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Comment by david927 | Hacker News Reader

They're all that bad. We have to remember that voting isn't democracy. Unless there are true alternatives, having the freedom to choose between Pepsi or Coke is no freedom at all.

The system has been gamed; it's fundamentally broken. I believe that we need to have some form of direct democracy, such as allowing the public to vote directly on any bill, and if more than 25% vote in any district, their choice overrides their representatives.

Don't tell me it's a technical issue -- that's cowardice. We can do this. If you were CEO of a company, you wouldn't throw up your hands in impotence as your employees ran the company into the ground. It's our country. We're in charge. No more whining. We can do this.

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What we need is strong fundamental protections of "rights", which no representatives can overrule.

Direct democracy can be far worse, since when the majority becomes fickle and wants to kill someone (such as Socrates) who is there to stop them? And worse, it's usually the VOCAL ACTIVIST minority that goes and votes or intimidates others, such as the nazi party.

Thinking direct democracy will solve everything is naive. Here are some links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice#Special_interests

And by the way getting 25% of people to vote is not easy, without fines being imposed on the non-voters. Facebook wasn't even able to get 3% of people to vote, and that was online clicking a button.

Publius (federalist papers) wrote about democracies that they: have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. (Federalist 10)

The founders of the USA are kind of like the writers of the initial codebase and the protocol for amending it. Before there was programming, there was ... legal constitution writing.

We have them. They are constantly overruled. Gitmo, for example, is in direct violation of nearly all of them.

If we allow people to vote directly on bills, the constitutionality remains enforced, which means the founders would be happy and Socrates would be safe. The Nazi party was representative, that wasn't direct democracy.

You put out a lot of arguments but none of them showed very much thought.

California has direct democracy to a great extent. Let's see how well that works out for them in terms of economics for example.

The Nazi party is an example of a vocal and violent minority intimidating the majority into voting the "right way" for a single party to take over or staying away from the polls.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_election_and_referendum,...

is this the kind of thing you want?

Napoleon used direct democracy to make himself dictator its always been a tool of tyrants, and the referendum questions manipulated

Nonsense. Overthrowing Louis XVI was one of the most important movements of the enlightenment. Napoleon was popularly supported, remember, because people were sick of the monarchy.

Democracy, direct or not, is the way forward. Accept it or not.

"Plebiscites are “referenda”, people’s votes, in which an authoritarian ruler invites the people to answer an often ambivalent, suggestive question, which he formulates himself. Using such plebiscites, a ruler bypasses and ignores his elected parliament and tries to claim direct legitimacy from the people. In this he is wrong, because he does not respect or follow parliament which has indeed been elected by the people and expresses their diversity and different interests"

In your case this would be bypassing congress, and bypassing debate because referenda are always formulated in questions that cant be debated. You're with us or with the evil doers

Nice, thanks for this.

For others' ease of navigation, the quote above comes from http://ukrainianweek.com/Columns/50/74762

The problem with direct democracy is that it does not necessarily encourage deliberation nor the dissemination of factual information (i.e., education). There are other ways of implementing direct democracy without having the system subjected to the whims and follies of special interest groups.

https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/

Read the idea, review the mock-ups, and please provide constructive critiques on how the idea can be improved.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6518237

See this: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=135

It's interesting, though I cannot envision how any system that does not enforce complete anonymity can avoid either corruption or domination by special interest groups.

Plenty of people here have been employees watching helplessly as managers run the company into the ground.

Voting is not so crucial to democracy as pluralism: having lots of groups involved and making a difference. It's generally not feasible for people to really keep up with politics on an individual basis, so you need activists or union representatives or religious leaders or NGOs to do the legwork.

But the US suffers from being very fragmented, fractious and individualistic. In that environment it's hard to promote a third alternative that sufficient numbers of people can get behind.

I hate to sound condescending, but what are experiences with direct democracy? I recall someone mentioning that masses would make rather bad popular decisions with bad consequences that were hard to guess.

It might be true or false. Maybe masses still did better than politicians.

If you ask me, I think politics should be automated in some way. AI for that probably doesn't exist yet, but hey if they can replace surgeons, why not politicians?

They already replaced them - with dolls who smile and nod kindly to the camera. Real power stays hidden.

The problem with direct democracy, as I see it, is that it can be gamed just as easily for short term gain. Given how politics works in the US, as well as all the lobbyists and advertising budgets that go along with both of these I'd say that any policy that came up for a vote would be skewed one way or the other because the voter saw some "information".

Imagine SOPA had gone to a public vote. Who would have won, Hollywood or the public interest?

I recall seeing a critique of California's Proposition system that everybody votes for services, nobody votes to pay for them.

Of course there are also important movements like civil rights that don't always have majority support.

The bigger problem with democracy is how to stop the majority from prosecuting minorities? If majority of people voted - e.g. would gay marriages be allowed?! Would smoking tobacco become illegal (as in same laws that govern marijuana users cover tobacco users)?

I hate to sound condescending, but what are experiences with direct democracy?

While I'm American, I've lived for almost a decade in Switzerland which has direct democracy. I've seen it first-hand.

that masses would make rather bad popular decisions

In other words, you don't believe in Democracy. The whole point is that it comes down to the decisions of the people. Representatives were important when voting was a tough logistical problem; that's not the case anymore. Now they're a liability. There are 18 lobbyists for the finance industry per congressman, each representing a large amount of money in case what the people want contradicts what the finance industry wants. And that's just one industry. No wonder Congress currently has an approval rating of 5%. [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/09/congress-approval-r...]

It's abysmal, we agree, so why are we so petrified of an alternative that includes working together instead?

