It’s late 2012 in this fictional scenario and a dark horse write-in candidate is poised to become the next US President, thanks to a mixture of ballot-counting wizardry and, oh, auspicious planetary alignment. A lengthy Supreme Court deliberation later, the newcomer is sworn in as the 45th President of the United States.
Her first act of office is something rather unprecedented in the nation’s history: She cedes all her decision-making power directly to citizens through an online voting system. Every new bill that crosses her desk is now put to a direct public vote. She publicly swears to uphold the results of these votes, essentially transforming her position into Mouthpiece of the People.
The balance of federal power is still there, meaning the citizens of America can veto bills, make appointments, etc., but cannot create new laws without Congressional approval and are still subject to the possibility of overrides, impeachment, assassination, and other checks on presidential power (even if only by proxy).
How would this change the nation in the next few years?
Democracy gone feral. Electronic ballot stuffing on a intergalactic level. Violent swings between polarly opposed positions. Sort of like The Pit with out the dialogue. Tax rates fall to zero. Austerity initiatives voted down by landslides. Economy collapses under mountain of unfunded debt, a bit like Greece.
Rest of the world would piss itself laughing, were it not for the possibility of Oprah calling for a vote on retaliatory nuclear strikes.
Somewhere there is a quote from an early American thinker (of the founding father type) where he says something like “God save us from the voting opinion of the common man”. Benjamin Franklin?
His point is that leaders are elected to learn about their society and gather the details to effectively govern. With enough information and discussion they can make informed decisions.
Government by referenda would quickly devolve to those few people who have the time and inclination to vote. Everyone else would just get on with life. Unfortunately extreme politics can take advantage of the gap and most of us wouldn’t like the result.
I’ve played exactly one game of Vote Chess in my life. On move 9, the vote was about 60% in favor of a move that turned out to be a tactical blunder. People were screaming about it in the comments thread. “Don’t play __ because of this, that, and then this, and we lose!” The next day, the vote was 80% in favor of the blunder.
The people were warned. The people voted. The people lost.
The hacking attempts would be truly epic, and would attract the best hackers in the world. I think the voting system would be compromised and shut down in the first 24 hours.
It would be a mess, not least because the vast majority of Americans don’t have the time or the desire to vote on everything the President normally does. You’d end up with a small number of passionate (i.e. CRAZY) people doing all the voting.
Doesn’t seem like we have much faith in the common citizen.
(I wouldn’t either, at this point.)
In a better world, discounting hacking attempts and assuming massively increased education and political literacy (say, take the country you best associate with good citizenship and double their political savvyness), would you still stand by your doomsday chaos scenarios?
You still have the problem of ballot box stuffing. Or putting it another way, if a large number of people don’t cast a vote on some issues, does that open the system to being gamed on other issues?
You also have the problem that the President has access to multiple sources and advice and (hopefully) consults them all and weighs multiple factors before making a decision. And does Team America get to appoint the Secretary of State, Supreme Court justices, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, etc?
Do you also delegate the authority of Commander in Chief to the people? Do we need to stop and take a vote before authorizing the SEAL team to go after Bin Laden?
For that matter, how do you keep sensitive matters (say, negotiating a treaty) a secret if you have to consult Team America before making a decision?
As I recall, Obama’s website that let people set up petitions for him to review if they got enough votes was quickly taken over by truthers, birthers, deathers, and people demanding that he tell the truth about the aliens in Area 51, the invention of crack by the CIA in order to kill black people, and the amazing health benefits of acai berry.
Most popular petitions:
-Stop expanding trade with vietnam at the expense of human rights
-End ACTA
-Take these petitions seriously
-Libraries for kids
-End the war on drugs
-Industrial hemp
-New FEC commissioners
-Something about obesity that I don’t understand
-Dissolving the Electoral College
Etc. You might not agree with them all, but at least they’re quite a bit more serious than your average conspiracy theory
Unless I’m misunderstanding something, this would be giving the citizenry veto power over anything Congress passes. A very bad idea but I don’t think that it would be the Mad Max scenario some people are imagining. It’s not like the citizenry would be authoring and passing the bills.
Because of hacking and voter apathy it would probably end up being analogous to bills being signed or vetoed based on the flip of a coin. Congress would override vetoes on anything a large enough majority believed had to be passed, everything else would be hit or miss.
If the backers felt strongly enough about a bill, they could just keep passing versions of it till the coin flip came up in favor of it.
The biggest problem would not be the mostly well-meaning people who would probably go online and vote, it would be with understanding the wording and concepts and repercussions.
To be exact, it can take thousands of words that most probably wouldn’t bother reading (how many of you read all the fine print on every legal document you have signed?).
If you try to be brief, people can misinterpret and wind up voting against what they really believe.
Theoretically, people in Congress and the Senate have poured over the fine print (or at least have a team of experts doing so) to find those tidbits that make passing/not passing a law good/bad.
Plus, many small bills that might seem insignificant can wind up influencing laws and making other more important legislation impossible.
So in theory, letting the masses decide might seem to be a good idea, but there have been lots and lots of examples in history where the masses didn’t do so well as angry mobs.