A democracy is a system of government in which the population votes to decide on matters of policy. In its simplest form every citizen
has a vote and during a referendum they can cast that vote to indicate their opinion on the matter once all the votes have been cast or
the voting deadline has been reached the votes are counted and a decision is made based on those votes. This type of democracy is called
direct or pure democracy and although rare, it is used in certain parts of the world, the most common being Switzerland.
The more common kind of democracy is a representative democracy which as the name implies means the population elects representatives
that then make the decisions. The advantage of this form of democracy is that countries don't need a sophisticated infrastructure to
handle potentially thousands of policy decisions with millions of votes every year. Another advantage is that citizens don't have to
be constantly thinking about policies and making decisions on them, we can delegate those decisions to a few people whose job it is to
think about these topics. These are both great arguments in favor of representative democracy and I'm sure there are more, but there
are some arguments against this form of government that are so important that no argument in favor can overcome them.
One of the arguments against direct democracy is that it creates a tyranny of the majority. That is, a majority can enact policies
ignoring the needs and wants of a minority which results in oppression. I fail to see how this is solved with a representative
democracy. In a representative democracy a majority can also opress a minority. The only thing to avoid a tyranny of the majority is
to create a documental with fundamental rights. These fundamental rights are rights most people would agree with, such as the right
to live, free speech, and privacy or disallowing the government and people to discriminate based on religion, race, or gender.
No two people in the world have the exact same opinions on everything, but when we cast a vote for our democratic representative we
must side with one person on all decisions. This means you have to way your opinions and your values and decide which of them are more
important even when these values and opinions have nothing in common. If fiscally you lean "right" or "conservative", but socially you
lean "left" or "liberal" you have to decide which is more important. Lets go back to the year 2000 when in many countries homosexuals
could not marry. Most people in western societies were fine with homosexuals marrying, but policies were behind because right wing
politicians were against gay marriage. That meant that voters that leaned right on many aspects had to be against gay marriage, even
if they were completely in favor of it. This is even worse than a tyranny of the majority, it is a tyranny of politicians.
In representative democracies there is no way to agree with a politician on most issues, but
have a dissenting opinion on one matter. Citizens must find a representative and/or party that they will agree with fully which is
completely absurd. Not only is it absurd, but it creates huge problems. People end up being radicalized because we don't see the middle
ground. Most people are sane, rational, and empathetic, but they can't express that when they vote, they must choose a side. This means
that we end up thinking that everyone that votes for a "liberal" party is a communist and everyone that votes for a "conservative"
party is a fascist. The truth is: most people want the same things for themselves and for others, where we differ is in what steps we
think we should take, as a collective, to get there. Most people on both sides of the political spectrum can sit down in a room and
have a political conversation and agree on a thousand topics. They won't agree on everything, but they would realize that they are not
so different. Representative democracies are one of the reasons, if not the main reason, for radicalization.
The main argument against representative democracies, as they are currently implemented, is that we stop living in a democracy. We vote
every X years between Y candidates all of which lie to us and all of which need money to run for election which means they end up owing
favors or being in debt to people with money. Once these politicians are voted into office the populace has no means to keep the
politicians in check. These elected politicians can now completely ignore everything they promised and the policies they ran their
campaigns on and do the exact opposite or do whatever they want. The head of government can usually be impeached, but this is not a
process that is started by the populace it is instead started by other politicians and this only deals with the head of government not
with other politicians such as senators.
These arguments boil down to the fact that representative democracies are not democracies, instead they are elected dictatorships. Every X
years the citizens of a country vote for the dictator that will rule their country for the next X years. Politicians may have promised
the world during their campaign, but once in office they must have support from other politicans, they must keep their debtors satisfied, and
they must look out for themselves meaning the country is not even in the top three priorities of a politician.
Let's recall what a direct democracy is: one person one vote and people people vote directly on policy with no intermediaries. This system
had two big problems the required infrastructure and people needed to be informed about too many topics. Let's fix them.
