
Ask HN: Why is there no solution for direct democracy? - tevlon
Hi there,
i always asked my self, where there is no app, that solves democracy.<p>Why are we still voting every 4 years.
Going back to first principles, we should ask ourselves : 
Why do politicians exist? They existed(!) in ancient greece, because people didn&#x27;t have time to inform themselves, right ?
- We solved this with newspapers, 100 years ago.
But, it would be too much paperwork to get the votes from millions of people. It wasn&#x27;t scalable.
- We solved that with smartphones, 5 years ago.<p>I would like to have votes like the one in switzerland, but with smartphones.
Can you give me reasonable arguments, why this is not already done ?
======
mcdoug
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are
stupider than that." ~ George Carlin

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.

~~~
tevlon
Well, speaking of domain knowledge : \- Why are politicians the ones that vote
for/against net neutrality ? Do you really think, they have the domain
knowledge ?

~~~
jeremysmyth
They're there because you (or people very like you) voted for them to
represent you when the time comes to make new laws. If you don't like the one
you've got, vote for another one.

~~~
DaFranker
This "if you don't like it, go elsewhere / vote otherwise" attitude really
gets on my nerves.

It seems to presume the simplest possible Game-Theoretical scenario is fully
representative of reality, and ignores all the factors that forced us to
create representative governments in the first place or that are included in
the common usage meaning of the word "politics".

To illustrate this, imagine an isolated SmallTown™ in northern Alaska, where
relocating a family to anywhere else in the world costs upwards of 50 000$
(fictive figure). Mr. Daddy has a job and a family in this town. Suddenly,
he's told that he now has to work 90h/week rather than 30h/week, and for
whatever reason this is fully legal for his occupation and employment
conditions. Now he has effectively no time to devote to his family. There are
no other jobs available in this town where Mr Daddy has the skills for being
hired that also pay well enough to support the family. "Not happy with the
schedule change? No problem, you can just quit whenever!"... and have the
family starve, as they're unable to relocate and there are no other options
available.

The above scenario is an extreme where I've cranked up the scarcity level to
100%. However, even if you're a senior programmer in Bay, the problems and
consequences and mathematics of quitting a job don't entirely go away.
Depending on the situation and individual, the collaterals associated with
quitting the job might be five times worse than accepting unfairly imposed
conditions, where the situation could easily be resolved to everyone's benefit
in a different configuration (think Nash equilibria vs Pareto optima).

And if you're not happy with this comment, well, obviously you should just go
read another one. (heh)

~~~
jeremysmyth
Perfectly valid comment, but you've put it in the wrong place. My comment is
about voting for one's representative, who then goes on to debate and shape
future laws. This is key to representative democracy and has nothing to do
with scarcity, mobility, or voting with one's feet/skill/labour.

If I don't like the policies of the guy I voted for last time, I won't vote
for him next time. If lots of people in my region do the same thing, then he
either has to shift policy or be replaced by someone who will. Are you
suggesting I move if I don't like his policies? That is _not_ how democracy
works, and isn't even close to what I'm suggesting. Nor am I suggesting
(anywhere) that if I hold a minority position that I move, or change my vote.

