A Modest Proposal Post One

A Program for Direct Democracy Through a System of Proxies

This is by necessity far from complete and is at the moment little more than a thought experiment not yet well thought out. I hope you (the imaginary readers of my blog) will take it in that light and think and respond accordingly.

One of the projects I have been thinking about for a while now is a new political paradigm exploiting new technologies and communication to allow for a system of direct democracy allowing all citizens to have a more direct voice in Government but also allowing for expertise and flexibility free of traditional political divisions. This would be accomplished by digital online voting allowing every person to log in and vote on any given issue... This of course would be a complete and utter mess... There are many problems with this system which I will be outlining and addressing over future posts and as such here I am going to try to lay out the system in broad strokes and acknowledge the essential problems inherent in the idea which will be expanded on and hopefully in some way answered in the future.

First the basic structure. People would be able to place their vote into a system of proxy where-by they will designate a person to vote on their behalf. They could do so on a blanket basis, handing over their vote on all things to a single person, as they essentially do now to their congress person and Senators. Or they would be able to designate different people to vote on their behalf according to the area of policy being addressed. This would allow the representation to more closely reflect the opinions of the populace as there would be no reason to balance one's opinion on economic issues with those on social issues in order to find a single representative who is acceptable on both, let alone on various social issues, the environment vs. gay marriage...

Ok, so you place your votes in the hands of different representatives on different issues, this raises the first possible problem:we would need to clearly define the areas of policy and categorize the policy proposals in order to determine who has how many votes to cast on each issue. Also people would have the ability to withdraw their proxy at any given time and vote for themselves, or place their proxy in another person. This level of flexibility is only available to us now through the development of information technology eliminating the need for scheduled elections and campaigning, no longer would people be forced to place their power in the hands of another for years at a time and watch helplessly as it is mishandled. Also representation would no longer be geographically defined such that all a person needs to do to gain 1/435^th of the voting power is convince 50.01% of the people who show up on a given day to vote, or less in the case of a plurality, in a given area to invest it to them essentially ignoring the opposite will of the rest of that constituency...

Further we would set a cycle by which every year, or perhaps another time period as seems appropriate all proxies revert and people must choose who if anyone will be empowered to vote on their behalf. In this way we could ensure that those voted are being actively invested and not sitting with any given person out of apathy. Those people who are not interested in the issues will simply not be voting their vote nor investing it with a proxy, however should an issue come up which awakens their political interest they will not be locked out until the next election cycle but will have the choice either to vote on individual issues or should they feel that their knowledge does not meet the level of their concern or interest choose a proxy who they believe knows the correct answer or at least trust to have a good idea what needs to be done.

There is obviously much more work to be done on this proposal and I will be returning to it frequently both adding new entries and editing this one. I am cutting it off here primarily due to time constraints of the day. I am posting it because rather than waiting for a sense that something is finished and thereby allowing myself to never post anything I am going to post works in progress forcing myself to improve them as they exist in public and people will be judging me based on them.