Leading questions:
Representative vs Direct Democracy?
Unitary or Federal?
Presidential or Parliamentary?
How much separations of powers should there be? In presidential systems, such as the United States of America, there is often deadlock between the executive and legislature. In parliamentary systems, the head of government is elected by legislature, therefore, there is practically no deadlock as long as theres is majority support of the executive in the legislature (although, there can still be courts to determine constitutionality of policiss). Would you prefer more checks and balances, but can also result in more deadlock, or a government more easily able to enact policies, for better or for worse?
Electoral method? FPTP? Two-Round? Ranked-Choice/Single-Transferable Vote? What about legislature? Should there be local districts? Single or Multi member districts? Proportional-representation based on votes for a party? If so, how should the party-lists be determined?
Should anti-democratic parties be banned? Or should all parties be allowed to compete in elections, regardless of ideology? In Germany, they practice what’s called “Defensive Democracy” which bans any political parties (and their successors) that are anti-democratic. Some of banned political parties include the nazi party.
How easy or difficult should the constitution br allowed to be changed? Majority support or some type of supermajority support?
Should we really elect officials, or randomly select them via sortition?
These are just some topics to think about, you don’t have to answer all of them.
Edit: Clarified some things
Like Github PRs on an open source project. Anyone should be able to write an RFC or POC. It gets discussed publicly and implemented.
Elected representatives can be maintainers
Uhh, GitHub is an authoritarian dictatorship. You might write as many PR, RFC or whatever you want. But a repository manager has absolute power and zero duty of care with you. They can just ignore you, reject your proposals and do whatever they want, and you have no power or recourse in the slightest to do anything about it except complain.
Like Git
hubPRs on an open source projectGithub is a git hosting service, PRs are an inherent feature of git, though done traditionally via email.
Right. I’m specifically referring to the open nature of GitHub PR discussions
Direct Democracy coupled with a constitution to protect the rights of minorities.
I dont want to vote for politicians, I want to vote for policies. It is a system that works remarkably well for Switzerland - and I doubt if many people can recall the name of a Swiss politician, for good reason - they are simply tasked with enacting policies rather than setting them. Another benefit of this system is it makes it all about policy, not personality.
How you’d elect the people tasked with carrying out policy would then become more about competence and track record than anything else. It would also mean that which system you use to elect those people would become less important, given that people would be voting on policies directly than along party lines
Representative parliamentary. If it’s a large country (both population and area) or geographically diverse country (eg an archipelago) it should be federal, if not unitary.
Proportional representation based on party lists. Getting on the ballot requires evidence of grassroots support. Silly example: you must have video evidence of you engaging with 5000 unique constituents in a 5 minute one-on-one conversation on the issues in the last year at their residence. The video must end with the constituent explicitly endorsing you. That means at least 5000 5 minute videos with 5000 unrelated people. That’s a lot of physical legwork were you must meet the people. There are better ways, this is just a simple example.
Choose a voting system that favours coalition building.
Elections should be publicly funded. Don’t ban political parties, do ban explicitly anti-democratic people. Antidemocratic ppl can’t work via proxies. They’re, justifiably, afraid that their proxy will steal the power for themselves.
Completely separate head of state (who should be powerless) and head of government. Lots of pomp, ceremonies, frequent press coverage of the powerless head of state. Let the portion of politics that is effectively a dog and pony show focus on him. Let people get emotionally swept up about him wearing a tan suit or sleeping with his secretary or get super proud about how totally not old he is. The head of state can be a show. The head of government should be a boring bureaucrat.
There’s more, but this seems a decent start.
I’d like this idea, and would like to expand democracy to the work place. Leader’s at work should be elected by the workers, not the board of directors.
Napoléon III would like to teach you a lesson regarding anti-democratic people and proxies. Hitler may add some notes too regarding how to do politics from prison.
I’m genuinely interested how Napoleon 3 used proxies.
My thinking is something the lines of:
In democracies, demagogues don’t get truly dangerous until they gain some form of state power. They used that little bit of state power to both fund their allies (state capture for capitalists, government hand outs for the people) and undermine their enemies (breaking down/stymieing democratic institutions)
Eventually, they accrue enough state power to take over the state, either internally (think putin, erdogan) or via an old fashion coup / fake crisis (hitler and erdogan again)
In my mind that real power is necessary to overthrow democracies. I have trouble finding good instances of demagogues putting themselves in a situation where their proxy has more real power than them.
I’d appreciate some examples that undermine that logic.
Note: I’m excluding cases of real popular revolt. I.e. you have more than 50% of population’s support.
That’s what Napoléon 3 did: he was the proxy. From my memories, conservative (royalist I think) used Napoléon as a proxy to take the president seat because he was not well known, he was from napoleon family, and they thought he was an idiot they could easily manipulate or force to do their job. I don’t remember the next part well, but Napoléon 3 played the game until he could make a coup to take the power for himself. Wikipedia should have the informations.