I sincerely think you read something into my comment that I didn't say, and
I'm trying really hard not to use the phrase "straw man" in regards to your
comment, because I actually agree with you, but you're arguing against a point
I didn't make.

~~~
DaFranker
Yes, I derailed substantially there. I think it was just another case of
needing to vent about Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, and your comment was
the convenient outlet for this particular one.

In retrospect I'm quite happy you didn't take it the wrong way, or worse take
the bait.

------
olivierduval
Switzerland is not scalable.... ;-)

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)

------
brockers
France had true democracy in the late 18th century. It became a popularity
contest to send political enemies to the guillotine.

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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> France had true democracy in the late 18th century. It became a popularity
> contest to send political enemies to the guillotine.

That was not a "true" democracy. It was a mixture of anarchy (in that what
government there was didn't have firm control of much of the country, or even
of much of the forces nominally acting in its behalf) and oligarchical
autocracy (in that what government _did_ have firm control was run essentially
by fiat of the Committee of Public Safety.)

Insofar as it was "democracy" at all, it was _extremely_ indirect: electoral
colleges were elected by the electorate (with ~11% turnout), who in turn
elected delegates to the National Convention, which in turn appointed the
Committee.

The US (either at the time or now) has much closer to "true democracy", by any
reasonable definition, than Revolutionary France ever had.

------
PaulHoule
There are lots of reasons but I will give four.

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)"

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.

Arrow's Theorem doesn't prove that, it proves that (for a particular
formalization of on intuition of what is "perfect") there is no perfect way of
taking rank-order-preference inputs from a group and producing a rank-order-
preference output that is the aggregated preference.

That's not the same as proving the non-existence of a public interest, or even
of one that can be assessed as a mathematical aggregate of some measure of
individual interest. It just proves that any public interest that exists
cannot (given the theorem's particular standard of perfection) be perfectly
assessed with only the information provided in ranked-preference-order ballots
(or, consequently, less information-rich mechanisms like choose-only-one-
option ballots).

------
clavalle
I don't have time to fully inform myself of every issue that the government
must deal with.

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.

------
cepera_ang
You know there was couple of guys who carefully thought about it and even
wrote a book about it. It's called "Cloud Democracy" and cover every single
aspect include many of discussed here in comments. In short, it is possible
and profitable, but should be developed with many considerations in mind.
Excerpt from Amazon description:

"We live in the XXith century, but the democratic procedures employed today
are mostly the same as centuries ago. The author's try to rethink the
processes of decision-making within large groups of people, employing modern
technologies. Meanwhile they show that "electronic democracy" isn't just
"electronic voting + traditional democracy" but much more could changed in the
way we cooperate and choose our representatives. "Cloud democracy" is a
futuristic concept which could me make practical surprisingly fast."

------
Mikeb85
The real answer is, politicians and the elite want power for themselves.

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).

------
ada1981
To understand this, you need to understand what our current republic was
designed to be a solution for. Read the Federalist papers, #11 is a good place
to start. You will discover that the motivation for the establishment of a
republic was actually to limit the will of the people and to protect the
"opulent minority" ie, the wealthy. The system was explicitly designed,
overtly, to preserve the power of the elite and making it extremely difficult
for the majority to organize and get anything done. So, our government
actually does exactly what is was designed to do, and it does it quite well.
Direct Democracy is a solution to a different problem.

~~~
ada1981
Further, years ago I designed a system that is a proxy based direct democracy
system. We called it dynamic democracy. Someone in the bay actually quit his
job and began organizing an ngo around it after I had a conversation with him.
Basically, you have the right to vote on everything, but you can also proxy
your vote to someone else on any issue, category of issues, etc. You can
always override a proxied vote, but you can find someone you trust, who is an
expert, and let them vote for you. This allows for you to save time, but some
people who really wanted to put time and effort in would get more votes
proxied to them. Of course, if they proxy their vote to someone else, it would
influence all the votes tied to them. You could see how voting blocs would
emerge organically.

~~~
filoeleven
I like this idea, and a Google search shows that it's still being thought
about. This is one of those things that would be really interesting to try in
a small slice of the real world to see what the people participating in it
think of the system. I wonder how difficult it would be to get a group to sign
on.

It also appears to me to be close to what the electoral college was intended
to do: you do not vote directly for a representative; you vote for a member of
the community whose opinion you trust to take the time to do the research on
the candidates and pick the one who best represents the community's interest.
That may have worked well when local communities were often more homogeneous
than they are today, now it's just a weird artifact. With dynamic democracy,
the ability to always override your proxy seems like it would mitigate the
problem of accepting a representative "whole hog" and ensure that for the
issues you find important you can always make your choice known.

What about the disadvantages of this kind of system? There are bound to be
tradeoffs but given my cursory understanding (and enthusiasm for some kind of
change) those are harder for me to see.

------
karmacondon
Most people don't care enough to deeply understand complex policy issues, and
shouldn't have to. Reading re-tweeted newspaper headlines isn't sufficient to
make long term decisions that will affect millions of people. That's why we
hire professionals that we trust to decide for us.

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.

