^figure 1a.
1. I’m sick of seeing plastic lawn signs everywhere. Why would I want to vote for someone who thinks it’s fiscally and environmentally responsible to print up thousands of plastic signs with his or her name on them and put them up around town? It assumes and promotes ignorance. It doesn’t treat people as intelligent. I can trick a lot of people into voting for me by putting signs everywhere. I have the most money, look how many signs I have I must be the best because the rich people paid me to be the best.
2. proxy vote. I was thinking the other morning commute about a better way to organize democracy: Allow everyone to vote on everything. When elected officials vote on bills and things, everyone gets a vote. Elected officials get votes equal to the number of people who voted for them who don’t vote for themselves.
Say you elect a guy and he campaigns for one issue but then starts voting differently once in office. Maybe there’s one issue you find most important. Instead of tons of people spending tons of time and money trying to sway politicians, everyone can just chime in on what they feel is most important. Granted most people wont have time, desire or expertise to research and vote on every issue, that’s why you elect someone you trust to handle things when you’re too busy.
1a. Dots are people and arrows are votes (who you pick as your proxy). If you vote on a bill, your vote goes directly to be counted. If you don’t vote, your vote goes to your proxy. So say Martha has 5 people who pick her as their proxy and none of them vote on a particular bill. If that Martha votes, her vote is worth 6 votes (Martha + unused votes). You could always check how much your vote is worth (but not who voted for you). If Martha doesn’t vote, 6 votes go to the person she voted for. And so on.
While drawing the diagram I realized loops could be created. What if Tom voted for Bob and Bob voted for Tom and neither of them voted? I guess they would probably get an email saying “infinite loop, please vote.” And you could always change your vote whenever you wanted so if you became dissatisfied with your proxy, or were trapped in a circle.
So in this way, everyone is elected, at least by themselves. You just pick your proxy at any time.
Maybe the people with the top # of votes would actually get paid to participate in discussions on the issues and work in the capital, just like modern day politicians.
If enabled today it would change nothing… until you told people about it. If someone takes the time to fill out an online petition, they might as well be voting. It could be integrated into social media, you could search for people who voted the same way as you and create discussion groups.
AT LEAST this system could be created as an automatically generated poll. A simulation of what was actually going on in government. Elected officials could see what the consensus is. Could connect up and get detailed information about every issue. A wikipedia page for every bill.
It is still vulnerable to people just voting as they feel. It’s hard to get people to actually pay attention. If you put up plastic signs all over town, or banner ads all over the Internet with “vote yes on 7” or whatever. With pictures of happy people or things that give people a gut reaction or emotional response. There are still too many people who don’t read any deeper than appearances. So this would work well in conjunction with an increase in critical thinking classes in school.
The whole system can be access on the web. If you don’t have a computer go to the library.
Trickle down voting.
This is a thought in process.
