> being able to vote with your feet is much better than voting in an election.
I've had this idea for a while already. Indeed, it would be interesting to set up a free market system for the governments. US seems to be an ideal place for this sort of experiment given the ease of movement. Competition between states could be quite healthy.
The American system requires people to vote with their feet (freedom of choice of employment) and their wallets (freedom of market choice), thereby giving individuals the direct power instead of some bureaucratic entity who may or may not have the individuals' best interests in mind.
> I personally slightly prefer approval voting (e.g. select all candidates you like, no ranking, most votes wins).
Yes, I like this one a lot more.
> There are municipalities and states that have implemented both.
I think for low-stake elections that most people don't vote in anyway, experimentation is relatively safe. But I wouldn't want to try anything new with fiery federal elections, particularly not the presidential election. The risk of confusion resulting in costly civil unrest is too high.
> More importantly, a large minority of people in the US who already believe the current voting system isn't fair
> Luckily, people tend to be much more savvy when voting with their wallets or their feet. And as a society we would be well advised to encourage these latter two.
The problem with voting with your dollars is that people with more dollars get more votes. The problem with voting with your feet is that only some people can afford to move.
If you want "just let the rich decide", why dress it up in fancy words?
Support banks until the goverment collaps? Does not sound like a great idea.
> If you live and a free country and abstain from participating in politics, then in my opinion you have abdicated your responsibility as a citizen.
Voting is irrational form any perspective. Political organisation is not really worth the time it costs. Thats that sad true, economily speaking the goverment is a externality it would be good if everybody did inform themself be active (add so on) but in reality you yourself doing it is just a waste of time.
For that reason the idea came up that there should be a constitution. The problem is that that did not work very well, the constitution was just overruled or ignored (for sometimes good reasons).
What to make of the situation is hard, some people want more federalism so the voter is more effected by his opinion, but many people oppose that because why have good things someplace and bad other places, it would be much better to have good things everywhere.Other people want a new constitution, but I do not see any reason why that would not end the same as the other consitution.
Again other have tons of ideas, change the style of voting, change the style of representation and so on. Again others become anarchists.
> I don't understand the argument of reducing cost of elections and scaling.
How about if we could scale ballots to such an extent that a citizen can vote from wherever/whenever on all issues they're interested in[1], not just a head of state election every X years? Wouldn't that be a more democratic process ?
I believe it would, and that paper ballots won't get us there.
>I’ve been thinking the past couple of years you should be able to vote in local elections in the area you work in, even if you don’t live there.
Makes sense to me, especially if you are paying local income taxes in that area. I seem to recall from high school that 'taxation without representation' caused a big kerfluffle a couple hundred years ago.
> One idea I've considered, but not fully, is the idea of being able to vote only if you pay taxes
I've seen some variant of this on HN recently, proposing ways to TAKE AWAY voting rights.
(The last time that sticks in my mind was someone saying you should only be allowed to vote if you do so under the guidance of a sanctioned organization like a non profit social organization!)
After all the progress in voting rights during the last century, it is disheartening to read people seriously proposing taking rights away from people.
Are you sure about that? This past election wasn't exactly very healthy.
Be careful with removing all the pageantry around elections. Symbolism is very important and singular day election days play into that. So does filling in a paper ballot, and going to a polling place with your fellow citizens.
Imagine you created an app, wherein you enter your preference (Dem or GOP) and the app goes and proceeds to vote for you automatically anytime there's an election. Would that improve democracy or alienate people from it?
> I just don't get the draw of an electronic voting system.
Make elections cheap. For those that wish to experiment with majority rules a reliable system would allow the people to technically be able to vote in their government on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.
So further to this if elections are easy to run and are cheap what does it matter if someone breaks one election? You can just run the next one fine. It changes the variables somewhat and requires a sustained and persistent threat to be engaged to subvert the democracy. Combined with a team that investigate irregularities you can create a vaguely stable system, especially if you consider ideas such as binding authentication to geography instead of identity making it more difficult to stuff ballot boxes as teams can easily verify how many votes should be possible from a specific gps co-ordinate.
I'm not saying its a great idea, its probably awful but it opens up an option to society that previously hasn't been available and that's interesting.
> If you believe voting changes how government operates, you haven't been paying attention.
The powers are entrenched and voting does little to change anything in government anymore.
I agree with you there in the context of the US. What desperately needs changing is campaign finance. Lobbying, Citizens United, etc has completely ruined politics in the US.
> If we had a system in which you could vote for whomever you want (regardless of where they're from) and that person had voting power in the legislature that was proportional to the share of votes they got, then the laws we would get would actually reflect the will of the people.
More simply (and easier to manage) we could just have multimember districts with a proportional, candidate-centered, ranked-preference voting system like STV.
(Your version has all kinds of challenges, like how you manage a legislature of reasonable size while maintaining the general structure, and is more radical than is necessary for major improvements in representation.)
Well... yes. And I view this as a good thing. The current US voting system is broken and I am not sure it is fixable simply by voting more - that simply entrenches the current system.
I prefer to use illegitimacy and disenfranchisement to spur useful change to the systems themselves. I want to see somethink like ranked choice with an instant runoff, the abolition of the electoral college and a simple one person, one vote choice for president, without dividing people into small groups first.
Reforming the senate is likely also a good idea.
Apathy and illegitimacy are the kindling needed to foster real change.
> but these kinds of costs are the costs you have to pay to live in a democracy
Not really, we could randomly choose a few thousand people to vote and it would be practically just as effective without all the costs of having everyone vote. Better yet, you would probably get a better sample of the population too since it would not be biased towards people who normally vote.
> I’ve always thought that voting, at the national level, might benefit from non-geographic constituencies.
The US voting system is uniquely bizarre and designed for vote manipulation by electoral district boundary fiddling. National level voting should just be by popular vote, like it is pretty much everywhere else.
> to an elector tree like the old US Senate rather than direct voting for too many positions
I mentioned this. The senators are still one of the largest divergent points from public interests that are direct elected. I'm all for abolishing the 17th amendment amongst other things (I disagree with the policy of 2 senators per state in principle anyway).
> No state senator would pass such mandates laws and vote to limit their state governments if the senators had to answer to and were elected by the state legislatures. Each state can elect their senators as they see fit.
I wish we could have unified state congresses that directly elected all federal representatives from within their own ranks. The citizenry shouldn't even be involved in the fed, which shouldn't be nearly as large as it is. They should be involved locally, and their local choices should influence larger groups through representation. The way republics are supposed to work.
>The question I'm really trying to ask is whether it's at all reasonable to do something to increase the quality of the vote.
Absolutely. I'm 100% for programs to promote literacy and civic education. Reduce corporate political financing so that politicians _have to_ appeal to their constituencies. Increase the density of elected representatives so that each representative has a constituency small enough for them to actually reasonably represent.
I've had this idea for a while already. Indeed, it would be interesting to set up a free market system for the governments. US seems to be an ideal place for this sort of experiment given the ease of movement. Competition between states could be quite healthy.
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