France third republic was a political mess. It was oscillating between democracy and monarchy. Napoleon obviously gathered population support, but it wasn’t a revolution still, he merely took the power and forced the parliament to give him the power iirc, because the military would rather support him than monarchy.
Okay. That tracks. I remember him mumbling into the presidency and then just taking over.
So, my logic of proxies being a bad idea, because the proxy will double cross you, still holds. However, despite that, people are still dumb enough to push a proxy forward. And that proxy can turn out to be demagogue as well.
Fair critique.
The quick basics I would want are single transferrable vote (STV), as it has a ranked ballot, regional representatives (important in a large, diverse country, imo), and pretty (although not perfectly) proportionate results.
I would also increase salaries and pensions for elected officials, but on the stipulation that they and their immediate family must liquidate all investments in order to take office, including real estate. The reason for this is to eliminate ulterior motives and reduce risk of corruption, and the compensation of course would be a very generous salary and pension so they never have to worry about their financial situation during or after leaving office.
I would also constitutionally eliminate the ability to take away someone’s vote, and to demonstrate why, I’ll copy-paste an old comment of mine from my reddit days:
What people like this miss about democracy is it’s more than just majority rule; democracy depends on minority rights, so the majority can’t just vote to trample over the minority.
This is not only to protect the minority (as you point out), but to protect democracy itself. An example:
There are 10 people. 4 of these people want to ban all fruits except mangos. 6 of them don’t want that.
So the 4 people scheme. One of those 6 people is really frickin ugly, and everyone can agree on that. So they propose to strip that ugly person of the right to vote (or just kill them or something). That vote passes 9 to 1. Ugly person is out of the equation.
The 4 people are still the minority, so they try again. One of those 5 other people likes to dip their pizza in marshmallow fluff, and everyone else agrees that that is absolutely vile. So they propose to strip that person with horrendous taste of the right to vote. That vote passes 8 to 1. Marshmallow pizza eater is out of the equation.
Now the 4 mango purists see they’re half the electorate. They just need to boot out 1 more pan-fruitarian. Fortunately for them, one of those remaining 4 pan-fruitarians always unnecessarily explains the punchlines of obvious jokes, and it really annoys everyone else. So they propose to strip that annoying joke explainer of the right to vote. That vote passes 7 to 1. Annoying joke explainer is out of the equation.
And now the mango purists have a majority and can ban all other fruits, counter to the true majority.
If this all seems abstract and unlikely, consider fascist movements and their tendency to start as big-tent to gain allies and gain power and then, once they’re in power, start trimming down who counts as the protected in-group until it’s only the core group they cared about in the beginning, producing lots of r/leopardsatemyface material in the process.
I would also constitutionally eliminate the ability to take away someone’s vote, and to demonstrate why, I’ll copy-paste an old comment of mine from my reddit days
Good explanation, and I agree with your logic. Here in my country there has been some debate around prisoners getting the vote, and given this I can see it iis reasonable to let them vote. In practice it has not been an issue as research shows they often vote against their own interests anyway. Even if they didnt its better not to take the ability to vote off anyone
If prisoners are not given the right to vote, there exists no good reason for them to want to reform. We must encourage the rehabilitation and reintegration of ex-criminals into society else we are doomed to find that they will reoffend again and again.
Treat someone like a criminal and they will have no choice but to act like it.
This reminds me of this board game called Secret Hitler and the game starts with a majority of Liberals (liberal as in non-fascist, not a “neoliberal”) and minority of Fascists.
You can even play this online! secrethitler.io (warning, there is a lot of fascist sympathizers on this site, ironically)
Basically, this game simulated the political climate of the Weimar Republic.
There are 3 roles: Liberal, Regular-Fascist, and Hitler (who is on the fascist team)
Liberals don’t know each other. Regular-Fascists know each other are and who Hitler is, but Hitler doesn’t know anyone else’s identity.
Basically, Liberals are trying to enact Good policies, and Fascists are trying to enact Bad policies.
Players can also “execute” another player, removing them from the game. Fascists players can use it to remove Liberal players and acheive a fascist majority and Liberal players can also use it to eliminate the “Hitler” player, immediately ending the game and ending in a victory for Liberals.
It’s actually a fun game to play sometimes, and you don’t need friends to play it with since you can play it with online people. Although, again, the users on secrethitler.io aren’t exactly the friendliest people.
The theme of this game can be offensive to some people, but the creators of this game didn’t make it to be pro-fascist, quite the opposite, in fact.
This is a really great question OP.
Personally, I do not have a great deal of faith in the democratic political systems as they currently exist. Political parties are motivated by self-interest and not necessarily the interest of the people.
As someone wisely said, politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.
I believe that our current systems, for example first past the post, and the electoral college, are vestiges of systems that were created hundreds of years ago, and don’t work effectively enough to keep up with our rapidly evolving global technological society.
