Let's extend liquid democracy to gaseous democracy.
Let's suppose that we want 1000 members in a legislature. The population as of the last census is 350,000,000. Thus, we want each member to represent 350 thousand people.
Have the voters sign up directly.
Anyone who gets verified signatures for at least 350,000 people by the time of an election becomes their representative. A person who can get 700,000 verified signatures gets two votes. We'll arbitrarily cap that; so the number of representatives will be between 500 and 1000.
Note: no geographical limitations. You voted for Rep. Brown, Rep. Brown is your representative. We have computers that can keep track of this.
"Elections" can be held continuously, with the totals on a particular cyclic date taking effect; for stability, any period less than annually seems problematic.
Polling can be completely replaced by actual measurements. No more. The results of the election are likely to be pretty similar to the totals the week before and the day before.
The right to vote would have to be much better protected than it is now, but we would no longer need protection for specific election days. I would suggest leveraging the Post Office to handle vote changes.
It's certainly interesting to imagine. In some ways this reminds me a little of Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe, which imagines political alliances by timezone allegiance. I think it would be an enormously difficult shift for a while for politicians to start thinking about their particular demographic, wherever they were. One potential downside is that it could encourage niche demagoguery - a representative for each conspiracy theory, for example. But that's not a knock-down argument against it or anything. It would certainly be different. I worry that 350,000 people is too many to do a good job representing - see my post on the Dilution of Governance. 35k would be much more reasonable, but that gets us to 10,000 representatives, a difficult number to manage.
I'm going to be focusing more on the aspects of bundled governance, track records, justifiable governance, and independence of evaluation, so my proposed design will be very different, but perhaps some aspects of that design will be blendable with liquid or gaseous democracy to form a different new proposal!
Let's extend liquid democracy to gaseous democracy.
Let's suppose that we want 1000 members in a legislature. The population as of the last census is 350,000,000. Thus, we want each member to represent 350 thousand people.
Have the voters sign up directly.
Anyone who gets verified signatures for at least 350,000 people by the time of an election becomes their representative. A person who can get 700,000 verified signatures gets two votes. We'll arbitrarily cap that; so the number of representatives will be between 500 and 1000.
Note: no geographical limitations. You voted for Rep. Brown, Rep. Brown is your representative. We have computers that can keep track of this.
"Elections" can be held continuously, with the totals on a particular cyclic date taking effect; for stability, any period less than annually seems problematic.
Polling can be completely replaced by actual measurements. No more. The results of the election are likely to be pretty similar to the totals the week before and the day before.
The right to vote would have to be much better protected than it is now, but we would no longer need protection for specific election days. I would suggest leveraging the Post Office to handle vote changes.
It's certainly interesting to imagine. In some ways this reminds me a little of Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe, which imagines political alliances by timezone allegiance. I think it would be an enormously difficult shift for a while for politicians to start thinking about their particular demographic, wherever they were. One potential downside is that it could encourage niche demagoguery - a representative for each conspiracy theory, for example. But that's not a knock-down argument against it or anything. It would certainly be different. I worry that 350,000 people is too many to do a good job representing - see my post on the Dilution of Governance. 35k would be much more reasonable, but that gets us to 10,000 representatives, a difficult number to manage.
I'm going to be focusing more on the aspects of bundled governance, track records, justifiable governance, and independence of evaluation, so my proposed design will be very different, but perhaps some aspects of that design will be blendable with liquid or gaseous democracy to form a different new proposal!