This mechanism would be prone to abuse: a group that opposes a particular issue could effectively time that issue out to prevent a replacement group from pursuing it.
The adage about “being the worst system except for all the other ones” applies well here: your (and my) participation in democracy is a required component, not just a nice thing to have. Devising hacks around our participation will ultimately result in a system that doesn’t allow our participation.
We do things according to what our goals is. Tinkering around technically just for the sake of it provides no value on its own.
In this case, someone losing their voting ability because of the system on a regular basis is not acceptable. That's the obvious why not. We want to make a system to count the people's votes. If it bars a voter from casting their vote, it's a failure.
I like the idea. The biggest problem would be to make it safe against voter intimidation/vote buying etc. by making it possible to build hierarchies of delegated votes small enough to chase down individuals.
Perhaps we can save democracy by replacing the voting mechanism by placing people in groups of 10, and letting them reach consensus before making a vote.
I would be leery of upending representative systems that at least theoretically have an anti-majoritarian bias. Even if I'm in the majority today, there's no guarantee that I will be tomorrow, and a system that helps to preserve my rights against mob rule seems reasonable.
There are quite a few permutations on liquid democracy, some of which stake out different points on openness vs. susceptibility to vote buying.
For example, you could have only people who have delegates have open votes, while those that don't have anyone delegated to them can vote or delegate secretly. This isn't much worse than our current delegative system, which admittedly does have an issue with vote-buying!
I think that would incentivize ideas that conform to the community, and the community to conform to certain ideas. Reddit is a good example, they've wrongly crucified people before for things that don't fit their narrative. Persistent voting systems would solve some problems, but they certainly introduce other problems.
Sure, but this problem already exists with representative democracy.
This system can dampen other problems like Election Cycle Effect, high barriers of entry for becoming a candidate, voters focusing on superficial aspects of the candidate etc
If a significant portion of the population refuses to vote, it only reduces the legitimacy of the democracy.
But the system is still perfectly robust. How can you expect the government to improve if you refuse to utilize the only mechanism you have for imparting change?
Comments like yours seem to imply that there needs to be some sort of radical revolution in order to see any improvement in our system. What kind of revolution do you imagine?
I don't think the voting system matters as much as we think. The main attack vector that interest groups use against democracy is shaping the public opinion in the direction that benefits them. Certainly, some systems may be easier to game, but ultimately interest groups will do neither more nor less than the minimum required to win. If they only need to make 30% of the population rabid in order to win, that's what they will do, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking they couldn't make 51% of the population rabid if they needed to.
Basically, if people's stated preferences are ill-thought-out and/or manipulated, then even the perfect voting system that perfectly reflects the people's preferences will yield bad results. Voting reform in this case would be fixing the symptoms, not the disease. The disease, in my view, is that given the sheer complexity of the issues, the poor attention budget of people, the outsized influence of media, the impossibility of directly interacting with decision-makers, there's basically no way people can make an informed decision.
Personally I think we should ditch elections and just pick representatives purely at random, and then pay them to think about their preferences full time, discuss them with each other, directly interview candidates for executive positions, and so on. The basic idea is that I think collective decision making probably reaches an optimum around Dunbar's number and falls off precipitously beyond that.
It's an interesting idea, but I think the more important part is ensuring that the candidates are qualified. Of course whoever decides on who's qualified or not will have a lot of power over the process. There needs to be some sort of objective measure to determine that, and that's going to be hard, and constantly subject to attempts to allow or ban popular controversial candidates.
Personally I've been thinking if maybe it would be a good idea if everybody could both vote for someone, and against someone else. That way, the most controversial candidates would never be able to win. Athens had a slightly harsher system where people would vote to banish anyone who was deemed to have become too powerful.
On the other hand, if the system is too moderating, it could become too conservative and it might become impossible to change the system once it's on a certain course; any popular newcomer who wants to address certain problems in the system would immediately be blocked by everybody who benefits from those problems.
The adage about “being the worst system except for all the other ones” applies well here: your (and my) participation in democracy is a required component, not just a nice thing to have. Devising hacks around our participation will ultimately result in a system that doesn’t allow our participation.
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