"Representatives were important when voting was a tough logistical problem"

That's not why the U.S. is a Republic with a legislature rather than a Democracy. It's because the founders thought that a (direct) Democracy was a bad idea. In a country where most people don't believe in free speech and think that it would be a good idea to force children to pray to Jesus in school, I tend to agree. As bad and corrupt as Congress is, this would be worse.

How do these direct democracy solutions scale? Hardly linearly with population.

I doubt you can organize USA's 300++ million people in the same way as a conservative and homogeneous small country (at least much less heterogeneous than USA; no gang/ghetto subcultures, for instance).

Edit: Cough. The same point were made in other comments, but clearer and with good examples. I'll leave it here anyway.

> I hate to sound condescending, but what are experiences with direct democracy?

American idol?

They aren't all as bad as Feinstein. California liberals should stop with the "but we must reelect her, because otherwise someone who isn't connected to the San Francisco political machine might get elected". I'll take Boxer, Reid or even Bernie Sanders over Feinstein any day, and I'm not a liberal.

Your ideas are naive and it's clear you don't understand the purpose of representative democracy. Please don't confuse one of the worst representatives with "the system is entirely broken and should be replaced with this untested system".

The strongest argument against democracy is a five minute discussion with the average voter. -Winston Churchill

The alternative to the US system isn't direct democracy.

First-past-the-post is the main problem. Better democratic systems are used all over the world where actual parties that represent a spectrum of opinions get actually elected.

Direct democracy has huge drawbacks as well.

I agree it's the problem in Canada as well. For the first time a third party was able to come ahead of one of the two parties, but this had disastrous effects as it provided the opposition party a majority government and overall weakened the power of the center-left and left. And right now I have to decide if my vote will mean anything if I vote for the third party.

The third party's platform will be mixed proportional representation. Which I hope we see one day so maybe this won't be such an issue any more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT0I-sdoSXU

Exactly. It works. The Swiss are the best example. They have direct democracy and the country is far away from chaos.

8 million people? I suspect the Bay Area might be able to make direct democracy work for a while. I wouldn't want to extrapolate that out to the West Coast though and certainly all of the states.

That's part of the allure of people championing state's rights as opposed to doing things on the federal level. Unfortunately I don't know of too many historical examples of power becoming decentralized.

Would you care to elaborate?

I don't see why 8 million people should make better decisions than 80 or 800 million people.

Or do you mean that people in the Bay Area make better decisions than people in other areas?

> I don't see why 8 million people should make better decisions than 80 or 800 million people.

With a smaller group that is local to one another, they're more likely to share interests and understand one another. Communication is faster and clearer among the electorate and between the electorate and the elected.

It's not just the pure numbers, but geographical and cultural range. 8 million people in an area (16k sqmi) smaller than the US State of West Virginia(24k sqmi) are going to have an easier time understanding and voting on issues affecting everyone than 300+ million people in an area over 9 millon square miles. Direct democracy in the US could end up with even worse tyranny of the majority issues than already experienced. (Example, detonating multiple nuclear weapons in the state of Nevada in the 50s. It might have passed in a national vote, but likely not a vote only in Nevada.)

Incidentally this is PRECISELY why our country was founded on the idea of a weak federal government and strong state governments.. it's just too damned big with too many different competing cultures and ideologies to get anything done. This is why I'm a Libertarian. Yes, I believe some states would wind up terrible to live in because the people that live there are terrible. That is why I would choose to live in a different state.

While many founders wanted a small federal government, it was tried and failed twice with the Articles of Confederation. There is a level of power that the federal government needs to have or the states will simply bicker forever. On the other hand, state legislatures had to be taken out of the loop on electing senators (see the 17th amendment) because they fell into endless bickering. Different issues are best addressed at very different levels of the federalist system.

edited 13th to 17th amendment, oops http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...

You like federalism which is biased toward States' rights, which is why you are a Libertarian? What?

Libertarianism is about individual rights, not States' rights. You can be both a Federalist and a Libertarian if you want, but one doesn't follow from the other.

Got an example of a political elite ever changing things so that they have less power?

George Washington turned down the title of king and set major restrictions on what the president could do. He set a precedent of only serving two terms (eight years), which almost every other president followed even though they didn't have to by law. The only exception was Franklin Roosevelt, who was elected to four terms but died in office. The 22nd Amendment limiting presidential terms to eight years was passed shortly after that.

That's pretty much the only example I know of.

It looks like things are improving in Myanmar, although it's too early to tell for sure:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma#Reforms_and_transition_to...

Another one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_transition_to_democracy

I'm not very knowledgeable about the details, but it looks like he was basically handed the keys, and worked to transition to a democracy, rather than hold power.

Why are we asking them? It's our government.

Giving power away is a hard thing for humans in general. It's difficult enough even for parents when their children grow up.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

The minister for Queensland changed gun laws forever, knowing it would cost him his job [1]. (it did)

Watch the video to see the difference between Australian and US politics.

[1] http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/former-prem...

South Africa? The Soviet Union?

The dismantling of the British Empire.

I think the GP forgot to put "willingly" in there.

The Brits, after WW2, were exhausted. India had been clamoring for independence for ~50 years. And after the war, you suddenly had a million young men in India, well trained in arms and warfare; these men would have been hard to control with force. So they had no choice. Once India fell (i.e. became independent), the dominoes started falling, and soon the sun had set on the British Empire.

While I agree mostly with you about direct democracy, there's a catch: direct democracy needs an informed electorate. But then, if the electorate is informed, it won't vote for the current crop of representatives anyways.

I guess the driver behind the success of direct democracy isn't the fact that voters can vote directly; it's the fact that voters actually have to think before casting their votes.

The systems already set up to be resistant to change. There are a lot of better systems we can all think of, but there's no way to make them happen anymore. You need to consent of the people you're fighting against to put them out of power.

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