There once was a time before democracies, of monarchies, etc., but from various societal changes and historic events, democracy eventually emerged. But today, what we call democracy is a situation where the ultra rich and the for-profit businesses have gamed the system to their advantage, despite whatever democratic systems are in place. Wealth inequality is ever-increasing, one of the fundamental problems that is the cause of so many other problems. Rising economic inequality is one of the conditions that preceded the French Revolution.
It is my belief that salvation lies in the power of decentralized technology. Politics and nationalism are increasingly causing problems that are not for the benefit of the people of the world, but for the benefit of those entities. Those entities will always be self-interested, and they will continue to play the games of politics and geopolitics in the pursuit of their own interests. But most people in the world don’t want to have war with each other.
What if there was a system that specifically represented everyone as maximally fairly as possible, in the most democratic way that you can imagine?
To me the answer to that question would be a system of some type where every person in the world gets the exact same voting power as every other person, 1 person gets 1 vote. Seems pretty basic and also fundamental to maximizing fairness. You would need some ability to somehow accurately account for everyone’s vote, ensuring transparency and prevent any kinds of tampering or fraud in any kinds of voting records or elections. This could only be achieved using modern technology including the internet, and some kind of decentralized software network without any kinds of centralized authority, with hundreds, thousands of nodes ensuring consensus on what is “true”.
Bitcoin is a great example of a decentralized software network that has a design like this. A system where there is no single authority that can unilaterally rewrite the rules to it’s own benefit. It is a decentralized network that can achieve consensus without relying on having to specifically trust any other participants in the network, because all nodes can all individually verify the consensus data.
But bitcoin is a cryptocurrency governed by a decentralized set of mathematical rules that all participants mutually agree on, and this decentralized-technological-democracy network would not be a cryptocurrency.
This network would ideally operate on many thousand nodes across the planet, more nodes creating more resiliency. The primary purpose of the nodes would be their record keeping of the cryptographic identities of every person in the world, ensuring ability to verify uniqueness, kind of like a dencetralized digital directory. A digital identity in this context would basically be ownership of a set of digital keys that provide access to a digital public account that you would own and only you could possibly ever own it, not so different from how a digital wallet works for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
This would be ensured by having processes in place that make every person verify every other person that they know. For example in real life you know people by their faces, their voices, their mannerisms, etc., these features immediately identify the unique person that no other person is. You would have for example an address book of people you know, and you would perform a type of mutual digital key signing with each person in that list, you both verify to one another what your public cryptographic identity is that you and only you could possess. Everyone verifies everyone else that they know, and all of these cryptographic verifications would be stored on the nodes, and it would be an unbreakable database of public digital identities, serving as the foundation of a digital world where there is a common network that contains everyone’s unfraudable identity, regardless of their location or nationality or political affiliation. There would of course need to be processes in place to recover any lost keys, but this is a minor point in the big picture.
A false identity could not be created because it would not be possible to verify the existence of somebody that does not exist. You could try and fabricate a false identity and maybe even collude with other people to create false verifications of somebody that doesn’t exist, but over time it would be impossible to maintain such a fraud. If for example there was an organized effort of many people to collude and create numerous false identities, the way that troll farms do it today, it would become apparent to the network that this large number of false identities seem to only have identity verifications with each other, effectively demonstating that it is practically a separate group from the rest of the entirety of the network. There would not be very much decentralized trust in those particular identities.
Once you have this decentralized identity network where every person is in possession of exactly one unique public identity associated with themselves, and importantly that there aren’t any additional false identities in the network, you would now have the foundation in place where you could create a new technological democratic system where every person on the planet is an equal participant. You have software that can take polls or votes or elections, and every individual person with their unique identity gets exactly 1 vote per issue.
What does the consensus of the entire world really want?
“Hello world, do you like access to things like clean water and electricity? Should we prioritize things like this and get to work ensuring that everyone in the world has equal access to clean water?” “No”, vote the self-interested ultra wealthy, who don’t want to have to share their hoarded wealth to fund such initiatives. “Yes” vote the billions of people who all rationally agree that it would be a good thing to prioritize things like clean water and that we should be taking whatever appropriate actions that fairly provide everyone in the world access to clean water. A clear consensus emerges: everyone in the world likes access to clean water and also electricity, and in the interest of maximal fairness, this creates the “political” will if you can call it that, to get it done. No longer would power of the government and the political system be beholden to the small number of ultra wealthy individuals that don’t care about the rest of the world.
Cool ideas. I like the idea of an accessible, global democracy. But I wondered about two things:
One, I think the complexity of such an identity database would be so great, it would preclude any means of reliably identifying false connections. And if that complexity wasn’t boggling, would it really capture anything more than our present distributed (inefficient) system of records? You would wind up with a, admittedly more sophisticated, statistical model for identifying bogus individuals.
Another thing I wonder is how much help it would actually be. Lots of issues are more complex than “is clean water good?” If and when a decision needs to be made on something outside your expertise, or with no clearly altruistic option, you have to look for help in understanding your choices. And that makes you vulnerable to influence by someone else’s interpretation. Which leaves you where we are now.
