Earlier quoted context omitted.
TL;DW (sorry, this is still long, the video is an hour!): Something happened in the 1970s which caused a major shift in a number of indicators in the US, leading to a general decline and increase in corruption in Congress. Lots of media kinds of sees this trend happening, but none of them have found a cause. The author was in Africa, thinking about how E-voting could help to reduce the costs of voting. Which sounds g…
Sorry if this is naive, but: Don't we want intimidation/vote buying of members of congress, in a sense? As a voter, it's important to be able to verify that the people I voted for actually represented my interests, rather than just paying lip service in the campaign. A citizen at the polls has no constituency. Doesn't seem to me like there's an easy answer, although I'm open to the idea that closed votes are the less…
I think this vastly overestimates the degree to which voters actually look at how representatives voted rather than what they say on television. The only people actually looking at votes are lobbyists and party leaders.
The whole idea of representative democracy rather than direct democracy is that you elect people you trust to represent your interests. If you don't trust them then vote them out, because individual voters clearly don't have time to micromanage untrustworthy members of Congress.
The actual votes are all choreographed anyway. Everybody knows ahead of time whether or not a bill is going to pass and by exactly how many votes. Which means every bill that passes or fails with a margin of more than one vote (which is almost all of them) would have allowed anyone to change their vote from the one they preferred to the one their constituents or donors would have preferred without changing the outcome, and party leaders generally only care about the outcome. And if it would have changed the outcome then that means the vote was close and it shouldn't be hard to find someone on the other side that you can trade votes with so that you can both vote the way your respective constituencies want to see you vote even though you each effectively voted the other way.
The only thing revealing the votes does is allow the exact thing we wanted to prevent, i.e. it allows a representative to be rewarded or punished for voting a certain way but only by the people who know enough to distinguish when the vote is only for show and when it really changed the outcome.