~~~
tevlon
__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? __

We now have fingerprint sensors on the new phones. I can imagine, this will be
a standard feature in 3-5 years. Back to your question: This could also happen
with "regular" voting.

~~~
ConfuciusSay
Fingerprint sensors that can't tell the difference between an image and a
finger.

------
ChuckMcM
It is an excellent question but one where the answer might surprise you. From
a technical perspective the purpose of 'slowing down' voting is a function of
feedback control. Voting (whether it be on posts or on ballot issues) is a
system where the system can change as a result of a vote and those changes can
then cause more voting things. At the extreme end, where anyone could call a
vote any time and your 'vote unit' would beep at you, give you the summary of
the question and ask you to put your thumb on 'yay' or 'nay', not only would
you find yourself sitting there with this thing going off constantly, the
rules and regulations would change so quickly that nobody would be able to
reliably follow them, even if they wanted to.

Under damped voting systems can oscillate out of control to self destruction
just as effectively as circuits can.

But once you start down this path, what you'll really start to uncover is how
the institutions of government are designed to work. So its a great place to
start.

------
dragonwriter
> They existed(!) in ancient greece, because people didn't have time to inform
> themselves, right ?

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?

------
runjake
Why? The masses are fickle, have poor situational awareness, do not have
access to classified intelligence, are _unaccountable_ , and are easily
manipulated by special interests.

For example, think of how a knee jerk "Should we nuke the Middle East?" vote
would've gone immediately after 9/11\. Keep in mind, Afghanistan isn't in the
Middle East or Arab.

------
cpursley
Direct democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.

------
Frompo
I think the main reason is that there are plenty of people in the USA that
don't actually trust democracy all that much, see the plentiful comments to
that effect in this thread.

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.

------
howeyc
I've thought about this a lot, even thinking of running in a district with the
plan of "all my constituents will vote on my web site, and I will vote what
the majority wants for each bill before me."

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.

------
Millennium
There are two problems with this approach.

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.

------
junto
Governing by Referendum would be a nightmare. Think of thebstupidist person
you know. Then imagine lots of people like that. Now imagine all those people
making decisions about national defence or fiscal policy.

------
Dublum
An aspect of this no one is touching on is the mechanism for it. If it's done
digitally, securing the process sufficiently would be nigh impossible. I had
an instructor in an application security course who said "the moment we have
online voting is the moment you can start referring to me as Mr President" and
he's not wrong. Think of all the breaches you hear of involving credit cards,
then think of how motivated people can get if the reward isn't money, but
control of national policy.

------
TelmoMenezes
I think this question arises from the misunderstanding of not realising that
people are hypocritical about their preferences. The majority of people prefer
for the power to stay in known hands, while enjoying a legitimating ritual
that prevents the humiliations and loss of social status that would result
from open subservience -- as was the case in less sophisticated models, like
the feudal one. It's a win/win, but lying about your preferences is a
fundamental ingredient.

------
mc_hammer
currently i think we need to ban lawyers and bankers from politics

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?

~~~
evgen
And then we need to ban all of those computer programmers from writing code
because they keep creating buggy code that fails and is insecure.

Like it or not, lawyers are domain experts when it comes to law. They know
both how laws are read/interpreted at the pointy end of the stick and
understand the language in which laws are expressed better than you ever will.

Yes, you are wrong here.

------
stupidme
We need to redirect our politicians from focussing on reelection to governing.
And by governing I mean creating an easily understood and contemporary code.
This would include repealing irrelevant laws, etc. The gathering of money for
reelection should be placed into a common pool. It should be distributed
equally among all candidates. This would improve the efficiency of our govt.

------
Synaesthesia
What we call democracy is not true democracy. It's actually a very weak form
of democracy, where we don't even ratify laws, let alone participate in their
creation.

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.

------
anatoly-kern
The main response for 'why' is because politicians want to control the power
by pretending to have democracy.

------
stephensongr
Voting has to be truly and completely private to not permit of corruption.
Smartphones will not and cannot ever be so.

Watch this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY)

------
mbesto
Why isn't there one hammer than can build a house? Apps are just tools. You
need people to swing them.

------
pjz
See [http://liquidfeedback.org/](http://liquidfeedback.org/)

------
monroepe
Not everyone has smartphones.

~~~
tevlon
technology shouldn't be the problem. WhatsApp managed to support old phones as
well. A technological solution would be : sending an sms to a specific
government number.( free of course )

~~~
GotAnyMegadeth
Not everyone has phones.

~~~
tevlon
Again : technology shouldn't create problems. Phones should just be an easy
alternative to paperwork. If "you" don't have a phone, you should still be
able to vote with paper. Problem solved.

~~~
jeremysmyth
Not at all. The problem is now two problems, each with associated risks and
caveats. Now we've got hanging chads AND repudiation of several sorts.

------
rewonc
You have two questions wrapped up in one. First, what would be the benefits /
detriments of such a system? And second, why hasn't such a thing been
implemented?

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.

