Representatives and Internet Voting
One of Polish football commentators (soccer - for those of you who live in the US) called once football players of Polish national team „T-shirts”, by which he meant that the team did not have any important, well known player, but just few warm bodies dressed up to play. Well, this is what we have in our parliament too (and I suppose that situation in your country is similar) From 460 members of Polish Parliament I would be able to name maybe 10, the rest are just all „T-Shirts” for me. Why do we have 460 parliament members and not let's say 1000 or 50 is beyond my comprehension. Too few to really represent my opinions (I don't even know personally any of them) and at the same time too many for me to remember and to judge their performance after their turn ends.
These 460 parliament members have been chosen in elections in which only about 60% of the voters were eager enough to vote at all. Part of the votes have been wasted on people who didn't make it to the parliament, some members were elected through political party list, even though they might have had less votes than the other ones (yes, we Poles are THAT crazy). It means that in the best case scenario Polish Parliament represents the feelings of about 50% Poles from an election day. We all also know that many things which politicians say before elections stops to have any meaning the very next day they have been elected, so I really don't know whose interest (besides their own ones) are they representing during these 4 years.
This system has 2 basic disadvantages – the first one is that the life is not a 4-year turn based strategy, but the real time one. The second one is that if you represent everyone you actually don't represent anyone besides yourself. This could be solved if everyone represented just itself and took the decision in real time process and not once every 4 years. However I have worked too much in IT to not recognize Utopia when I see one. We cannot force anyone to say... read 2 hours of laws every day, nor wait endlessly for everyone to find some time to vote.
Nevertheless our voting right is too important to FORCE anyone to choose representative. That's why I believe that ideal system should be based on following rules:
- Everyone can vote by oneself on any public matter
- Everyone can temporally cede his voting right to anyone he trusts
- Voter who choose a trustee/representative, can change him online at any moment or go back to independent voting
- Trustee/representative votes with the number of votes it has at moment of voting
- There are no limits on number of trustees/representatives nor on the number of voters one trustee can have
- There are no geographic or any other limitations in being trustee
To avoid multitude of legislative spam or laws proposed as jokes by trolls it would be necessary to set some reasonable limit on number of supporters required to start official work on law. Taking into account how easily is to get 1000 posts on any meaningless subject I would even say that the limit should be higher than the current limit for popular/citizen's initiative.
Everything I said can be done through one simple IT system, so why are we still allowing others to decide about our fate?