Ask HN: Why is there no solution for direct democracy?

In fact, democracy is NOT about every single choice, it's about choosing a project for a society. And that's what politicians are for: to take decisions CONSISTENTLY to achieve a global goal. As a side effect: politicians may not be able to deliver on each promise, but it's not really a problem as long as they stay on the "track"

BTW. looking at Switzerland: do you really think that their last popular poll is such a good idea (about limiting collaboration with Europe) ? It has been voted but... it's not in their own interest (disclaimer: I'm french but not working in Switzerland)

It's all about the politics of power. The elite in power don't want your input on legislation, they want to keep it from you. It's up to us to take back the power though.

For more information on this, read Noam Chomsky.

One of them is Arrow's Theorem, which proves there is no such thing as a "public interest" in which the preferences of a multiplicity of people can be aggregated. There has to be some coercion and some of people's preferences dismissed out of hand if you don't want to have cycles where people like Nader better than Gore and like Gore better than Bush but like Bush better than Nader.

Another one is that people are afraid of anarchism because they think it would be like the Watts Riots. The problem is not that the sheep will either riot or get lazy, but that with no government, the wolves will fight each other to make one.

On that note, we have referenda in many states in the US and looking at the record it's hard to believe these are a force for good in any way. Typically some rich guy is able to put forth something that sounds "populist", promotes it heavily, and then we have to live with the results.

For instance, California had a referendum called Proposition 13 in 1978 which is a major reason why there is an ongoing housing "crisis" because it created a regime where building housing causes fiscal damage to the enclosing town.

Finally, the political system is it's own entity which needs care and feeding, and politicians will attend to to that. One theory of politics is that politicians will do and say the minimum they can to get and to stay elected. If politicians gave everybody everything they want, the cost would be way too high, so disenfranchising voters is the key to survival. Right now the "gridlock" in DC is pro-systemic because it means when somebody asks a (Democrat|Republican) "What have you done for me lately?" they can say "Nothing because of the (Republicans|Democrats)"

Do you really want people with 0 domain knowledge deciding whether to go to war? Or how to determine teachers' efficiency? Or how to set minimum wage? Or whether gay marriage is marriage? Or whether it is OK to execute people by a firing squad? Imagine 4chan running the government for the lulz.

Technology for this exists, or can exist. The problem is people. You really don't want an average person governing.

Not that an average politician is much better, but he/she can be. The idea with representative democracy is that you give people jobs and it is on them to execute. They get rewarded (re-elected) if they do well, and punished (not re-elected) if the do poorly. It's just that in the US where you have 90%+ incumbency rates in congress, there are no consequences for bad governing. It literally doesn't matter what you do, as long as you can raise money effectively, and that's what we are selecting for with the current system. Technology solutions should fix this problem, and the problem of PAC's, not let every single person with 0 knowledge weigh in.

One is the classic paradox of hiding something and revealing it at the same time: the vote must be secret to prevent social chilling effects, but it must also be strongly authenticated to preserve the integrity of the process. This is essentially the same problem that renders DRM ultimately infeasible.

The other problem -perhaps also a paradox- is that an abundance of information has not, in practice, resulted in a more informed populace. This is not to say that it has caused the populace to be less informed -that would be absurd- but it has not caused them to be particularly more informed either. 9/11 truthers and antivaxxers constitute some relatively non-controversial evidence for this claim; there are others that would invite non-productive flamewars if I listed them here.

You have to ask yourself, when a system is created where there's only 2 options, and where the same interests rule no matter whom you choose, do you really have a democracy?

Edit - apparently propaganda works. Both posts criticizing the US' democracy have been downvoted with no explanation. Still doesn't change the fact that what GWB started, Obama has continued, and the next incumbent, whether Dem or Republican, will continue... And the NSA will continue to grow, and whistle-blowers will still get imprisoned, and your rights will continue to be eroded away...

And the vote that comes up on top for me is one stating that the average US citizen is too dumb to be directly in charge (not entirely wrong, but also a very cynical attitude concerning democracy).

Like hiring management we put someone in place that we trust to handle the minutiae and if they screw up we replace them with someone else.

That being said, I'd be all for a 'representative tracking app'. Basically, continuous polling of a constituency on issues with 'friends of the people' briefs from experts or interested parties. Then a comparison with how the representative actually responds to and reflects their constituency be it from direct comparison to voting records, to legislation introduced to advocacy on behalf of constituency. It'd be tricky because the people interested in responding to polls wouldn't necessarily reflect the will of the whole being a self selecting group and brigading problems but there could be some sort of meta analysis of respondents as well so people could know how seriously to take the results.

with these lawyers in power - they make new laws every day and freedoms are actually shrinking

free speech zones, everything is taxed, marriage laws, drinking in public laws, its getting rediculous. poker and bitcoin are moving towards illegality (wtf? poker is actually my favorite hobby)

when did we decide we need someone to make laws every day and pay them with our taxes? this seems absurd to me. any insights? am i wrong here?

