> I don't understand the argument of reducing cost of elections and scaling.
How about if we could scale ballots to such an extent that a citizen can vote from wherever/whenever on all issues they're interested in[1], not just a head of state election every X years? Wouldn't that be a more democratic process ?
I believe it would, and that paper ballots won't get us there.
Well, I live in a representative democracy, and it mostly works. I don't think the vote is only way to express political power, just the most 'sacred' and extreme of all. The one of removing your ruler (or ruling party) from power.
And making people vote on issues they're interested in just makes me think only extremes will be heard and counted, and I would have to give my opinion on a bunch of things I don't really care about, or am not quite competent enough. To me, the democratic vote should be a precious rare thing, to elect a representative or a bunch of them, and trust them to do a non-too-shitty job of it.
Referendums, IMO are among the worst democratic moments in my republic, and I feel my concitoyens (from talking to some, and reading what they say in polls or public forums) don't really vote on the specific subject but on a global policy rant. It's a place to vent, not to decide ; when your elected ruler throws up his hands and gives you back the wheel at the last moment, with little context, FSD-style.
> I don't think the vote is only way to express political power, just the most 'sacred' and extreme of all. The one of removing your ruler (or ruling party) from power.
Indeed, the voting is less about getting people you want to have power, but more about preventing people you don't want from getting power (or retaining the power). Votes don't directly affect the actual policy decisions that representatives make afterwards, you're not legally bound to fulfill your campaign promises. What voting process does instead is telling the society, ‘See, the elected officials are not massively hated by the people, no need for a concern’.
The thing about representative democracy is that your representative is still your representative even if you didn't vote for them.
When the ballot process can be done in the morning with your coffee and toast, maybe more people would be inclined to apply judgement and vote in good faith.
And I think I speak a truism when I say that more deciding power for each citizen is a better kind of democracy than representative democracy. What I'm hearing from you are just hypotheticals that nobody can be sure of without actually trying a system like this. Basically that's all I'm saying, the current democratic process leaves a lot of citizens without proper representation and probably we need to move in a direction where that's not true any more. We need to look at alternative ballot systems which would allow that. If the current political strata are wrecked in the process, all the better.
How about if we could scale ballots to such an extent that a citizen can vote from wherever/whenever on all issues they're interested in[1], not just a head of state election every X years? Wouldn't that be a more democratic process ?
I believe it would, and that paper ballots won't get us there.
[1] A current instance of this is the Swiss voting system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_Switzerland