Governance is not a technological problem in and of itself. Technology is a set of tools that is neutral, it can be used to power democracy and it can be used to power tyranny and fascism.
Also, many countries that call themselves democracies actually aren't. There are very few actual democracies, the only country that really manages to cross the line for me is Switzerland, it is also the only country where the citizens will associate themselves with the decisions taken by the government in conversation as in 'we decided that' rather than 'the government decided that'. That's the first and only time I've come across that phenomenon, everywhere else the government is seen as a force outside of control of 'ordinary people' even if they nominally have the vote and the power.
Because "technology", as in technology companies, have no profit in doing that, but they have all the profit incentive in doing the opposite and enable the surveillance capitalism.
How come "democracy is broken", only when people get voted into power, that you don't like? Well, that's democracy. I believe an every increasing government is broken, how about we start with that? Democracy doesn't help anybody, if government is broken.
"Democracy is broken" means that the will of the people is largely ignored, regardless of who they elect. This has been demonstrated to be the case in the US [1].
What's wrong with government "increasing" as society becomes more specialized and complicated?
And not everyone thinks that way, so it's not a place to "start" when talking about democracy.
Individuals feel ignored, even when several million form a group, because often the groups are still very small relative to the whole. Plus those groups are very temporary. Meanwhile we have government and corporations that form long lived groups. This is the natural result of centralization I think. Like an ant colony. Want more voice? Move to a country with a tiny population. You gain a much larger voice, but you also give up things.
Although I agree online voting should be obvious over the globe in 2018, what intrigues me more is why we're still using a system where the elected have zero responsibility with their campaign. Nothing happens if a politicians promises X and delivers Y or even worse, delivers the opposite of X.
In a civilization that has shown time and time again politicians are most often in bed with corporations and not with their electorate, why are we not using smart contracts for that? Why is it we are not using machine learning to find out when judges apply different sentences for the same crime depending on whether the accused is black or white, something pretty common in my country?
Since I first understood how deep learning works, I've been puzzled by the lack of verification we could be doing in order to mathematically detect corruption, injustice, prejudice, racism, hatred. All the tools are there, yet our laws and elections conveniently ignore those technologies and we're stuck in a system where we have to trust trust. What is so inherently good with the current system that we ditch mathematics, our most basic objective language and keep on using a system based on lies, promises that never come to happen and lobbying? There's something clearly rotten with the current concept of "democracy" being used in this planet yet the only tools which can fix it are ignored.
Everything in the universe can be calculated, but the math side isn't what's hard, it's data collection and verification, and being sure that your algorithm is either complete, or encompassing enough to produce the correct results.
In order to "mathematically detect corruption, injustice, prejudice, racism, hatred", you need actionable metrics to create the model to begin with, and be sure that those aren't biased or incomplete.
Occupational blindness seems very recurring in tech. Just because a system can be built to solve a problem doesn't mean the system you end up building will.
I object to the premise of this article. Democracy isn’t broken, it’s just messy. A cursory glance at history should reveal that it has always been messy.
Thinking back on civics lessons we had in high school, it’s sort of weird that we teach such a romanticized version of the history of democracy to kids. It’s a guaranteed recipe for disillusionment - no matter how good your government is, it can never match up to the idealized versions of historical figures. They’re not here for us to converse with, else we’d quickly learn they are just as flawed as anyone else.
This article is deeply flawed in everything from the premise to all of the proposed solutions. Compulsory voting, electronic voting (online or otherwise), abolishing the electoral college are all fundamentally terrible ideas that pose direct threats to the integrity of a democracy. Not to mention that the United States _is not_ a democracy and never has been: it is a representative republic and that is an extremely important distinction.
It's sorry to say but the article reads like it was written by somebody without the slightest clue about how elections work.
> Compulsory voting, (...) abolishing the electoral college are all fundamentally terrible ideas that pose direct threats to the integrity of a democracy
Why? The electoral college is a pretty uniquely American institution, and Australia seem to manage OK with compulsory voting?
