The article here makes the point that it should be possible now to use software to enable a democracy that allows voters to stay updated on and actively participate in specific issues, rather than on a whole party identity. It suggests its software to be integrated into existing democratic processes, so that the voters can gain insight into them.
I agree on the first part. I disagree on the second.
Here’s my suggestion on how to implement the vision.
THE PROXY POLITICAL PARTY (PPP)
Setup a political party that works as follows:
The PPP provides open source software that allows use by registered voters in the country of the PPP.
Users propose, discuss and vote on actions to be taken by the PPP.
Acting members of the PPP act and vote in the political system according to the users’ votes.
Voting in the PPP allows for voting on specific issues. Voting for the PPP does not constitute voting for a specific ideology, but for additional political power for the PPP, and thus by proxy, for its users. If one or more acting members of the PPP decide to ignore the result of a vote, they get voted out. If that doesn’t work, the PPP loses its trust and people stop voting for it, thus making it powerless.
There’s nothing preventing the existence of several alternative PPPs with different acting members and different organizational processes.
THE SOFTWARE
Whatever suggestion I make here for the software to organize a PPP would probably not survive contact with reality. Nevertheless, here’s what I’d like to see in the MVP:
It should be open source.
It should make sure that all registered voters can have access to it, but noone else.
It should provide tools for suggesting, discussing and voting on actions.
It should ensure the integrity of its data.
User anonymity might be of value, but I’m not too sure about that.
I suspect that specifics like the software giving insight into obsolete public debates or building up a user profile that can predict your votes are unnecessary. Continuously improved, collectively crafted and AI summarized legislative documents on the other hand do sound highly valuable. Do note that my personal opinion on this is unnecessary as well, as these specifics could be discussed and voted on in the context of a PPP.
It’s quite unclear what you are proposing. It sounds a bit like you are trying to reinvent Liquid Democracy without knowing the term or any of the practical implementations of it.
Thanks for the feedback! I didn’t know liquid democracy was a thing.
My thought process was: “This article is interesting. They suggest using software to enable voters to directly vote on issues rather than voting on representatives. They want to put it on top of existing processes. Here’s a better way of getting to that goal.”
This post doesn’t suggest to change existing political systems, or to implement some software nation-wide. Changing a political system is a highly difficult problem. But forming a political party is easy, and so is implementing software and processes for issue based voting. You can thus then use a proxy political party to bring issue based voting into a democratic process without modifying the democratic process itself or fighting your way through the bureaucracy required to have your software used.
The general problem you have with allowing everyone to vote on anything is that a parliament takes a lot of votes.
Even a senator whose main job is to be a senator needs a staff to make informed decisions on every vote.
You don’t really vote political decisions to be driven by Youtube influencers together with anyone who has the money to run a marketing campaign to frame a given vote.
Liquid Democracy is a way to get people to delegate when they don’t have the time to make informed decisions for a given vote. It’s worth noting that the Pirate Party in Germany used Liquid Democracy for its party decisions. That didn’t stop them when they were in parliament to ofter have half of the Pirate Party parliamentarians when they were in parliament in Berlin vote “yes” and the other half “no”.
The system that Aubrey Tang build in Taiwan is also worth looking in when it comes to the prior art.
Senator Online have been trying to do this in Australia since 2007 (without any success).