So I guess it raises some problems to solve. Can you really create a perfect record of identity without sacrificing privacy? Could you meaningfully interrogate it? How do you provide an unbiased education of every vote and referendum? How do you solve the influence problem or stop organized political machines from springing up again? Does any of this address the root cause of unbalanced wealth and power?
The way I see it, people are able to be influenced, particularly by the power of such forces as group-think and tribalism. For example, consider the Asch conformity experiments. For the majority of people, when they see what “the group” thinks, this has an outstanding impact on their own opinion. This is how the ultra wealthy use culture wars to divide and distract the electorate, by fabricating and propagating narratives in mainstream media and on social media that confirms the political and tribalistic biases that we have that tells us we are right and our political opponents are wrong. They have us fighting culture wars so that we don’t unite and engage them in the class war.
Propaganda exists because it is an effective way of exerting mind control over millions of people. Current forms of for-profit social media are incentivized to have a platform that is maximally engaging, (addicting), because the more time that people spend on the platforms means more exposure to advertisements means more revenue for the for-profit company. Adding to this, rage and anger and hatred are emotions that gets the adrenaline flowing, and this is an addictive loop that Fox news figured out many years ago. Before social media, day after day, night after night you tell your audience that they should be angry and afraid. That insert minority group or political faction is the cause of all of your problems in life. Later, Facebook took the same idea and baked it into the largest social media network in the world. Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter/X, etc., each of these social networks are specifically designed to be as addictive as possible and one of the methods of creating addiction is by providing the users with all of the rage-fuel they could ever consume.
Part of this is you’ve got troll farms out there running many millions of false identities, simulating sentiment. E.g. from the movie Borat 2 : https://imgur.com/gallery/SFVNwWh. Troll farms are a type of propaganda, and they exist because they work. They are on the social media platforms all day every day for the benefit of whoever is funding them, to promote certain narratives in order to divide and distract us away from other real issues.
But, in my perfect world, you would have the technological infrastructure in place that is not dependent on for-profit social media companies, that gives every person a unique verified identity that belongs to them and only them, and that by design such a network would prevent fraudulent identities from existing. Troll farms wouldn’t be able to use endless numbers of false identities to simulate a sentiment and influence the minds of millions of people.
If such a network were to exist, it would give the people of the world the ability to actually express themselves, without having to compete with fabricated propaganda narratives.
Consider for example a twitter/X poll. Nobody trusts a poll on Twitter/X because everyone knows that Twitter is infested with bots and that you don’t have anything that remotely resembles a true democracy there. There is simply so much room for manipulation and no reason to trust it. But, consider a similar kind of poll but one that would exist on top of the hypothetical decentralized identity network. Suddenly you would have a tool in place that could actually truly assess the sentiment of the people, to get a consensus of what the people think of a particular subject, and you could actually trust those results.
And this brings us back to my original point here: People are able to be influenced, people have a tendency to conform, and if you had a global social media network that could effectively get the consensus of people in a way that everyone would trust, you would probably have an environment where things that are true and maximally fair naturally rise to the top, and that issues that benefit one particular political party or ideology to their benefit over the opposing political party or ideology, suddenly wouldn’t be as important and wouldn’t have so much attention given to them. You would be able to have an environment that destroys our filter bubbles, filter bubbles that exist because for-profit social media companies make lots of money by keeping us all addicted to their platforms.
Sorry I just skimmed through it so I might’ve missed some points. I’m a bit depressed at the moment so I don’t have the energy to read it word for word. But some interesting points I noticed:
This could only be achieved using modern technology including the internet, and some kind of decentralized software network any kinds of centralized authority, with hundreds, thousands of nodes ensuring consensus on what is “true”.
Um… yea…no
I do not trust any voting system heavily reliant on computers. Most people probably don’t even trust computers for elections. Computers are too complicated for the averate voter. Who knows what code is even running on the machine at election time. For elections to be trusted by the people, the people need to understand them. Otherwise, you’ll get the losing side screaming about “rigged election” all the time.
The simplist method of voting, and one that can be easily trusted without any knowledge in computers is simply putting paper ballots inside an envelope, put those envelopes inside a box. Have a bunch of people all accross the political spectrum to watch the polls, heck, even live stream it. Every part of the polls can be livestreamed using multiple cameras, with multiple people physically watching the polls, there will be no tanpering. The only part with privacy should be the election booth that has curtains for a voter to mark their ballot in secret.
If you live stream the entire counting process, it is almost impossible to tamper with it. l
Bitcoin is a great example of a decentralized software network that has a design like this. A system where there is no single authority that can unilaterally rewrite the rules to it’s own benefit.
Bitcoins is for money. Blockchain doesn’t really work for elections, unless you want every vote to be public.
In banking, there is Security, but no Anonynimity. Every identity is known. Same with the Bitcoin blockchain. Ever address and the amount of bitcoins it has is publically known.
