I know a lady who's a likely Trump voter. But she also donated money to Hillary in order to get the "woman card". https://shop.hillaryclinton.com/products/the-woman-card She's pretty honest that it's just entertainment for her - like voting on American Idol.

Think about how many elections have been swayed due to "I support Obama because I'm not racist", "Bush looks like a cool guy to get a beer with", "boo yeah Trump - take that liberals who look down on me", etc? (Amusingly, neither Bush nor Trump will ever get a beer with you, teetotalers both.)

People get away with this because their vote doesn't matter. If they vote wrong, they won't lose anything. So why not just do what makes you feel good? You've got no skin in the game.

OTOH direct democracy may be not as broken, since the effects of voting are much more immediate and local. See Switzerland that constantly keeps voting against populist measures like lowering the retirement age. It lasted ~850 years so far, longer than almost all European states and 100% of American states.

Switzerland is compact, but even then it's a pretty loose union, a confederation with important laws significantly varying between its many cantons. This system is more or less imaginable in the US with a more restricted federal government (despite the size that was the rationale for the current multi-step representation system), and hardly even imaginable in highly centralized states like France.

The vast majority of people are borderline illiterate emotional animals. You don't see or interact with them because they exist in their isolated silos of service work and personally proffered bars and TV stations, but the number of rational informed actors in any given election is in a steep minority.

I don't know the Swiss well, but I'd hope they have a much better culture to support direct democracy than what the US has, because the US would be a disaster. Islam would be banned, Hispanics would be kill on sight, police would be given heavy artillery to demolish drug dens. Whenever any international news of any kind phases the country there would be immediate over-reactionary laws passed to diminish liberty and perpetuate a culture of fear, because that is a large part of what we have now, and giving that animal brain legitimacy on the national stage would be a global catastrophe.

This may be true in some cases; this is why I think universal vote, without any limitations, is not a good idea. Voting is a privilege and a job of running (a small piece of) your country. Compare it to a jury duty.

This, again, may be false in some cases. Unless the voting process is framed as a sports match (like it usually sadly is), the emotions are much easier to keep in check, and reason is easier to listen to, even without an advanced university degree.

OTOH if you don't trust your countrymen, I wish you all the luck in importing infallible Martians to help you rule your country as e.g. a king. On this planet the only way used to be growing and educating some portion of your countrymen to be able to run the country (without running it into the ground). This applies to kings and dictators to a very high degree. This as well may apply to a wider mass of voters.

I suspect this is what happened to the Swiss: centuries of local self-rule and rather immediate consequences of it, combined with living in rather harsh conditions most of its history, must have educated people not to take the voting lightly. I don't see modern Swiss killing Muslims or Hispanics on sight (it's not the Reformation wars time), but I do see a ban to build minarets [1]. Apparently the fallout was pretty small, without a "culture of fear", Muslims fleeing the country or something like that. Sometimes a minority has to listen to the majority; it's best when the compromise is as small as this ban. Regular not listening to the majority and alienating them makes for what you fear: the mob running over the castle of the highly-cultured but insolent lord.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_minaret_referendum,_2009

I'm a Finn. During the cold war we we're situated right next to Leningrad, but still pretty much free-trade capitalist liberal democracy. Our country has very little corruption, very good primary education, free health care, conscription and long line of very very well liked past presidents. Everybody had skin in the game.

Now compare that number to the 1 Euro worth of tribal satisfaction/self righteousness/other positive feels you get from voting for that national socialist.

In contrast, consider a true "wisdom of crowds" situation. When I hold irrational views about share prices, the stock market immediately takes my money and gives it to people with rational views. Bad decisions result in immediate losses in direct proportion to how bad the decisions are.

Then throw into the equation some very polarizing stuff like abortion, drugs, animal welfare, inheritance tax, immigration and whatnot. Then watch as some political entity loots government budget while people are arguing. This happens in Finland too now that Russia is weak.

Correction: democracy is fundamentally broken when no one has any incentive to vote correctly.

Your argument against democracy is based on one single implementation, and a pretty flawed one at that. Maybe take a look at how other countries implement proportional representation, or where the political landscape is diverse enough that no single party usually gets a majority on its own (e.g. most of northern Europe).

Why doesn't voting matter? Gerrymandering? The money race? Duverger's Law? The electoral college?

