Direct democracy - the only true democracy?
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sprinkles
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There's a lot of milk left for you to drink..
sprinkles
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Well escardon my intregway while I drink said milk out of a lefticated flagon.
Barnabas
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It's not patriotism, it's practicality, Switzerland can run a direct democracy because the country's size and population, the united states can't based on the fact that most of our states as large as European countries some times much larger.
sprinkles
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Yes exactly. We would have referendums that require a minimum of like 10 million. That's more people than what live in the state of Michigan.
Edit:
Or put another way, our quorum for one issue would be bigger than the whole of Switzerland.
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America can do anything, you Nazi.
As I said, not everything revolves around the USA. Democracy is present in the entire Europe as well yet a direct democracy is practiced only in Switzerland.
Political duopoly is all about an illusion of choice and not about participating in politics.
Barnabas
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You said the world is a large pace, I agree, Switzerland is so small in comparison to the rest of the world it simply can't be held up as a standard from a simple logistical standpoint, even the totality of Europe run by all of it's separate governments isn't a fair representation of the world at large. The EU has 500 million inhabitants, the U.S has somewhere around 300 million, both combined can't match India's 1.25 billion people or china's 1.35 billion.
how do you work out a single vote system for 1.25 billion people?
With a click of a mouse.
Barnabas
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Do you realize how many issues online voting can cause whether that's logistics or from security.
muir
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Logistically it is far easier than running a bloated government full of beaurocracy...all that could be swept aside
As for security depending on the issue voting could be open, transparent and accountable
muir
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This!
The sooner everyone wakes upto this the sooner we can get on with the inevitable and vital task of creating a more inclusive form of democracy where special interest groups don't rule everyone else
Well, if you can transfer money online I don't see how it wouldn't be possible to vote online as well. Biometrics, pin codes, etc. It is easier for a local voting place to misuse their authority while counting voices than it is to hack a system which calculates every click of a citizen. A system that could be controlled by an infinite number of interested groups. All nice and transparent.
sprinkles
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It'd be easier to hack an electronic system than a paper ballot one actually. The internet is not transparent at all. An infinite number of interested groups is a liability.
If you can make a computer count votes you can just as easily make it rig votes. It might be hard for an outsider to do sure, but outsiders aren't necessarily the ones the most interested in doing it.
With paper ballots you at least have physical evidence, literally a paper trail. With electronic votes you can make things out of thin air. You don't know what's going on inside that machine, let alone the whole network.
Biometrics are also insecure and are a problem because you cannot revoke or change biometrics. If somebody manages to duplicate your fingerprints for example, you're fucked permanently! Unless you plan to grow new fingers. If it was just a password you can get a new one. If they crack your biometrics then you are done for for the rest of your natural life. And don't think it can't be done because whenever security finds a way, the technology to break it also advances.
Edit:
Also money transfer is sort of secure yes. People still get their money stolen and employees still embezzle electronic funds. So while it's secure enough that only a few people ever get ripped off, having a few people get ripped off is not good enough for a voting system.
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ThomasJ79
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Electronic ballot has the potential for a direct democracy to be fully realized, but it is the most vulnerable to corruption. I agree with sprinkles, direct democracy is probably most possible in homogenized, small populations, where there is room for some disagreement, but not open to radical changes.
sprinkles
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Yes. It may seem the opposite, but you have to think that with paper votes you have to convince a significant number of counters to mess with the votes to have any real effect. And if you're an incumbent or somebody running for votes and you try to buy off random ballot handlers you now have a liability for blackmail following you around, if they don't report you outright. With a machine its a different story. How it works is not obvious or transparent from the outside so you could get in from any number of places, could be one engineer at the factory, or just one programmer, and it'd be hard to trace. Plus instead of getting counters to possibly fabricate votes, you can change thousands of votes with one click. Or even make the machine change a few for you.
If people are transferring millions of dollars and conducting businesses that directly affect the oil price, stocks, bonds etc. then it is safe enough for voting.
To hack each and every one of the voters (retinal scan, fingerprint, pin codes etc.) takes a tremendous amount of time and a security protocol can be established that would measure the number of votes in real time and record them on separate locations so that the each location would have to be somehow compromised in order to falsify the number of votes. If on 4 pm John Doe had 400,000 votes as recorded on 5-6 different locations, then it would be impossible for anyone to claim that he had 200,000 or less. Real time display of votes naturally would be the best, but it could directly affect the will of the voters so we would have to exclude that in the beginning.
Not only that, but more people would actually be willing to participate since it would be made fairly easy to do so.
sprinkles
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Who says anything about hacking each and every voter? Even ONE is too many! How'd you like it to be you? Your fingerprints could no longer be trusted ever again. That's too much to have happen to even one person.
As for your 'security protocol' you're just making up random junk. If you're measuring in realtime and there's a corruption, all your redundant records will be corrupt. They'll all show the same thing and you'll believe it. Because it'd be stupid to have ONE voting point (one voter can't be in more than one place at once!!) and not have it send out corroborating evidence to all the auditors.
As for people transferring money for stocks and oil, there's a ton of corruption there already. You say it like they're all honest or something.
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Moreover, with a system like that you'd be less likely to identify fraud because it can false positive very easily - e.g. your metric is to compare 5 different auditing points but if that is what you trust, then you will not catch the voting machine itself being hit. You'd just say "All the numbers match. Must be legit."
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Well, in most countries they take your fingerprint before issuing you an ID, so if they want to misuse that data it is already easily achievable. Nothing new there.
Same can be said for regular parliamentary or presidential election. If they say Obama has won, you will believe them because they said it. The same way they are preparing the field by falsifying the poll results, etc.
You missed the point..Let me put it this way, more attention is being payed to money transfer than there is to a single vote. If people "trust" the encryption system to deal with their transactions (and people are very very sensitive about their assets) then surely a voter would trust his vote to something as similar.
There are ways in which a system can be created that would enable referendums to be cheap, easily manageable and most of all transparent. In 21st century there are no good excuses to prevent citizens from expressing their opinion as the real democracy should enable them to do.
Rule of the people has no alternative and there are no subtypes of democracy. Either it is democracy or it isn't. Either way, it is time to start calling things by their real name.