In elections, votes need to be secured and anonymous (most democracies use secret ballot to prevent coercion or retribution of past votes), and blockchain doesn’t really allow anonynimity.
It is nearly impossible to design a computerized voting system with both Security and Anonynimity. Banking works because banks know how much money everyone has, so any mistakes can be reversed. For elections, you don’t know everyone’s votes so you cant reverse mistakes. But if you want to tie a vote to a voter, then you bring back the old problem of coerced votes and retrubution for voting for a certain candidate.
Paper ballots should still be the standard, until there is some sort of tamperproof technology.
Again, we can use paper ballots. Put them in a box. Move the box to the center of a city/town to count them. And live stream the entire process (again, the poll booth where the voter marks the ballot is covered by a curtain). This way, we get both security and transparency, and still have secret ballots.
Sorry if my wall of text is incoherent, I’m just a bit depressed to explain it better.
Oops I made a mistake there, I’ve corrected it now. from “some kind of decentralized software network any kinds of centralized authority” to “some kind of decentralized software network **without ** any kinds of centralized authority”.
You raise valid points.
Regarding the issue of trust: the same argument you raise is one that people use against bitcoin, and for that matter what people used to say about debit cards and then online banking. That they would never trust a computer or a machine to securely store or transact their money. But debit cards, online banking, and even bitcoin are all implementations of technology, flawed as they may be, that achieve a degree of trust by fulfilling their promise.
Whether or not an individual person trusts bitcoin, for example, it doesn’t matter how that person feels, the bitcoin network continues to fulfill it’s basic promise of being a decentralized cryptocurrency where you can’t fraudulently double-spend the currency and you can’t fraudulently mint any currency, it is all maintained by unbreakable mathematics and vetted thousands of times over on many independent nodes. Bitcoin is not a perfect system but what it is is a network that has demonstrated that you can transact valuable digital information without needing a central authority of any kind, without needing to trust anyone at all, the trust is in the mathematics and the combined computing power of the network.
As for the issue of privacy: this is certainly an issue that would need to be solved but I don’t believe it is unsolvable. As an example, Monero is a cryptocurrency that is similar to bitcoin but is privacy focused. Again it is not perfect but it does demonstrate that you can create a cryptographic design that can facilitate transactions privately while protecting the identity of the accounts.
The problem that this ideal, hypothetical network would solve, would be to not require the rigmarole of elections via paper ballot as all. Even if you had a perfectly accurate paper ballot election, part of the issue with that method is the sheer amount of time and resources involved in accurately tabulating and verifying hundreds of millions of votes. The amount of resources is so great that it makes it such that you only have an election or referendum every 2 years or every 4 years or some cadence like that, which is much slower than what a hypothetical decentralized computer network could achieve. Why wait 2 years if you could hypothetically generate a consensus within a few days or even hours in some cases.
Whether or not an individual person trusts bitcoin, for example, it doesn’t matter how that person feels, the bitcoin network continues to fulfill it’s basic promise of being a decentralized cryptocurrency where you can’t fraudulently double-spend the currency and you can’t fraudulently mint any currency, it is all maintained by unbreakable mathematics and vetted thousands of times over on many independent nodes.
Trust is very important in a democracy. Trust is what lets everyone know that the final tally is the majority opinion.
You can’t just invent whatever voting system and say “I don’t care if people trust it or not, they’ll just have to deal with it”.
For a currency system, that’s fine, people can use another currency.
For an election system? You can’t just ignore the fact that most people isn’t knowledgeable enough to understand complex systems. If they don’t understand it, they wont trust it, and they’d fear that their votes aren’t being counted correctly, and that leads to the losing party/candidates making false accusations of election fraud and inciting revolt. And the party/candidate’s supporters would falsely believe they are actually the majority and they’d eat up the lies being fed to them.
Remember those “dominion voting machine are rigged” narrative that conservatives tried to push. Those propaganda only gets worse the more computerized voting gets.
Mistrust in elections can lead to violence, such as the attack on the US Capitol Building on January 6th, 2021
But if you have a simple “paper ballot in a box” system, with election observers to make sure nothing fishy is going on. Most voters of the losing party/candidate would just accept the results, and any “rigged election” propaganda isn’t as effective if the election system is so simple to understand. There’d still be people spewing conspiracy theories, but it would be much less when using a paper ballot system than with computerized voting machines.
You aren’t wrong, trust is obviously very important.
What I am trying to describe is the emergence of an alternative system that people could choose to use based on its own merit, similar to how bitcoin has emerged. While many people still don’t trust an idea like bitcoin, already many millions of people do trust it, and the aggregate value of all bitcoin is currently something like half a trillion USD because of this, because of the network effect, because many people do give value to it. As the years go on, as bitcoin continues to fulfill its basic promise of being trustworthy, of functioning as intended, more people will continue to trust it and use it because, while flawed, it promises a degree of inherent trust and functionality that is superior to the incumbent alternative fiat currencies that continue to lose more and more relative value every year due to irresponsibility and corruption of the central banks.