> Not to mention that the United States _is not_ a democracy
Well then how can they be a threat to the integrity of it?
Australia does manage fine with compulsory voting, however, they operate on a parliamentary system of proportional vote distribution. America might be fine without the electoral college, but we would need to alter our first-past-the-post system.
Please note that Australia's use of proportional representation is only in senatorial and state elections. The elections that determine who gets to form a federal government (Australian House of Representatives elections) are held under the non-proportional majority-preferential system (instant-runoff voting).
I'd like the US to both abolish the electoral college and adopt a different voting system for presidential elections. Actually, I consider the voting system used for the Australian House of Representatives more suitable for presidential elections than for parliamentary elections.
> Not to mention that the United States _is not_ a democracy and never has been: it is a representative republic and that is an extremely important distinction.
That's not an important distinction - it's misguided pedantry. The US is a republic and a (representative) democracy. Those terms are not mutually exclusive.
You're incorrect about what a democracy and a republic are. The US is both.
A republic is a system where each head of state is chosen by the people in some form, not necessarily by voting (res - of, publica - public). Contrast with Monarchy.
A Democracy is a system where the goverment's decision process is based on the population that it serves (demo - the people as in "demographics", cratia - to govern), this is determined by voting so decisions can be made according to the majority. In the particular case of modern democracies, because of the unyieldiness of having the whole population vote on every measure, we use what's called a representative democracy, where we choose someone to represent via voting us when deciding something. Contrast with dictatorship.
The messiness of our elections is excessive, and your points are generally good. But to our credit, it's hard to imagine a large, long-lived republic that would get a pat on the head from Jefferson. He had very strict principles that even he found difficult to maintain in practice.
That being said, we need a healthy dose of principles that safeguard liberty, and the determination to hold elected officials to them.
As a start, I'd like to suggest we stop using the word leader / leadership when - as your so accurately noted - they are elected officials. Some do lead. But leader is a title that should be reserved for those who actually do.
We've been duped into believing they are all leaders. They are not. We haven't even left the gate and already the first step is wrong.
I live in a parliamentary democracy (Canada). The ability to elect a minority government is actually a super useful protection mechanism because it creates 4 or or more options.
1. Majority for Liberal government
2. Majority for Conservative government
3. Minority for Liberal government
4. Minority for Conservative government
5+ Majority/minority for any of the various other parties (NDP, Green, etc.) <- doesn't really happen federally, but provincially it's definitely possible
The downside in Canada is that our appointed Senate is weak compared to an elected one, and you can whip your party to vote along certain lines.
There is no real democracy and its weird how people can think there is. People are not supposed to have the power to actually change things, and probably for good reason. How much time are we putting into really knowing the issues and researching solutions?
Most people pick candidates based on how well they do in debates or based purely on superficial qualities. Oh look, Obama looks stunning today, let's vote for him. Or look, Hillary is a woman, let's vote for her. The amount of effort on this is zero, which is also exactly what we actually want.
The system also makes sure no real suitable candidates have a chance. They need to be rich, first of all. Second, they need media support (media is owned by a handful of people, so they decide who gets to look good and who doesn't). Third, there are powerful people at the top who can make people catch a bullet (Reagan, Martin Luther King, etc). Fourth, there is actually a real illuminati group of people who already decides the direction of the world and what is needed to keep people distracted.
> Fourth, there is actually a real illuminati group of people who already decides the direction of the world and what is needed to keep people distracted.
No group of humans is smart enough to decide the direction of the world. It's an emergent phenomenon from billions of actors.
Wouldn't it be nice if there actually were real Illuminati managing the world? At least someone would have some control over what's happening, hopefully someone with a clue.
