Digital Direct-Democracy (The Plan)

My Fello Amerricns,

The time for change has come. The time for hope has come. The time for hoping for change has come.

Sorry, that didn’t really have much to do with anything…. just amusing myself; if you can call it that.
(the rest of this article has nothing to do with any vague pointless references to the present political circus. It has everything to do with the fundamental redemption of the world’s collective political soul)

Direct Digital Democracy:DDD:D3
(no those are not emoticons)

Representative democracy has become the world standard for communal governance and the defence against abuse of power(don’t laugh, it’s true). There are many people however who would argue that an even better system would be a direct democracy, where everyone get’s a vote on everything. Instead of just getting together and picking some guy to send off for four years and crossing our fingers that they don’t spend too much of our money or bomb too many of our neighbors we could have a constant check or even active participation in the application of government powers through direct democracy. The biggest problems with building a direct democracy have been practical ones, it has just always been too hard and too messy to do effectively….Untill Now

maybe.

The argument has been made, by both myself and presumably many others, that the logistical impediments to the implementation of direct democracy have largely been rendered void by the near ubiquity of the internet. It is now theoretically possible to collect, marshal and moderate the knowledge and desires of the electorate through a networked system of moderated participation and voting; ultimately allowing for constant and total control of the decision making process by an involved and informed citizenry without the need to vest all (or any) decision making power in a single representative.

i.e. We don’t need politicians anymore because we have internet forums and optimizable voting algorithms. hoo ray.

That being said – the questions become: would/could direct democracy enabled by networking and software be an improvement and if so how would we go about implementing it?

The Tentative Plan:

First choose a government position like small town mayor or city councilperson.

Then Determine what powers that position entails and the choices that someone in that position faces.

From this information construct a set of software encoded rules to govern exactly what powers this elected official will contractually grant to their citizen constituents.

These rules will be a combination of participatory voting software, political platform, and one-person constitution, and will represent a legally binding contract with the voters to legislate according to the will of the will the voters as evidenced by the voting system.

Once this software is finalized, someone will run as a candidate, having signed this contract to uphold the integrity of the pre-agreed processes, encoded in their “mayor-ware”.

This approach means we don’t need to have a violent revolution and bloody overthrow of the existing government in order to drastically change our mode of politics, we simply quietly go about the business of drastically changing our mode of politics.

The other extremely important aspect of this plan is that each candidate will compete on the strength of their contract in the eyes of their constituents. This means the software will continually evolve and improve in order to better meet this need; with each candidate running on the strength and utility of their latest and greatest version of digital direct democracy. This market pressure will become particularly powerful and productive when it gets to the point that multiple D3 candidates are competing with each other.
(D3=test run of possibly lame, but concise and easy term)

In it’s initial form, the contract could be as simple as saying that registered members of the electorate can force their Representative to vote a certain way on a bill by preregistering for a decision and then acquiring a majority of some specified size behind a yes or no vote. By requiring preregistration say a week in advance you might curtail abuse by vote flooding.

Obviously, the larger the number of people involved in this process, the more complex the systems and controls need to be. That’s why it should be initially implemented in a small, low tension environment and start out simply as a citizen’s veto power.

Once proven as well as certain flaws highlighted, the candidate and possibly new candidates can rerun on new rewritten and improved contracts which learn from the previous implementation.

And finally, to avoid the legal attacks that the signing of a binding legal contract would invite, the contract with the electorate would stipulate that any breach of the contract will be mediated by the votes of the electorate and not sent to a judge.

This will take a lot more thinking and probably a lot of trial and error, but it is entirely possible to build a system that accurately and continuously reflects the will of the people, and in so doing, change the fundamental nature of democracy and civic involvement without changing any of the structural underpinnings. That’s a pretty amazing thought though I think.

Some more notes:

Legislation-
Legislators are rarely elected for their ability to craft quality legislation of long-term value. So there is very little selective market pressure to produce and swear in the best executors of the task which they are ostensibly elected to do: write and pass good laws. There are way more citizens than legislators – presumably some of them could write much better bills than what is currently produced.

Given the above – All that is then required is a system of allowing anyone to propose legislation to the body of participating citizens who can then choose what ideas to further develop and refine until the point that some agreed upon majority percentage is willing to agree to the final wording of a piece of legislation.

Voting-

On the surface, this one is a no brainer. If representatives are elected to vote the will of the people, it makes much more sense to just let the people vote the will of the people.

Executive function-

This ones a little tougher and such powers will likely have to remain vested in a single individual.

What would/could change in a D3 system is much greater oversight and constructive powers of the electorate over the various bureaucracies that are traditionally entirely run by and comported to the will of the head of the executive powers. On a national level, this would mean that major institutions such as the CIA, the Fed, the Department of Education would/could be forced to submit to oversight by the D3 in what would essentially amount to a (or all) seats on what would be the board of directors of these institutions if they had boards of directors.

Much of the argument of vesting power in a single executive comes from the fact that some decisions simply have to be made right now. Timely decision making is not generally a feature of any system that allows and encourages dissent, therefore we occasionally need a momentary totalitarian. However,presuming this is the argument for having a part-time king, one would have to accept that once the timeliness factor is no longer an issue, the power to overturn any choices made by the executive should return to the democracy; something like a six month time delay on the ability to overturn an executive decision. This will needs to be fleshed out quite a bit more but the overall result would be that a significant chunk of the sovereignty of both the executive and legislative functions of government would be transferred directly to the people.

Judicial-

Obviously there is no way this system should be allowed to touch the actual judicial process.

If anyone manages to read this in its entirety and sees some of the at present unaddressed concerns that adopting such a system would bring up, please weigh in..