In this sense, a decentralized digital identity network would simply be a more functionally decentralized social network. The topic here is trust, and here we are in the fediverse because centralized for-profit social media companies are not preferred by people here, because of trust and other reasons. As the years go on, the experience of for-profit social media companies will have to compete with the experience of fediverse social media, and if fediverse social media is better, it will eventually emerge as a preferred viable alternative, and maybe even the predominant form of social media. People can choose to use it or not, but because of the network effect, as more people do use it, it increases its inherent value, which causes more people to trust it and use it, which continues to increase the inherent value, etc., until some thresholds are reached.
This would be true also of a hypothetical decentralized identity network. People could choose to use it or not, based on its merits. Many people would choose not to use it because they don’t trust it. But, as it would continue to grow and evolve and improve, like bitcoin, or like the fediverse, a larger number of people would use it and trust it despite it being relatively niche, it would continue to demonstrate itself as a viable alternative. In such a scenario of emerging naturally by competing with the incumbent systems, it is not inconceivable that such a system could eventually surpass a threshold and become the predominant social network and identity system in the world, that also provides effective functionality of things like voting on issues.
How would be such a debate of ten milliards of people moderated? Who would decide, that today, we shall vote about the water, and tomorrow, about some boring technical norms of street lights? If you have an answer, how would be this solution resistant to a misuse?
Would we haveanything like a constitution? And how would be principles of subsidarity achieved?These are some great questions that I don’t necessarily know the answer to.
I imagine a discussion platform kind of like Reddit / Lemmy, but where moderators are all democratically elected. This would ensure that the community always has the power to remove moderators that aren’t serving the interests of the community. In terms of how changes are made, I imagine an environment that combines the best features of Github and Wikipedia, in terms of how changes are made and decided upon and applied for everyone. That there would be standard processes in place for making suggestions and changes, but that the ultimate power rests in the hands of the community participants.
Dunno if there’s a more elegant term, but fractal representative.
Each person is part of a neighborhood, first level council of appx. 100 citizens, like an apartment building or suburban block, which elects a representative from among them.
That representative must personally know every member of their neighborhood, and participate in a second level council of appx. 100 such neighborhood representatives (representing a total population of appx. 10,000).
That council elects a representative from among them to represent them in a higher third level council of appx. 100 second level council representatives (representing a total population of appx. 1 million).
Repeat as necessary.
The principle here is that each citizen can petition their 1st level rep., whom they know personally, to petition their 2nd level rep., whom the 1st level rep knows personally, to petition the 3rd level rep., whom the second level rep knows personally, etc. This provides an explicit chain of personal accountability between each individual and the highest authority.
I believe a lot of the issues in our present representative democracy models originate in abstract representation of millions of people, to whom one representative is neither morally nor functionally beholden. Campaigns are based on hollow promises and marketing slogans that most voters don’t scrutinize. Additionally, local issues are decided at levels too high and separated to understand them.
In the US, this would look like a hierarchy of roughly: block/neighborhood -> borough/town -> city/county -> state -> nation.
So me and my neighbors confederate, voting on our immediate issues, including the election of Neil as our neighborhood rep. He knows us all and listens to our needs and concerns. He and the reps of the 100 closest neighborhoods confederate, discuss the issues of their constituents, and vote on issues common to all of them, including the election of Bertie to represent them on the city level. Bertie then listens to Neil and the other neighborhood reps to advocate their interests, including the election of Cathy to represent the city/county, which continues to the election of Steven to represent the state, and Nathan to represent the nation.
When I have a concern about the nation, I tell Neil, who advocates for the whole neighborhood when he talks to Bertie. Bertie now hears the combined concerns of all the neighborhoods, which she communicates to Cathy. Cathy hears the combined concerns of all the boroughs, which she communicates to Steven. Steven communicates the combined concerns of all the counties to Nathan. Every stage has a face. Each representative is accountable to, and personally familiar with, every consistent they represent. Votes bubble upwards, ivory towers are avoided, every citizen has a direct chain of 5 people, with personal familiarity, linking them to the president.
I like this concept. Do you have thoughts on how you would address gerrymandering? One reason I like proportional representation is it addresses that challenge, but wouldn’t have the same intimacy in the concept you’re describing.
I could also see challenges with too many steps meaning that officials in the upper tier of representatives don’t actually know the tier below them and so may not have that sense of interpersonal obligation.
The crux of the system is interpersonal obligation with your peers and constituents, mandatory regular meetings at each level would help. Every representative is required to hold a town hall style meeting with those they represent, and required to attend the town hall style meeting of their representative. The meetings should be scheduled such that upper level meetings always happen after lower level meetings, with sufficient time between for significant issues requiring escalation to be formally drafted before presentation to the next higher council.
As to gerrymandering, I’d suppose higher federations would emerge around logistic necessities (utilities, public transport routes, industrial sectors, etc.). Additionally, I’d propose that federation (e.g. which neighborhoods compose a borough) be decided from below by the constituents via some form of RCV, rather than dictated from above by some committee.