Good point about democracy being not so much broken as fractious... but it seems that the youngest are usually the ones most eager to push for political change against entrenched interests (perhaps because the youngest are not entrenched yet). I expect that stems from a person growing up being told that a system works in a particular idealized way (that bill-becomes-a-law cartoon) and then discovering as they begin to interact with it as they enter adulthood that it actually works in quite different way (legalized bribery). That sort of clash of ideal-against-reality motivates them to try to improve the system back towards the ideal.
If they were never taught the ideal, or worse, told that the way things work now is how its always been, would we rob ourselves of any opposing societal force beyond armed insurrection that could improve things?
This article is mostly about voting, focusing on technological "solutions" to voting, many of which make the situation less auditable and trustworthy. But democracy is not just about voting. It's about the whole system of participation and expression. Campaigning, canvassing, candidate selection, pluralism, lobbying, identity, NGOs, federalism/devolution, and media coverage of all the above.
This is partly why attempts to airdrop democracy into other countries have gone wrong. You can't just set up ballot boxes and hope the rest of the system coalesces around them.
Another lesson that might be learned from overseas "democracy promotion" is that nothing turns a democracy into a failed state quicker than ethnically-fragmented voting.
So I live in massachusetts, and no matter how i vote (in presidential elections) it does not make a difference, because the state always votes democrat.
Two times in my lifetime a presidential canidate has had the majority of the votes, and still "lost" the election.
Most people ive talked to have agreed that often laws get passed by paying corrupt gov officials. People just kind of accept it.
I agree with you that auditable systems are not going to bring the change to democracy that this country needs. This system needs some fundemental changes.
I don't think the argument that "electronic voting doesn't work because x, y, z" is implicitly making the argument "the current system does not need fixing". It does, especially in america for the reasons you've outlined, among others, but in many other western countries as well.
But electronic voting, at least right now, doesn't solve any of the difficult problems. I think we as "the technological elite", in many ways, need to be responsible with what our hammer makes us see as nails.
A perfect electronic voting system would make the current system more efficient and likely increase participation, at least somewhat, but it wouldn't fix any of the real problems, and we don't have a perfect electronic voting system _anyway_.
in Brazil we have had eletronic voting for some time now. Voting is compulsory and turnout is very good. It just so happens that our system is still very broken and messy. Blank or null votes are always high, many times surpassing the runner-up in our presidential elections.
Voting is certainly the biggest problem in America at least. The two party system means nothing, people don't vote for parties they vote for individuals. The last election demonstrates that it's certainly possible for even fringe elements to capture a party. But none of that matters because of all the problems with voting. The solutions to the voting problem are obvious and well known: independent districting commissions, ballot voting, election holidays and finally mandatory voting (that is a small $20 - $50 fine of anybody with a permanent address who doesn't vote).
But it will never happen and this is by design. The history of America is not the history of empowering people through democracy. It the history of the powerful working very carefully to ensure that only their votes count and only their voices are heard. Even today it is extremely rare to hear important politicians talk about how to make it easier for people to vote, instead all you hear about are the need for voter IDs as the solution to the completely non existent problem of voter fraud. All of these major initiatives to disenfranchise the citizens going back to the very beginning of the republic are now paying big dividends. Academic analysis of the American system has shown time and again the government works only for the wealthy.
Another lesson that might be learned from overseas "democracy promotion" is that nothing turns a democracy into a failed state quicker than ethnically-fragmented voting.
This is why the US is so messed up. It's also why democracy falls short of its promise in general. People don't care about policy on a large scale. People care about their tribe. Tribes are regional. Red and Blue states have remained largely the same for decades, if not centuries [1].
Ultimately, democracy is a very low resolution census.
This looks true descriptively, but is it true normatively? That is, does it have to be this way? I'd say that a large part of nation-building is precisely the effort to extend people's thinking of "us" to the boundaries of the country including everyone in it. Where divided communities exist they can be bridged, but it takes effort. A discussion of this in the context of Northern Ireland: https://sluggerotoole.com/2018/04/15/i-voted-for-peace-and-a...
