That is not a small percentage. And I am not talking about forcing a new system. I am talking about voting for it. If 40% care about a change, then it won't be voted on.Originally Posted by Bubba
I didn't say unaccounted. I never implied that we don't have a democracy. But that doesn't mean that in a direct democracy your vote doesn't have a much greater role.
I have already commented on this. Let me get straight your argument. You are saying that if there is a vote in New York, since the city has the most population, the decision will be based on the people in the city. So, the decision will not take into account the situation and need of the people outside the city. Am I right?
IF that is the case, that can be true. It is not most of the time, though. The decision might not matter where you are. If you want to make your military stronger by increasing its annual cost, what would it matter where you live for example?
Then, as you said, you have the state divided in counties, towns and such and some decisions are taken from there. The solution is already there, divide the regions into smaller pieces. I don't see how the change of the system would affect this. You could also have each region have a vote and count the votes for each region. Instead of the region having a rep you will use the majority. There are ways.
Again, I am not sure we are in the same page. What would change in a direct system for the candidates?
I use it as an example because the "it does work" is relative. Democracy means that the people have the power, not representatives. So I see our system incomplete and in that sense, "doesn't work". Except, if a direct system isn't feasible. Then we have to settle for what we have.
I said that we shouldn't vote for all laws. I said that more than once. We can vote for the laws that we want to vote or for laws that are labeled as "important". If for example there is a vote on law A and only the 10% votes, then you can call the number too small. If 60% vote, then that number is high enough to count the vote. In order to avoid everybody voting wherever they feel like to, you would label some votes as important so people would focus on those. The rest you would have to have the pros do so for you. I don't support unrealistic ideas. I support fro the people to have the ability to vote. If they don't use that privilege or are too busy, then the lost nothing.
A direct democracy would require the people to be educated and more concerned, but I find that a positive thing.
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A direct democracy is more balanced. "You can lie to some of the people for all time, you can lie to all the people for some of the time. You cannot lie to everyone all the time", or something similar to that. Controlling the government is much much easier than controlling the majority. So you avoid corruption and a worst case scenario has less chances to occur.
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Now, the government is responsible to check the government. The people would either have to rebel or would have wait and vote for someone else if the government abuses its power or does a poor job. In a direct democracy, the people check the government. If they find something wrong, they can simply vote against it. So there is one more layer of protection. That layer the hardest to control and the one that has less chances to be corrupted. A direct democracy doesn't imply that you don't have people to govern you. There will always be people in charge.
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Direct democracy is more accurate of what the people wanted when the they had enough of a government having too much power. I don't think they want that now either.
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In a direct democracy you don't concentrate your voting right on one vote, the one to elect a representative. You vote a few times per year. That is much more practical. Because if you don't agree on everything that a rep has to offer, you just vote on the things you agree with him. If you could see the future and you knew that this rep votes for A, B and C, the other for B, C and D laws and you agree only on A and B, then you would be satisfied with your decision. But if you could vote directly, you would choose just A and B and be more satisfied.
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There is no direct distinction between a direct and indirect democracy except from the level of directness. We do vote directly now, as we would vote through representatives in a direct democracy. The question is how often. I find it really hard that people only have time and only have the ability to vote once every few years! They have time at least to vote for a few times per year. The "they are not ready to vote" implies that we don't have a democracy.
Having a direct democracy would give a flexibility on what we can vote on and what we can't, based on more serious factors than "we can only vote for reps".
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Reps are not independent. They belong to groups. Which gives a lot of powers to the leaders of the group since they can choose not to support them if they do whatever they want.
The government has to have the majority. Why is that? Because otherwise it couldn't pass the law it wanted. It would be impractical. So again you are govern mostly from a certain group, not from X independent persons.
Why not have X independent persons? You vote for those rep and their majority vote would be the final decision?? The answer is obvious, politicians are not really independent and the independent ones will have far less chances to get elected.
In a direct democracy there are groups of people but rarely the majority belongs to one group. So even if group X will follow what their leader says, that would be a small percentage of votes, not the majority.
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There is no real reason to label the system and keep if all the time. Let again have a flexibility. There is a lot of ways to do so. I give an example of a semi-solution on the fly:
Each person can choose either to vote or leave it to his rep. So you get a choice in case you disagree with your rep. If you want to be independent you simply don't vote for anybody. So you would say "I vote this in place of my rep which is this.
Or the people could vote and take into account both the people's and the reps vote.
So you would have a balance. If the people want to vote for something stupid, the reps will get a saying and balance the situation. If the reps wanted something bad for the people the people could vote against it.
The magnitude of each group would be dependent on the number of people voting on it. If Y people are voting 70% saying "yes", then that would count 0.7*Y. If the reps said 60% "yes", that would count 0.6*X. So the people would decide how much they want to be represented and how much they want to participate.
Or something like the above. The absence of the ability to vote directly is just something I don't like.
I want to clarify that I m not against representative democracy. I just find it the first step to go to a more "real" for my standards democracy.
