A post by Omni in the "next election" thread made me want to see what you all thought of this...

Our democracy is a representative democracy because there's simply too many people out there for every man and woman to have their say in the issues of our government.

I've read about a proposed non-representative Democracy with the invention of the internet. It would then be completely possible for every man and woman to have their say in what our government does.

I'm sure there's many many problems that could rise from a internet-based government but the idea could possibly turn into something easily implemented. Possibly a 4th branch of our government for public opinion? Maybe a replacement for our house of representatives?

Any thoughts?

well youd have a poll, and yeah I guess there'd be a forums but for no other reason than debate on the issues you have to take a poll on

An internet-based government (an interesting idea btw...bravo!) would be wrought full of problems.

For one, that's a LOT of input to take in...I mean, the servers would crash every time a major decision had to be made 'cuz you'd have millions and millions of people trying to access the website at the same time.

Another thing to consider is that people without computers are left out of the loop entirely. I mean, at least with the current form of government they can still voice their concerns by sending a letter to their congressman or whoever is representing their state, but if you had to go online to get your voice heard, you're SOL, especially if you're a homeless person.

Such a system is also easily exploitable. Imagine a cracker DDoSing the government website whenever an act or bill was proposed that he didn't want it to make it into law; all he'd have to do is wait until the vote was the majority in his favour, then send request after request to bog down the server and prevent anymore votes from getting thru. Even worse, suppose he just makes a virus that sets every 2nd vote to the choice that HE wants and then manages to infect that system, and after the vote, the virus self-cleans itself before anyone even notices that something went wrong. The result? Something the people DIDN'T want to happen or DID want to happen either does or doesn't happen respectively.

There's other things to be concerned about too, but I think that those 3 points are probably the major concerns (another one might be someone from another country using proxies to mess around with the government system). It's an interesting concept, but the internet has far too much freedom to accomodate such a system.

That's my 2 Canadian cents. =P

That's why I like the idea of a liquid democracy. The only difference between it and a real non-representative democracy is that you get to give your vote to proxies if you don't want to use it yourself.

If you can take your vote back at any given instant, politicians who betray those they represent could find themselves powerless within days. (maybe even hours)

I think the biggest problem with this is that you would just have mob rule.

I PROPOSE WE GIVE ALL OF BILL GATES' MONEY TO EVERYBODY ELSE. ALL IN FAVOR?
Probably 10 people would vote no. ;D