Much of the problems of the US are due to people playing up divisions for party advantage. There's only so far that can go before there's blood in the streets.
This doesn't contradict your comment, and you might be aware of it already, but red and blue states are to some extent an illusion caused by the voting system:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2016/
To the extent that they're not an illusion, the red and blue states might be the result of a voting system that inhibits third parties and promotes hyper-partisanship.
The author (or his editor) may have done himself a disservice with this easily-ridiculed title suggesting that the whole article is predicated on a false premise, as the article actually goes in some depth into why there is no technological fix. I almost skipped over it myself.
That's something I never understood from the US (I am not from there). From those kind of article I kind of get the impression that every election occurs with different voting district. If that is the case it is extremely confusing. I understand you might want to do it every now and then, but not every single time. Is that right?
As far as solving the problem, maybe we should look at how we count votes. The way it is done know tend to polarize opinions. Maybe something that would average them like Range Voting [0] would be better. That way trying to win election is more about being fit for the majority rather than trying isolate a majority of people. Gerrymandering would become a lot more difficult as people can vote, to a varying degree, for or against you.
Thank you for you answer. Would doing without districts altogether for federal legislator be a possibility? And on state level you could model on the congress with one chamber based on districts' majority and one other on population?
It's not a near term practical possibility, it would require a Constitutional amendment.
For states, they each get to decide how to structure their own government. Many do have 2 houses. Here the upper house is elected from larger districts than the lower house, but each member represents 1 district.
I've the impression that representative democracy is clearly fragile at the moment (Cambridge analytica, concentration of media control, money in politics). I believe it would be very useful to consider adding some sortition to the mix of our current system.
I'd like to know how a 30-day hiatus from media, of any kind, prior to voting would change an election. If it is wise not to make key decisions during an emotionally charged situation, why not apply the same to voting?
Only the rich benefit from technological advances.
The poor today would be better off living in small remote communities away from civilization. It's in the interest of the rich to make sure that the poor remain addicted to the system even though it works against them.
That's why drugs have become such a problem. With drugs you can keep extracting value from the poor way past the point of 'would be better off living in the forest'.
> Technological utopianism (often called techno-utopian-ism or technoutopianism) is any ideology based on the premise that advances in science and technology could and should bring about a utopia, or at least help to fulfill one or another utopian ideal. A techno-utopia is therefore an ideal society, in which laws, government, and social conditions are solely operating for the benefit and well-being of all its citizens, set in the near- or far-future, as advanced science and technology will allow these ideal living standards to exist; for example, post-scarcity, transformations in human nature, the avoidance or prevention of suffering and even the end of death. Technological utopianism is often connected with other discourses presenting technologies as agents of social and cultural change, such as technological determinism or media imaginaries.[1]
How can we expect democracy to work well when most Americans (including college graduates) don't understand enough about American history, institutions, and civics to pass a basic test? Just follow the party line or vote for the person who is most attractive.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadWe have had democracy (and far more extensive -- to those participating in it at least) before we had electricity.
Also, many countries that call themselves democracies actually aren't. There are very few actual democracies, the only country that really manages to cross the line for me is Switzerland, it is also the only country where the citizens will associate themselves with the decisions taken by the government in conversation as in 'we decided that' rather than 'the government decided that'. That's the first and only time I've come across that phenomenon, everywhere else the government is seen as a force outside of control of 'ordinary people' even if they nominally have the vote and the power.
What's wrong with government "increasing" as society becomes more specialized and complicated?
And not everyone thinks that way, so it's not a place to "start" when talking about democracy.
[1] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
I agree in the larger sense though. In my opinion, the only way to stop a corrupt government is to shrink it.
In a civilization that has shown time and time again politicians are most often in bed with corporations and not with their electorate, why are we not using smart contracts for that? Why is it we are not using machine learning to find out when judges apply different sentences for the same crime depending on whether the accused is black or white, something pretty common in my country?
