Direct Democracy: Iceland's crowdsourced constitution submitted for approval | Hacker News Reader

Direct Democracy: Iceland's crowdsourced constitution submitted for approval

engadget.com

48 pointsnextparadigms10 comments

The Constitution is not about direct democracy at all, it's setting up a parliamentary republic. And the drafting of it involved a lot of online feedback and participation, but was ultimately written by a committee of 25 people.

Some noteworthy aspects: It guarantees universal health care, the President is elected with preferential voting (where voters rank their choices 1,2,3,etc.), and to amend the Constitution, Parliament must pass a bill and then a vote is held within 1-3 months. It's also possible for Parliament to unilaterally amend the Constitution, but only with a 5/6th super super majority.

I think this is a good step towards Governments and Parliaments that are more representative for their people. Direct Democracy sounds like something idealistic that would never work in practice, but that's only because people think of it to the extreme - as in literally the whole population deciding what laws need to pass and so on. And I don't think you should look at it like that, and instead using it as a scale - how direct do you want it to be exactly? Where are the specific situations where people can directly influence legislation and governance?

The current representatives in all countries seem to have gotten out of hand, and they mostly do what they want, especially if it's an issue that threatens their power.

To most young people voting seems pointless because they know it's a very weak form of feedback to vote a "party", and it's a feedback that happens too rarely. This is why they couldn't care less anymore about who get to be the next country leaders.

If they could engage a lot more with the representatives, and feel like they helped shape a certain legislation, I think they will become a lot more enthusiastic about it. They'd also like politicians to be a lot more accountable, because too many times they get away with voting for legislation that isn't for the benefit of the population at all, neither in the short term, nor in the long term. Warren Buffet seems to agree with politicians becoming more accountable, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNEp7q30JCw

Wow, this is truly nice! People gathering around, commenting and voting, singing kumbaya!

Until someone games the system. Heavily. Then it ends.

It's not like the current system is not heavily gamed and exploited. This may be more, or less, robust.. who knows, only time can tell. In any case, this kind of experimentation is very important for taking governance into the 21th century.

The main question to ask would be, is this system scalable to larger more diverse populations. Iceland is tiny (approx. 250K i think).

In Australia for Federal election, there's a 'ticket' for electing senators. In NSW, there's over 150 candidates. The way to vote is in two ways; 1) Must accurately vote for each candidate in a numeric incremental fashion. One mistake = invalid vote. 2) Or pick just one party. There's 15 parties.

With 2) If you pick a party, you voted for that particular party preferences where the party pre-filled the preferences for all 150 candidates for you.

That is very scalable until there's 150 parties. Or maybe 1500 parties.

I believe eventually that the government will be forced to provide a 'policy platform' department where the voter gets to 'vote' where their concerns are, eg do you support granting prisoners right to vote (Yes/No or Strongly/Disagree) and the output is the party most closely aligned.

Then the onus is on the parties to submit all the relevant positions to the policy platform department. I tried to create this platform [0] and closed it, code is available for others. I think I'll add it to Github soon actually!

I don't believe the platform will happen for a long time as parties complain that they can't fulfill all their promises while the voters believe that the parties will fulfill their promises. Leading some to rage when politicians call them 'non-core promises' [1].

Also, some parties treat election policies as trade secrets.. seriously. They won't reveal them until election time because gasp, the current government might implement them immediately.

[0] http://joakal.com/topic/shockseat/

[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=non-core%20pr...

A little bit of backstory in case anyone's interested. This endeavor started out as a constitutional congress, members having been elected in a low turnout election in late 2010. For some legal-technical reason the election was illegal and therefore the powers that be decided to appoint the congress elects to a committee instead. All this was done as an appeasement response to public anger following the economic downturn in 2008. A clever, if expensive, political ploy as it made the government look like it was making an effort. The reality is that it makes no difference whether or not this committee makes any changes, anything they decide will be non-binding and advisory only. Most people in this country think the whole thing is monumentally pointless, being as there aren't many contentious issues in the current constitution to begin with.

Icelander here.

This endeavor started out as a constitutional congress, members having been elected in a low turnout election in late 2010. For some legal-technical reason the election was illegal and therefore the powers that be decided to appoint the congress elects to a committee instead.

True.

The reason the election was disqualified was debatable at best, but it was due to a lawsuit by some IMO rather slimy true-blood partisans of the highly corrupt opposition party Sjálfstæðisflokkur; The lawsuit involved technicalities in the voting process. The courts are appointed by congress representatives - very many from Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn. The judiciary appointment process here is IMO ethically problematic, to say the least.

All this was done as an appeasement response to public anger following the economic downturn in 2008.

Interpretation, not fact.

A clever, if expensive, political ploy as it made the government look like it was making an effort.

Interpretation, not fact.

The reality is that it makes no difference whether or not this committee makes any changes, anything they decide will be non-binding and advisory only.

Not strictly false, but is very difficult for the current govermnent to totally ignore the results of the committee; The election may have been low-turnout for example, but the committee process has been high-profile.

Most people in this country think the whole thing is monumentally pointless,

Interpretation, not fact; IMO even a rather biased interpretation.

... being as there aren't many contentious issues in the current constitution to begin with.

And this is where you go to far IMO. You cannot state that as fact. There exist in fact long-standing and very public arguments here about: The separation of powers, judiciary appointment, a highly disputed clause about the president's power to impede legislation (it's very fuzzy and highly open to interpretation - this MUST be clarified), human rights, media, etc. etc. etc.

AFP link if you want to avoid the stupid at engadget ;) http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jbxT7zuFK...

Another pompous title. It was not crowdsourced, but they used social media for online discussion with the committee that drafted it. May not be practical for countries with >300K souls, though.

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