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Proxy Voting


Introduction

I have been disturbed by the corruption of the American political process. Some of the problems include: All democracies have these or similar problems. My solution is proxy voting on every bill.

How It Works

Potentially every citizen has the right to vote on every bill. This is managed electronically over the Internet using a digital signature system to prevent fraud. The votes are counted by several totally independent teams. Basically anyone who wants to put up the money to tabulate votes can become a scrutineer.

Of course, most people have not the time or interest to vote on every bill. They have several options:

You always have the right to override your normal proxy vote, to revoke that proxy at any time, not just at election time, or to reassign your proxy for any interest area.

Advantages

Disadvantages

Conclusion

In a way we are using proxy voting already. Polls that direct politicians are a statistical sampling proxy vote. They are different in that people don’t vote on bills, but rather carefully worded questions designed to elicit the correct answer. They are also different in that they are not legally binding.

Technology makes it possible to hold electronic referenda much more cheaply than full elections. Those without understanding of the technology can still participate via proxy voting. It also creates a grass roots democracy, of representatives of perhaps only dozen people in some area of expertise. This decentralising should go a long way toward breaking up the corruption of our current representative governments.

You phase this in gradually, giving say 10% of the votes on a bill to the proxy system and gradually up the percentage once we find out how it works in practice. This has a similar democratisation to the proportional representation, without bringing disruptive elements into government.


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