Since I first understood how deep learning works, I've been puzzled by the lack of verification we could be doing in order to mathematically detect corruption, injustice, prejudice, racism, hatred. All the tools are there, yet our laws and elections conveniently ignore those technologies and we're stuck in a system where we have to trust trust. What is so inherently good with the current system that we ditch mathematics, our most basic objective language and keep on using a system based on lies, promises that never come to happen and lobbying? There's something clearly rotten with the current concept of "democracy" being used in this planet yet the only tools which can fix it are ignored.
- easier to commit voting fraud
- no paper trail to audit
- further dis-enfranchisement of the poor
- no way to check if votes aren't done under pressure
- harder to verify votes aren't bought
In order to "mathematically detect corruption, injustice, prejudice, racism, hatred", you need actionable metrics to create the model to begin with, and be sure that those aren't biased or incomplete.
Occupational blindness seems very recurring in tech. Just because a system can be built to solve a problem doesn't mean the system you end up building will.
I'm afraid not. There are real limits (physical and otherwise) to what can be calculated.
The problem in short is that the people in power and quite a lot of those supporters don't want those problems detected.
Thinking back on civics lessons we had in high school, it’s sort of weird that we teach such a romanticized version of the history of democracy to kids. It’s a guaranteed recipe for disillusionment - no matter how good your government is, it can never match up to the idealized versions of historical figures. They’re not here for us to converse with, else we’d quickly learn they are just as flawed as anyone else.
It's sorry to say but the article reads like it was written by somebody without the slightest clue about how elections work.
Why? The electoral college is a pretty uniquely American institution, and Australia seem to manage OK with compulsory voting?
> Not to mention that the United States _is not_ a democracy
Well then how can they be a threat to the integrity of it?
The US could abolish the electoral college without replacing the first-past-the-post system (assuming by that you mean single-winner plurality voting): https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation
I'd like the US to both abolish the electoral college and adopt a different voting system for presidential elections. Actually, I consider the voting system used for the Australian House of Representatives more suitable for presidential elections than for parliamentary elections.
That's not an important distinction - it's misguided pedantry. The US is a republic and a (representative) democracy. Those terms are not mutually exclusive.
A republic is a system where each head of state is chosen by the people in some form, not necessarily by voting (res - of, publica - public). Contrast with Monarchy.
A Democracy is a system where the goverment's decision process is based on the population that it serves (demo - the people as in "demographics", cratia - to govern), this is determined by voting so decisions can be made according to the majority. In the particular case of modern democracies, because of the unyieldiness of having the whole population vote on every measure, we use what's called a representative democracy, where we choose someone to represent via voting us when deciding something. Contrast with dictatorship.
On the other hand, we need to look no further than gerrymandering to see that something has gone wrong.
Furthermore, we are barely a two-party system. We get to vote. What's lacking is choice.
The Fourth Estate is also in a troubling state. Unfortunately, they're not going to report that about themselves.
Finally. Let's not forget the power and influence of lobbyist.
It's hard to imagine Jefferson saying, "Yes. This is it. Great job."
That being said, we need a healthy dose of principles that safeguard liberty, and the determination to hold elected officials to them.
As a start, I'd like to suggest we stop using the word leader / leadership when - as your so accurately noted - they are elected officials. Some do lead. But leader is a title that should be reserved for those who actually do.
We've been duped into believing they are all leaders. They are not. We haven't even left the gate and already the first step is wrong.
1. Majority for Liberal government 2. Majority for Conservative government 3. Minority for Liberal government 4. Minority for Conservative government 5+ Majority/minority for any of the various other parties (NDP, Green, etc.) <- doesn't really happen federally, but provincially it's definitely possible
The downside in Canada is that our appointed Senate is weak compared to an elected one, and you can whip your party to vote along certain lines.