Well that’s the challenge, is that in order to have a vote on what the district lines are, you’ve already chosen a group of voters eligible for the election, so you’ve drawn a district. (Unless we’re having the entire country or entire state vote on districts) I also think district boundaries are exactly the sort of thing that voters aren’t inclined to research or show up to vote for, even though it makes a huge difference in election outcomes. For that reason I like STV/proportional voting for legislative bodies.
Unless we’re having the entire country or entire state vote on districts
Effectively, yeah, initially via some form of iterative ranked/approval/runoff system.
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Citizens are given a map of the residences surrounding their own, and asked to select a ranked list of addresses forming a continuous and compact neighborhood of over 150 people. Residences share a building or utility connection, like duplexes, walled subdivisions, and apartments, are automatically joined. Large apartment buildings and other similar automatic groupings over 150 people are subdivided by similar vote into sections of no less than 75 people. I imagine this done by some graphic applet.
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These rankings are then used to generate neighborhood districts of 75-150 people based on maximum consensus, perhaps with the inclusion of a final approval vote. The citizens then get a list of all the voting age members of their neighborhood, from which they select a ranked list of nominees for representative, as well as a list of time slots at public buildings, from which they select a ranked list of meeting times/locations. This establishes the base for at least the first meeting.
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At this point, things progress like most representative democracies: constituents proposes an action, the representative forwards a formal proposition at the next meeting, which is voted on. These can either be purely local, or proposals to be presented at the next higher council. This includes the drawing of borough districts, which is similar to the process of drawing neighborhood districts except that the proposed borough map must be presented before, and voted on by, the neighborhood as a whole.
Steps 2 and 3 are repeated at the borough, county, and state levels, continuously balancing to approach equal representation (e.g. a borough composed primarily of small 80 person neighborhoods would have 125 representatives, whereas a borough composed primarily of large 140 person neighborhoods might have only 72 representatives). This will lead to some variance in “power” of each small-scale representative, but it should even out by the mid-scale.
The initial process is very involved, but once the framework is in place, redistricting, when necessary, becomes simpler. Ideally, this leads to districts which emerge naturally by neighborly consensus, rather than dictated by narrow points of failure. By being so distributed, it’s also much more difficult for a small number of people to wrest control of a large area.
Additionally, this is not to say that sub-districts of any given district can’t caucus together for issues in between the district and super-district level (e.g.
I’ve got to say, having been involved in campaigns to end gerrymandering, there is a subset of people who can be bothered to learn/care about how it works, and many others who don’t. Your process sounds even more complex and time consuming, and I don’t see it being effective because the general public won’t be invested in it. Like voting for traffic court judges but even more confusing.
More importantly I also think you’re underestimating the complexity of reconciling hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods per state, each a ranked choice list of different variants. One person will pick a boundary, and then some other person will pick a boundary that conflicts with it, multiply that by a dozen million and then what, some algorithm will decide which lines are correct? And then the resulting districts still won’t have an equal number of constituents? That violates the one person one vote principle, which is part of the issue with gerrymandering and the electoral college.
there is a subset of people who can be bothered to learn/care about how it works, and many others who don’t.
My goal here was to make that irrelevant. Districts emerge naturally rather than being researched and drawn. Yes there’s complexity, but not in the surface. On surface it’s just a paint-by-numbers of the area around your house.
then what, some algorithm will decide which lines are correct?
Pretty much. Optimization algorithms are powerful. By ranking addresses like a topographical map rather than just drawing homogenous districts, you automatically have the data needed to refine the resulting districts. The whole system basically amounts to a matrix of weighted preferences, which is the one main thing current “AI” is actually good at resolving.
And then the resulting districts still won’t have an equal number of constituents?
They already aren’t. Like I said, some neighborhoods will be bigger than others, so some boroughs will have more neighborhoods than others, by the time you get to the county level every district should be almost exactly the same. At the neighborhood level, equal sizes is less important than geographic relevance. By the scale that equal representation matters, you have it.
I can’t claim the system is perfect, but it’s hard to imagine a better one. Every model has limitations.
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Nah. This is inherently flawed, because much like the present system, an intercept can be inserted at any point in the hierarchy to favour the rich and mighty.
Every system is inherently flawed. Unlike the present system, that intercept is subject to the familiarity and constant scrutiny of their peers and immediate constituency.
I don’t share your idealism, friend, but I admire you for it.
Like I said, every system is vulnerable to exploitation. I tried to advocate a system that minimizes opportunities for corruption; perfect is the enemy of good enough. If you know a less corruptible model, I’m happy to listen.
As the large-scale ellection campaigns are based on “hollow promises and marketing”, so would be your proposal prone to ?psychopats? who are able to act like ‘good guy’ and then do evil.
And if I had to accept your system, I would propose to elect more then one representant to the next level, becouse giving my power in hands of one person is really scary.
