into account.

But even more important than time is the granularity of trust. Just as in everyday life I trust different people to different degrees in different domains, I would love to have a voting system that reflects this with regards to political representatives or activists.

Yes, we need to draw a line at voting. It's a single event, where a choice that can be encoded in a single byte of pure information has enormous consequences in terms of power allocation.

If you can change that byte across even a small percentage of voting machines, you can leverage that into control of the country's government.

All of the examples you listed are continuously running, auditable, highly heterogeneous systems that can have multiple parties cross-checking because there isn't the absolute need for the actions of the participants to be untraceable back to them, the way it needs to be with voting.

> make good decisions on a scale of several years

I work with government often. I am often outside begging to be given access to help my community with one civic project or another. Interactions that take hours in open source communities, take months to coordinate with City staff.

I'm the last one to advocate taking the brakes off the car, but there are many many many parts of government where decisions require several years only because everything takes years to do. I think there is a perspective, if you step back to imagine this world, where we as citizens can participate and make the turn-around quicker. Not everywhere. Many government functions require care and caution and sober second/third/fourth thoughts.

But many of these actions need not take years, if we could re-imagine something better. And right now, the lifeblood of government runs like molasses, not because each slow process has been intentionally made slow, but because the processes and practices and hierarchies are structurally slow at their core. That's not clever slowness. That's a calcifying fossil.

I personally think giving citizens more decision-making access will keep civil servants on their toes, keep them learning, and speed up the cycle time in many needlessly slow areas of government.

I see your point and often share your frustration. However, none of what you said necessitates electronic voting. In fact, it may be detrimental to the democratic process at the local level. A couple thoughts: (i) First, taking time to do something means that people that don't agree get a chance to discuss and possibly mobilize against it. (ii) More subtly, forcing people to vote between options means that the options themselves have already been codified. This process of choosing what to choose between is fundamental to local governance. A somewhat absurd example but imagine being given the choice between reducing the tax rate on the wealthiest people to 20%, 15% or 5%. Sure, we can vote on that but it doesn't seem very democratic...

Voting by mail enables coercion and bribes.

Where is you evidence? Bribing voters is too difficult and expensive to be worthwhile. It's much easier to block the people through voter suppression laws.

Is that actually a good thing though? (I'm honestly not sure.)

I would think that as the response time becomes shorter and shorter, the system starts being more and more volatile. One of the benefits of the current system is its stability. It's unfortunate (depending on your point of view) that certain causes don't move faster, but at the same time it also prevents bad ideas from moving fast.

Not only that, but as the involvement is more and more frequent, it might have the effect of numbing people more. Right now national elections are a big deal because they are so rare, so it adds a bit of "moral weight" to the whole process. If they are as easy as pulling out your phone and tapping a button from your couch, is that actually going to result in more "correct" (in terms of long-term viability) decisions being made?

These things might not actually matter though, because they might have equal and opposite benefits that balance things out.

I'm sure many people smarter than me have debated this topic from both sides. If anyone knows of any articles/papers on these ideas I'd love to read them!

Initially it would probably be a mess. But I also think more involvement is the only way to build a more responsible, informed, interested citizenry. People need to feel that they can affect things, that they have a say in policies.

I think a lot of people are indifferent because it doesn't seem to matter whether they vote for the red or blue team every few years, <insert favorite cause> doesn't seem to be improving. If they had a slider to set their preferred allocation of public spending and they could vote on specific proposals about <their favorite cause>, they would probably be more inclined to participate and do so in a more responsible manner.

You can't force people to participate though. Maybe you could optionally delegate your vote, and then it would be effectively the same level of involvement as with the current hands-off representative system. But at least you could still withdraw or reassign the voting power at any time.

One of the ways to help that feeling is to get people more involved in local government. Local government has a lot more of an impact on them and they have much more power in such matters.

It sounds to me like you would like to be a representative on your local city council, or a town board. Why not run for election? Then you can do everything you mentioned.

In principle, frequent voting might sound nice. But I don't know if it really would be in practice. (I'm not arguing a position here, just thinking out loud.) I'm not really interested in most politics, I don't really feel qualified, or compelled to become qualified, to deal with a lot of the questions that come up. I'm pretty happy to instead vote for a person (or even just a party) to represent me in most cases. I don't want to propose policies.

Lots of people in my town are retired and/or seem to have endless time and energy to devote to meddling in town business. It would be exhausting if I had to keep constant vigilance every few weeks or months to make sure these people can't enact policies, rather than just voting every few years to make sure they don't get into office.

See, that's just it. There's a spectrum of involvement. I may not want to run a campaign, go door to door to collect signatures or spend days in council meetings.

At the same time, I do want to vote directly on issues I have a strong opinion about, I'm willing to put in the effort to find different people to delegate my votes to in domains I'm not competent in. Occasionally I may have an idea I would like people to discuss and vote on. If people like the idea, they may even delegate their votes in that specific domain to me and I would be further motivated and empowered to come up with and champion similar ideas.

I think technology would allow everyone to find their sweet spot of involvement in this spectrum.

An interesting proposal in this area is Google's "Liquid Voting", which implements an idea that I've wanted to see tried for a long time.

Essentially votes can be cast on every subject (for the very interested voters), or delegated to another representative (for the less interested voters).

This could have some interesting side-effects, not all positive; I'd expect volatility and cult of personality to increase. But then that's the trajectory of politics in general recently, so perhaps there's not much more to lose. Benefits would include the ability for voters to actually enact the legislation that they want, but which no legislators will choose to implement (e.g. anti-corruption/insider trading laws).

[edit: link is here: http://www.tdcommons.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1092&co...]

I wonder how this compares to the Pirate Parties Liquid Feedback voting system. On first glance they seem similar.

After Brexit, I'm not sure I and many others would be comfortable allowing "greater citizen involvment" such as directly voting on bills or policies. I am politically against such a motion and am a proponent of greater technocracy; letting experts decide what policy is best rather than the masses who can easily be duped by demagogues or other post-truth elements.

Electronic voting is strictly more expensive than paper voting. All those machines are expensive and you still need the voting places and staff.

If you're willing to do away with the requirement that you can't prove to someone else who you voted for then you can implement mail-in voting. Still paper and you can have an election every day if you want. Some US states use that. Once you go that route a simple HTTPS website run by the government that you authenticate to is all you need for electronic voting with the same guarantees.

So get involved then. Voting is a blunt instrument.

your missing the point of representative democracy

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