Most people pick candidates based on how well they do in debates or based purely on superficial qualities. Oh look, Obama looks stunning today, let's vote for him. Or look, Hillary is a woman, let's vote for her. The amount of effort on this is zero, which is also exactly what we actually want.
The system also makes sure no real suitable candidates have a chance. They need to be rich, first of all. Second, they need media support (media is owned by a handful of people, so they decide who gets to look good and who doesn't). Third, there are powerful people at the top who can make people catch a bullet (Reagan, Martin Luther King, etc). Fourth, there is actually a real illuminati group of people who already decides the direction of the world and what is needed to keep people distracted.
No group of humans is smart enough to decide the direction of the world. It's an emergent phenomenon from billions of actors.
Wouldn't it be nice if there actually were real Illuminati managing the world? At least someone would have some control over what's happening, hopefully someone with a clue.
If they were never taught the ideal, or worse, told that the way things work now is how its always been, would we rob ourselves of any opposing societal force beyond armed insurrection that could improve things?
This is partly why attempts to airdrop democracy into other countries have gone wrong. You can't just set up ballot boxes and hope the rest of the system coalesces around them.
Another lesson that might be learned from overseas "democracy promotion" is that nothing turns a democracy into a failed state quicker than ethnically-fragmented voting.
Two times in my lifetime a presidential canidate has had the majority of the votes, and still "lost" the election.
Most people ive talked to have agreed that often laws get passed by paying corrupt gov officials. People just kind of accept it.
I agree with you that auditable systems are not going to bring the change to democracy that this country needs. This system needs some fundemental changes.
But electronic voting, at least right now, doesn't solve any of the difficult problems. I think we as "the technological elite", in many ways, need to be responsible with what our hammer makes us see as nails.
A perfect electronic voting system would make the current system more efficient and likely increase participation, at least somewhat, but it wouldn't fix any of the real problems, and we don't have a perfect electronic voting system _anyway_.
But it will never happen and this is by design. The history of America is not the history of empowering people through democracy. It the history of the powerful working very carefully to ensure that only their votes count and only their voices are heard. Even today it is extremely rare to hear important politicians talk about how to make it easier for people to vote, instead all you hear about are the need for voter IDs as the solution to the completely non existent problem of voter fraud. All of these major initiatives to disenfranchise the citizens going back to the very beginning of the republic are now paying big dividends. Academic analysis of the American system has shown time and again the government works only for the wealthy.
Trump isn't a "fringe element" - he's pure GOP, just saying the bad parts out loud.
He has all the support of key groups, such as evangelicals: http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/383886-poll-white...
This is why the US is so messed up. It's also why democracy falls short of its promise in general. People don't care about policy on a large scale. People care about their tribe. Tribes are regional. Red and Blue states have remained largely the same for decades, if not centuries [1].
Ultimately, democracy is a very low resolution census.
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-see...
Much of the problems of the US are due to people playing up divisions for party advantage. There's only so far that can go before there's blood in the streets.
To the extent that they're not an illusion, the red and blue states might be the result of a voting system that inhibits third parties and promotes hyper-partisanship.
As far as solving the problem, maybe we should look at how we count votes. The way it is done know tend to polarize opinions. Maybe something that would average them like Range Voting [0] would be better. That way trying to win election is more about being fit for the majority rather than trying isolate a majority of people. Gerrymandering would become a lot more difficult as people can vote, to a varying degree, for or against you.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting
The districts only change every 10 years. The motivation is to keep the variation in population between the districts low.
For states, they each get to decide how to structure their own government. Many do have 2 houses. Here the upper house is elected from larger districts than the lower house, but each member represents 1 district.
#voteinpeace
The poor today would be better off living in small remote communities away from civilization. It's in the interest of the rich to make sure that the poor remain addicted to the system even though it works against them.
That's why drugs have become such a problem. With drugs you can keep extracting value from the poor way past the point of 'would be better off living in the forest'.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_utopianism
http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/2011/summary_summary.ht...