And another practical problem: let’s say sb. would be member of the Earth council, but also member of country, lander, regional, town and neighborhood councils. How would they be able to be active on all these levels? (Including also traveling problems, becouse I don’t really believe in usefullness of on-line meetings.)I think your first point is just a reality for any representative model. The best this model does is introduce more direct accountability at each level.
To your second point, I suggest drafts that trickle down, and votes that trickle up. I’d recommend formal proposals to be voted on for most issues, and transparent records to review at subsequent meetings for the rest. Representatives should be largely a formality when it comes to voting, like EC electors. Their main independent function would be debating issues and summarizing those debates for their constituents.
As to your third point, it’s an interesting consideration. On the one hand, I would suggest a special election for the lower district to replace them. Perhaps even make the runner up a vice-representative to help conduct meetings and seamlessly step in in the case of the reps election to a higher district. On the other hand, I like the idea of even the highest representative maintaining some connection with every level of democracy, to keep them grounded. Certainly higher offices would require more clerical staff. I will give it some consideration.
Democracy should be to listen to the concerns of everyone (except the bad actors of course) and build a consensus, not just the 51 percent needed to win a vote. Listen to everyone’s concerns, and help them solve their problems.
Otherwise, bad actors and grifters will take advantage of the minority people that felt they are being dismissed, promises to solve their problems with bad solutions, and make them angry and hateful.
Can we appoint officials by sortition (by lottery) for a reasonable term, and then dilute power to where no one person is critical to conduct business?
First, I’ll take down the cubicle walls. Symbol of transparency. There’d be no titles. Everyone has the same job. Same goes for me. I’ll take your job by rejecting the title. Everyone will be known for their accomplishments.
Hmm conflict. You know, Scratch everything from before. I’ll tell you what: Go the other way. More cubicles. More division. Everyone is somebody’s boss, and that person can fire the person below them. And once a month, the lowest person… [Imitates cutting throat] Buh-bye.
IDK… I used to want a true democracy, but that was when I still had faith in humanity.
A system where citizens could choose to be active or passive participants with no barriers. Passive citizens could submit their desires through annual surveys but otherwise live a live free of politics. Candidates for representatives would be chosen lottery style from the pool of active citizens weighted by the surveys, than voted on by the active population.
One in which the population is well-educated, possesses good common sense, has an appreciable sense of empthaty, and is politically involved.
After that, it’s pretty much just details.
A federated direct democracy with any delegation of power coming from the bottom. Supporters reserve the power to fire the delegate. Delegation of power should be allowed to rotate through the federation providing each member with experience.
Anyone can propose rules. Decisions are made via direct democracy scoped to effected parties. The goal of any decision is consensus.
Efficiency will be an issue since consensus and direct democracy require input from more people. Tools can help alleviate inefficiencies. Computers and artificial intelligence are examples of such tools. Voters would choose which tools to use.
Wow huge question! I mean for me in the US I think our democratic republic system is great, that is democracy on a local level, and republic on a state and federal level. We’re not in Athens anymore! I would love to see our country do away with the filibuster, the electoral college, and to impose very strict laws around lobbying. I think all elections should be publicly funded, which is such an easy way to level the playing field and negate the influence of corporate cash.
Those voting methods you mentioned of course is up to the states to decide already which is how it should be I think.
No I don’t think parties should be banned and I wish we could have room for more parties. I admit I don’t know why US has essentially only two where other countries have several. I don’t know what the hold-up is or the mechanism for change, but I think competition is always a good thing (capitalism, baby!)
Other comments have mentioned ranked choice voting, proportional representation and single transferable vote - these are all voting systems which encourage having more than two parties. The reason we don’t have them in the u.s. now is because people know they’re throwing their vote away or even helping the candidate they don’t like by voting third party.
Okay, my answer is pretty removed, but I’d say I’d like a system where decisions are made by submitting automated proofs of their optimality, either absolute or over all submitted proposals in a defined time frame. The conditions of optimality would be pre-defined in a Constitution, and non-provable facts would be accepted or rejected via a decentralized voting system that would keep multiple diff chains and penalize e.g. voting for facts that are later proven false via a submitted proof. The proof system would hold all powers, but would be able to delegate decisions to entities under proven rules, which would come faster but possibly be overriden.
I want something similar, but with the distinction that I want to separate the what from the how. Let’s call it a democratic technocracy.
Currently, politics combine the what and the how. For example: “We want to create more jobs by lowering the taxes on the rich”.
What I’d like is the what, that is the goals, to be decided using some form of democratically. After the goals have been set actual science and evidence based methods are used to determine how to achieve those goals. So a goal could be “more jobs for everyone”.
If goals conflict then the technocrats revert back to the democratic part and ask them to set priorities. Which goals are the most important to you.
Brilliant. That makes a lot of sense, especially the more concrete the goals are. I wish it were easier to achieve, maybe the theoretical frameworks for this will be a reality in a few decades… Your implementation at least seems more plausible.