Greece (Athens) provided the model for direct democracy. The model for indirect, representative democracy is less exclusive, but the main ancient model is the Roman Republic.

> We solved this with newspapers, 100 years ago.

Newspapers are much older than 100 years old, and they don't solve the problem of lack of time. Arguably, they increase the information assymetry between the ruling class and the ruled class, since it is generally the former that controls the papers and selects what goes in them -- and what does not. This is somewhat offset when different factions of the ruling class disagree on what to present, in that information from both factions is likely to be presented (often in different outlets), but that increases rather than reduces the time and skill of the population needed to ferret out the correct information.

> But, it would be too much paperwork to get the votes from millions of people. It wasn't scalable. - We solved that with smartphones, 5 years ago.

We get votes from millions of people all the time. We solved this with distributed ballot counting and using basic arithmetic to aggregate the results. For the balloting methods we commonly use in the United States, ballot counting is trivially parallelizable and, therefore, easily scalable. Again, this was solved more than 100 years ago.

> I would like to have votes like the one in switzerland, but with smartphones.

We have referenda in the United States at the state level. We don't at the federal level for social (Constitutional) rather than technical reasons. What is the point of adding smartphones into the mix, except to create additional economic stratification?

The problems with remote voting are authentication and coercion. How would we know that it's really you casting your vote, and that someone isn't physically forcing you to vote in a certain way?

Government and voting are going to change at some point in the future. But probably not in the near future.

Democracy isn't the same thing as liberty and unfortunately people have started to believe freedom == democracy. When in reality democracy is just a way to organize decisions.

To put is succinctly if unnecessarily crass, but one could argue that gang rape is democracy in action.

However, there are major problems that I have come to realize:

1. Most people are absolutely stupid. Sorry.

2. Even those that aren't idiots don't have the time to know the issues that cross the desks of their representatives.

3. There's also the problem of very few people willing to give up anything for the public good. For example, nobody phoned into a recent NPR episode in favor of raising the gas tax, even though it's needed to keep the federal infrastructure maintenance fund from going bankrupt.

MAYBE this could work if you only get votes based on themes (Net Neutrality - For/Against, Free Trade - For/Against, etc). Then for high profile legislation you can get votes or something.

BUT, see 1.

Other than that there is also the fact that, for a reasonable definition of "fair", it is impossible to make a fair voting mechanism. This is known as the Condorcet or Voting paradox.

It is also hard to make an electronic voting system that is trustworthy. You need to guarantee anonymity for the voter, verity that the voter is authorized to vote, ensure no voter can cast votes more than once, ensure that nobody can tamper with the totals in a manner that can't be detected and other similar concerns.

For example, ensuring anonymity of a vote along with confirming a user is authorized to vote, using the same device for both, while communicating over a connection being recorded by an adversary... that is probably quite tricky.

One large benefit could be increased participation and political efficiency. Right now you can vote every 2-4 years, write your congressman or local official, or start a protest or media campaign. These are high-cost actions with little perceived effectiveness on the part of most ordinary people, which explains why some people don't even bother to vote, much less participate in a petition, rally, or other political movement. But if expressing your political opinion was as easy as writing a restaurant review on Yelp, and as effective as Yelp in getting restaurants to respond, you can imagine how enthusiastically most people might participate. High participation would in turn provide government agents and politicians with a clearer indication of what voters want, and also increase their sense of accountability to those voters. General collective awareness about civic issues and trust in the system could increase as a result.

There's some potential detriments as well. First, nobody can be fully informed on all the issues, so how do you allow voters to make educated decisions or vote by proxy? Secondly, how can you protect the rights of minorities in a system where the will of the majority is easily determined? There are technical solutions to these problems, but the larger problem is that people would simply need to trust the system to work, which requires a working example.

Which leads to your second question. Why has there been no solution implemented as of yet?

Trust is one factor -- nobody has seen a working model for a national system (even though there are some municipal governments that are very progressive in this area), and so it's hard to garner widespread support for such a system.

By and far, however, the largest problem is that constitutionally the federal government has no support for such a system. Currently elected officials would have to muster the support for a bill or amendment and pass it into law. All currently elected officials won elections in the old fashioned way, and it's unlikely they would want to support a bill that would abolish the methods that allowed them to win. In other words, it's hard to change the status quo.

There's some ways to get around this. Some political entrepreneurs have tried to start "web 2.0" parties, where the party will vote according to deliberations on a website, but in general these have failed to win much popular support.

Personally, I think the most likely scenario is that either the Democrats or Republicans will find that adopting some software to allow more feedback from voters will improve their get-out-the-vote efforts on election day. This is a big area of investment for both parties, so it's not unrealistic to assume they might experiment with it in the next few election cycles. If one of the big parties were to adopt some software like this, the other would rapidly adopt it as well, and in that manner we might see a more online political process adopted rather quickly.