The Basic Rules:

1) The common notion of an elected lawmaker is eliminated. All issues are voted on directly.

2) At any time you can assign any other citizen to be your representative. This assignment stays in effect until you nullify it.

3) When you vote directly on an issue all voters who chose you as their representative have their votes cast as you voted. So you may control more than one vote.

4) If you represent others and you choose a representative of your own, all the votes that you control go to your representative.

5) Nobody knows who they ultimately represent.

6) You can override the choice of your representative simply by voting directly on an issue yourself.

So basically if A represents B and B represents C, then when A votes on an issue B and C automatically cast their votes the same way.

Just some of the advantages: - More people will vote. - People who don't want to spend much time studying politics can still have their interests looked after by a trusted agent. - It will encourage political discussion and awareness as everyone tries to get control of their peers' votes. - The dynamic nature of who the big players are in politics may make it harder for special interests to influence lawmaking.
-- kurleykyew, Oct 22 2008

Halfbakery: real-time forest voting real-time_20forest_20voting
Pretty close, but +tagging, +accountability (in contrast to your #5) [jutta, Oct 22 2008]

See link for my own attempt at this.

Problem in both our scenarios: Horse-trading. The small number of persistent players in the current representative democracy makes it possible for people to owe each other favors, which makes it possible to do uncomfortable things in trade for strongly desired ones, which makes it possible for things to happen at all. I don't think that scales to groups.
-- jutta, Oct 22 2008


//6) You can override the choice of your representative simply by voting directly on an issue yourself.//

umm.. sorta belies the "secret ballot" notion, that.
-- FlyingToaster, Oct 22 2008


This would lead to the over-representation of people who are interested in politics or who are followers of some "single-issue" politics or other, which would be a disaster.
Who proposes laws in this system?
Who looks after the bigger picture? If a law to give everyone a massive tax cut is proposed, no one's going to say no to that - and yet it might be unaffordable or be incompatible with last week's law to have fantastic public services.
-- hippo, Oct 22 2008


What's the process for vote forwarding?
How do I know who's handling my vote (so I know whether or not I want to revoke their access)?
-- phoenix, Oct 22 2008


phoenix-

There are engineering problems involved such as how exactly does a vote get forwarded, and how do I designate a representative (do I need to know their social security number?). These probablems seem sovlable, but not that interesting to me.

For the second question. Does who you vote for really matter? Presumably you'd be giving your vote to someone you trust, and they someone they trust. I would think what is more important is what issues you ultimately voted for. And I can envision ways people can find out what they voted for. The specific rules depend on how important privacy is.
-- kurleykyew, Oct 22 2008


Hippo-

One of the cool things about this system I think is that it is compatable with many of the standard political mechanisms.

For example, if you think the electoral college is a good insurance to make sure the big picture is looked after you could put that on top of this voting system just like it is currently sitting on top of a traditional voting system in the U.S.

There are a million ways law proposal could be introduced. One possibility is that laws trickle up from local governments. Once it recieves enough support at a local level it can be eligable to move up to the city/state/region/country level or whatever the next bigger governmental authority is.
-- kurleykyew, Oct 22 2008


Jutta-

This is an interesting point. I hadn't thought of that as a disadvantage. I don't really like the pork-barreling and earmarks that come with that kind of thing, but it is possible that this is what allows anyting to get done at all.

You could be right. But I'd hate to find out that this was the driving force in lawmaking.
-- kurleykyew, Oct 22 2008



random, halfbakery