Hollingsworth for US Senate 2014, implementing direct democracy

Anyone who has lived in California at some point in the past decade knows that direct democracy is a disaster. Ballot initiatives create service (and corresponding spending) increases and forbid tax hikes, leaving the elected legislature unable to balance the state budget.

This is the wrong soution to this problem. The _right_ solution is to quadrouple the number of senators and house members. This effort shows that yes via technology we can have more people voting on the important business of the country , but it doesn't mean we should ignore the benefits of representative democracy and pretend everyone will know everything about everything. The right solution is to water down congress, it amazes me that we have allowed the voice of so many people to be condensed into so few representatives. My parents had twice as much representation ( in terms of votes / constitutant ) then I do. My grandparents had almost four times as much [0]

As a fun by-product you would completely eliminate the effect of large donors on the government. Lets see the Koch brothers or George Soros donate $1 Million dollars to ~1600 Congressmen every two years.

0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_app...

Exactly. We have representatives for good reasons. Almost no one cares about most bills (which means they also won't know all the intricacies that often make the difference between a good bill and a bad bill). Even with the high-profile ones that we do care about, people will often vote for what they want now instead of what they need in the longterm (though our legislators aren't much better since they constantly are looking to the next election, especially in the House). California's ballot proposition system has shown that people will vote for flawed bills that sound good and be very reluctant to ever approve tax increases.

If this were implemented, for probably 90% of votes that he casts, we would see very low turnouts with voters coming from two groups: special interests--the small group of citizens who are deeply affected by the outcome of the vote and thus find it worthwhile to vote; and political junkies who get satisfaction out of voting on every issue, but who probably don't actually have time to really be informed about every single bill, especially as they evolve.

Implementation would also be extremely challenging. How do you ensure that Oregon residents (and which residents?--those who are eligible to vote? Those who are registered to vote? All, even children, felons, etc?) can vote once, and all others cannot vote? How do you handle people whose credentials for voting (whatever they may be) are compromised? What happens when a bill is amended--do people who have already voted on it have their votes stand by default? Are they able to change them? If they're able to change them, is that at the expense of anonymity? Do you actually have anonymity anyway? How does the Senator vote if someone DoS's the voting system? And obviously if there are any security vulnerabilities in the system, lots of problems could arise. These are very hard problems; there's been quite a bit of research into evoting, yet it is still very much an unsolved problem. If someone wins on a direct democracy platform, these problems will become very apparently very fast.

This is true, but with an actual 1 vote to 1 person ratio you can't really be "louder" than anyone else.

Until you get voting rings going, in which case it's up to raising awareness about an issue and that's out of the domain of such a system, is it not?

    > Normal people don't have the time to vote on every single issue

It's really easy to have both direct democracy and the convenience of not having to vote on any given issue. You could grant the use of your vote to another citizen or a group of citizens. If you don't like how they vote you could instantly revoke their right to cast your vote on your behalf and go back to voting on every single issue.

You could also grant use of your vote to different parties depending on the subject matter, maybe you like Bob to cast votes for you on environmental issues, but prefer Susan to do it if it has to do with foreign policy. Which bucket an issue falls into could be handled similarly, a third-party you op-it to trust to categorize issues before your vote is handed off to other parties that are voting on your behalf.

Those are just some that come to mind, you could do much better. But the point is that with modern technology it would be easy for everyone to choose where they want to side on the direct democracy v.s. representative democracy spectrum, and they could do so on an issue-by-issue basis.

The problem isn't that it's infeasible, it's just that nobody's tried because it would take power away from those that are currently holding it.