The same reason is why the government and many people will try to oppose it, because greater democracy is a threat to any power system.

The reason why people feel disconnected from politics is by design. The rulers don't want the people to participate, they want them passive.

So my opinions are likely very biased and quite useless for the political process. Even elected officials seem to have a hard time reading all the things they vote on, letting Joe average vote on almost everything seems like a recipe for disaster to me.

And yet you're expected to follow them. All of them. Ignorance is no excuse and lack of criminal intent is no defense.

We've got a bigger problem here than how the votes are cast.

If "media and lobbies" can get people to vote in their favor, why didn't the side with the money and lobbyists win the vote?

For many, many crimes intent is indeed a requirement.

The real problem is balancing tradeoffs, particularly between spending and taxes. Currently (in Australia at least) the size of the expected budget defecit is a crude metric for the overall financial responsibility of the government and is a factor in elections. If citizens can vote independently for spending versus taxes, then there is nobody to hold accountable (tragedy of the commons).

A proxy system should have an automatic expiration (1-month, 1-year, etc) as well.

What is the alternative? Some aristocracy deciding matters without any consent from the citizens?

If you get any alternative that's actually better than the citizens participating, I'd love to hear it.

Do you think everybody voting for Trump would vote for his hateful policies? I'm not on the US, but it looks to me that Trump gets most of his approval from his "I'm not one of the lizards" PR. If people didn't have to get the entire package, it's very likely they would be critical of those worse parts.

As democracy develops and citizens start to participate, we become more responsible for our decisions.

If anything, online voting system can let you "change your mind" later, robbing buyer of vote they paid for.

The people who sell votes don't care to "change their mind". They get their reward and they're happy with that. People who would bother to change their mind, don't sell their votes in the first place.

The difference is "upload a photo of your ballot" versus "upload a screenshot of your vote".

Now if online voting was allowed, the buyers could just take the seller's signature device and do voting himself. 100% the vote is correct. No possibility to get caught at polling station. The sellers don't hang around the polling station, thus less chance to raise awareness.

In addition to that, buyers could buy the device en masse from the addicts/homeless/etc and have a ready-to-use voting farm.

All in all, yes offline vote buying happens and it's not rocket science. But online vote buying would be much easier, quicker and less chances to get caught.

That's identity thieft, which should be punishable by a few years behind bars.

Also, make those signature devices tethered to receiving whatever equivalent of Social Security payments, and addicts/homeless will not let anybody lay a finger on it.

When the holder of the identity agrees, it is not a theft. Of course it is still criminal, but how could you reliably enforce that?

Once one of those addicts complains that you're using their ID, you're a toast.

The risk of getting caught taking a screenie in the security of your own home with no pollwatchers and election officials around is much, much, lower.

They should make killing also illegal.

it's very cynical and defeatist to argue that we should never try any solution that is not 100% perfect.

I, like you, live in a country were barely 50% of the population vote. This is exactly why I think Online voting is good for democracy. Essentially, more people will vote:

I am strongly against the view of the author.

I see that the majority (or a large portion) of voters are fanatics that vote based on affiliation and fanaticism, not policies nor experience.

Ie. The voting numbers are largely biased towards the political fanatic crowd.

I see online voting as a way to increase the number of ordinary people that vote. Getting the voting population to 80%+ or more is good for democracy. I see this as a positive.

Saying Online voting is a danger to democracy is like saying autonomous cars are a danger to safety.

Yes, if the autonomous system doesn't work and is made with loopholes that allow dangerous stuff, it will pose a danger. But if made to work fail-proof, it will be infinitely better.

There's no point in saying something will not work if your only argument is based on the proposition that it's going to be broken before it's even used.

Sure, an unsafe car is not safe. The only way to make it safe is to make sure it's safe.

The only way "democratic" online voting will work is to make sure it's "democratic".

Electronic mediated systems are utterly infeasible to audit. Among other reasons, many failure modes are silent.

The good standard for election administration is the Australian Ballot (private voting, public counting), administered per precinct (distributed), counted onsite when the polls close. It's observable, there's a physical chain of custody (that can be verified), it has the largest attack surface area (increases the cost of attack).

On the privacy note, only the Australian Ballot preserves voter privacy while ensuring a public count is possible. Postal balloting, touchscreens, online voting all remove the secret ballot (otherwise they could not be verified).