I like the idea of vote copying. With good implementation, it would make entering politics easier and cheaper, just like blogging made story publishing easier and cheaper. Specialization means that there will always be a specialized “political class”, but the costs of entry (in both dollars and number of followers) could be significantly reduced. Right now, you need thousands of followers and millions of dollars to start a political party. With a good system, if there are five people willing to follow your vote, you could already have a micro-party.
Some thoughts about implementation:
Public or private voting? The advantage of private voting is that your neighbors can’t punish you for voting for the “wrong” party. Even if you are a politician, a member of a party X, it is unlikely that you would vote for someone else; but still your vote is secret. I think this feature is necessary to preserve. So there should be a private vote, which cannot be made public in any way; and an optional “voting recommendation”, which is public, and is just an information for other people to read. The voting recommendation could simply be an option, plus a link to your web page where you explain the reasons. This format would allow easy aggregation—let’s say that you “follow” ten politicians, look at their recommendations, and if nine of them agree on something, you vote for it, or if there is more disagreement, you read their blogs and decide.
Your private vote could be an opposite of your public recommendation, which is a feature. Imagine that you live in a fanatically religious community, some vote is proposed, and the religious leader commands all their believers to make a public voting recommendation for some law. You have the option to make a public recommendation with some super lame reasons, to avoid punishment from your community, and then secretly vote the other way round.
Since the votes are separated from voting recommendation, with a good infrastructure you could separate the voting recommendations from your identity. In other words, you could become an “anonymous politician”. Just a blogger who recommends this or that, everyone can follow your opinions, but no one knows who you are. Not sure how resistant this would be against doxing (also depends on who would own the servers). You could have multiple profiles, for example the same recommendations but different explanations, for different audiences. Or even different recommendations: one for your religious community, and one for everyone else; there is no need for anyone to know that these two are the same person.
An equivalent of a political party could have one common account; they would have some internal decision mechanism about how to determine their public vote if there is an internal disagreement (they could describe it in the linked blog post, or precommit to keep quiet).
So at the end I imagine something like direct democracy, with an infrastructure that would also allow you to just copy your political party’s opinions. For the case of privacy, you could probably discuss the whole thing online, but then you have to go to the voting room to make a vote on paper (to prevent someone literally or metaphorically putting a gun to your head while you vote online from home).
I like the idea of vote copying. With good implementation, it would make entering politics easier and cheaper, just like blogging made story publishing easier and cheaper. Specialization means that there will always be a specialized “political class”, but the costs of entry (in both dollars and number of followers) could be significantly reduced. Right now, you need thousands of followers and millions of dollars to start a political party. With a good system, if there are five people willing to follow your vote, you could already have a micro-party.
Some thoughts about implementation:
Public or private voting? The advantage of private voting is that your neighbors can’t punish you for voting for the “wrong” party. Even if you are a politician, a member of a party X, it is unlikely that you would vote for someone else; but still your vote is secret. I think this feature is necessary to preserve. So there should be a private vote, which cannot be made public in any way; and an optional “voting recommendation”, which is public, and is just an information for other people to read. The voting recommendation could simply be an option, plus a link to your web page where you explain the reasons. This format would allow easy aggregation—let’s say that you “follow” ten politicians, look at their recommendations, and if nine of them agree on something, you vote for it, or if there is more disagreement, you read their blogs and decide.
Your private vote could be an opposite of your public recommendation, which is a feature. Imagine that you live in a fanatically religious community, some vote is proposed, and the religious leader commands all their believers to make a public voting recommendation for some law. You have the option to make a public recommendation with some super lame reasons, to avoid punishment from your community, and then secretly vote the other way round.
Since the votes are separated from voting recommendation, with a good infrastructure you could separate the voting recommendations from your identity. In other words, you could become an “anonymous politician”. Just a blogger who recommends this or that, everyone can follow your opinions, but no one knows who you are. Not sure how resistant this would be against doxing (also depends on who would own the servers). You could have multiple profiles, for example the same recommendations but different explanations, for different audiences. Or even different recommendations: one for your religious community, and one for everyone else; there is no need for anyone to know that these two are the same person.
An equivalent of a political party could have one common account; they would have some internal decision mechanism about how to determine their public vote if there is an internal disagreement (they could describe it in the linked blog post, or precommit to keep quiet).
So at the end I imagine something like direct democracy, with an infrastructure that would also allow you to just copy your political party’s opinions. For the case of privacy, you could probably discuss the whole thing online, but then you have to go to the voting room to make a vote on paper (to prevent someone literally or metaphorically putting a gun to your head while you vote online from home).