Today we do thousands of things on our phones, so why not vote? Making votes secure is easy, just like we have secure messaging, banking, and
shopping. The hard part is making sure that peoples' votes are anonymous and can't be coerced while guaranteeing that they are counted and
a single person can't cast more than one vote. This problem is being researched by some cryptographers, while others consider this problem
impossible to solve. So, it's over. All this to tell us we have a problem that can't be solved. Well, not exactly.
Originally and in some current direct democracies votes were not anonymous. People vote in a town hall by raising their hand similar to how
elections between neighbors in a building decide on policies for the building. The trouble with votes not being anonymous is that a bad
actor could coerce people to vote a certain way and make them prove it or that the government could store what people have voted and
retaliate against people that have voted against their wishes. These are serious problems, but just like we do with our current voting
system, we can mitigate these issues. We can have multiple authorities at a town, district, or city level that collects the votes of the
people that live there and then sends the central authority a tally of the votes. These votes could be inspected by different organizations
to make sure that the value sent to the central authority is correct. All these could be done without the system indicating who exactly voted
for what. The system would know and if the keys to decrypt this information were introduced a group of people could see exactly who voted for
what. These keys could be distributed with different parts of the keys given to different organizations and to the authorities so that a
certain amount of organizations would have to come together to decrypt the data. The votes would not be fully anonymous, but it would be pretty
close an unlikely that many organizations came together to deanonymize the data and prosecute people especially if this data was deleted after X
amount of time.
What about the other problem? How are people going to be paying attention to hundreds of policy changes? Well, this is a solved problem:
representative democracy. So back to elected dictatorship? No. People could vote or not vote for hundreds of policies, but on top of that we
could have people that want to be representatives, that is people that vote for other people. Anyone can become a representative, all they have
to do is turn on a toggle on the voting app. Once that is done other people can decide to allow that representative to vote for them. The
differences with the current representative democracy implementation is that: you can rescind your vote any time you want, if a representative
represents more than 100 people their votes are public so people can see what they are voting for, and lastly even if you are represented by
another person you can still vote, in which case your vote will override whatever your representative voted for in your name. We no longer have
a dictatorship that we don't control for X amount of years and on topics that are important to us we can vote to make sure that our representative
doesn't cast a vote against our wishes. These representatives which are only so at the whim of the populace wouldn't need as many benefits as our
current parliamentarians. None the less once the represent enough people that their vote becomes public they could gain some advantages like for
example getting a stipend relative to the amount of people they represent.
This form of representative democracy could be taken a step further if we allowed giving a representative a partial vote. That is, you give
representative X 1/3 of your vote and give representative Y 2/3s of your vote. This way you hedge your bets in the off chance that one of the
representatives decides to burn the good will they earned for whatever nefarious reason.
Another possible improvement, which would be very hard to get right, is allowing people to have different representatives for different topics.
One single person can't be an expert in everything. You could select a representative in matters relating to the climate and have a different
representative in matters relating to infrastructure. Setting this up properly would be very hard because many policies touch more than one
topic. For example, the financial topic is present in practically every policy, almost anything we do has a financial impact. Building a road
for example would include at a minimum a infrastructure vote, a financial vote, and a climate vote. Setting this up and deciding whether a vote
includes or not a certain topic and what the weights associated to that topic, if any, might be is an extremely hard problem. It is aslo something
that would be very hard to delegate to a single entity because of the power that that gives that entity, but also very hard to crowd source.
The basics of this system could be implemented in less than the tenure of an elected dictator, so why isn't it? Well, unfortunately for us the people in power
are in power because they crave power. They are not there to improve society for the rest of us, they don't care about us, just like everyone
else what they care the most about is themselves. It is a happy thought though, to think that maybe one day we are actually in control of our
society and we can come together and dictate policies that will improve our lives without having to worry about what other countries or the
wealthy to whom our politicians are in debt think.
These ideas are not new; for more information regarding what this system could look like, take a look at Liquid Democracy.