> I just don't get the draw of an electronic voting system.

Make elections cheap. For those that wish to experiment with majority rules a reliable system would allow the people to technically be able to vote in their government on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.

So further to this if elections are easy to run and are cheap what does it matter if someone breaks one election? You can just run the next one fine. It changes the variables somewhat and requires a sustained and persistent threat to be engaged to subvert the democracy. Combined with a team that investigate irregularities you can create a vaguely stable system, especially if you consider ideas such as binding authentication to geography instead of identity making it more difficult to stuff ballot boxes as teams can easily verify how many votes should be possible from a specific gps co-ordinate.

I'm not saying its a great idea, its probably awful but it opens up an option to society that previously hasn't been available and that's interesting.

The problem is so many government decisions can't be rolled back, like military, treaty, supreme court appointments, some environmental regulations... You'd have to change everything else and every other country first to tolerate a "by bad, we're gonna redo" attitude and then implement "my bad, redo".

An interesting simpler direct majority rule scheme is to halt elections completely and use jury selection techniques to select decision makers. What we'd lose in expertise we'd more than gain in the lack of sociopaths and psychopaths. A government completely of jury duty/draft would be far more effective than the one we have, which is probably why no one in power wants it.

>What we'd lose in expertise we'd more than gain in the lack of sociopaths and psychopaths.

I think far more likely these people would mostly just end up taking advice from whichever experts are left further down the hierarchies, who would then effectively run the country.

OK, I'm not saying no, but you'd need to explain how that's different than the current situation other than the top leadership would be less crazy and less corrupt on average. Or aside from being different, how would having better leadership make the situation actively worse.

Surely you can't be implying we have subject matter experts running the country now. Or that the subject matter experts we do have from law and show business who are in charge now are only in charge of their areas of expertise specifically law or show business? I'm just saying there's nothing wrong with having congress leading the American Bar Association, its just that having lawyers in charge of, say, nuclear power plants, is about as dumb as having plumbers in charge of source code.

So, using the US Federal government as an example, the sociopaths would need to convince 600-ish random people to do what they want on a continuous basis. Currently, the sociopaths need to convince ~100M random people to do what they want once every two years. The former might be superior, but it's not obviously so.

You make good points but as I understand it, Switzerland has a relatively direct form of democracy and already runs referenda very often.

> what does it matter if someone breaks one election? You can just run the next one fine

This assumes it's easy to detect manipulation which I think is very unlikely.

Edit: according to Wikipedia, Switzerland has 13 national referendums (not "referenda" apparently) in 2016 so not as many as I thought. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_referendums,_2016

Well, many things are decided by elected comitees, but referendum are required to change the constitution (we're ok with it changing, it's not seen as an untouchable artifact here).

Citizens can also decide to submit things to referendum, and that has absolute decision power. To do so you need to gather a set number of signatures depending on the level of the decision (communal, state-wide or federal). This is very often used by political parties as a "weapon" to counter their opponent's decisions - they organise signature gatherings, and if they reach their goal the people gets to have the final word on the topic at hand.

Of course, anyone can submit a referendum on anything, as long as you gather the required number of signatures. You don't need to be elected or in a party or anything like that.

The system does lead to some ridiculous things being put up for nation-wide discussion, but that is usually seen as the cost of living in a direct democracy. I can think it's stupid, but it's your right to bring it to my attention if you consider it important (a bit like freedom of speech and the old "I'll fight your your right to say it even though I disagree").

EDIT: doh' I did repeat the "referenda" mistake here :/ Edited out.

I would not want to live in any country where elections are run on the basis of cost.

I wouldn't want to live in a world where people's imaginations were bound by their current reality. I don't make this argument as a "right", its a what if. AND if they're cheap you can run em all the time, that's interesting isn't it?

No, I think being able to run more elections is dangerous, because there are a lot of reasons republicanism works better than direct democracy at scale, but people are self-entitled idiots and will want to weigh in on things they have no idea about or useful input on because they're important.

You seem to suggest that the complement of "direct democracy" is "republicanism", rather than "representative democracy". "Republicanism" is the opposite of "Monarchism", and it is possible for a republic to be a direct or representative democracy (or anti-democratic).

You're not one of those people who think "America isn't a democracy, it's a constitutional republic" are you? I see that meme expressed online a lot, and it's really unnerving that people believe that.

Also, might I infer that your support of "republicanism" over "democracy" is because you support the Republican party in the US and have been taught to fear and loath anything which starts with the string "Democra"?

> "people are self-entitled idiots"

Actually, that answers my question, thanks.

Republic: a form of government where elected officials exercise power on behalf of the public.

I would argue that kind of by definition, a republic is a representative democracy, though it's possible there are representative democratic governments that aren't republics.

The US is a republic, which is a form of representative democracy -- much like Im a mammal and a eukaryote.

The end of your comment of course is just a non-sense ad hominem. I don't support the Republican party, but your need to other and slander people you don't agree with is troubling.

And yes, people are self-entitled idiots. You, me, everyone else. That's why, even with it as our full time job, a support staff, and the genuine motivation to make a difference, we couldn't keep up with the actual complexity of every vote. Expecting the average person to do what a professional with staff can't is ludicrous!

Now, there are lots of ways we could use technology to better harness the public for decision making, but having them vote on everything would just be a disaster.

Thank you for your clarification and I apologise if I over-reacted. It felt like you were excluding yourself from the "self-entitled idiots" designation, which would itself be an attempt to "other and slander people". For what it's worth, I think you are under-estimating yourself if you describe yourself as simply a self-entitled idiot, but certainly we all have a bit of that in us.

My point, though poorly worded, was that very intelligent people with a lot of dedication routinely fail while working as senators and representatives because the job is legitimately complicated and hard.

We feel that we'd do good at it because most of us honestly have no idea what's actually required to work in that environment. I don't imagine that I, as an amateur with a job and social life, would really be more informed than the people in Congress. I don't think most of us would be.

So the solutions to the problem need to address how to combine our effort and expertise, rather than asking us all to be experts. (If that makes sense....)

I think there's a lot of promise in, say, using ML and public repos (eg, github) to let us collectively scan, annotate, and suggest edits for legislation.

Why isn't Congress just the maintainers of the authoratative repo that anyone can make a PR to? That seems much more useful than having a vote about everything -- let's argue about it, lay out our best cases as the PRs merge up the hierarchy, and let the Congress people argue out the final merge of a dozen proposal PRs? I mean, that's basically what they do, but it's weirdly pay-to-play, and it seems much more democratic to, ya know, let the public in on it.

Yes there are theoretical justifications for a republic over a democracy. But in modern practice, do you believe that the average person is more of a "self-entitled idiot" than the corporate lobbyists writing our laws?

Yes.

Not self-entitled part, but the idiot (on a particular topic) part. I think lobbyists could sell the public on things they could never sell senators on.

Now lobbying is a problem, but the solution should be in our picking and regulatory mechanisms, not in letting them lobby the public directly.

There are many forms of democracy and to act as if we've got it all figured out today and have the best system is potentially another form of being self-entitled and silly. Our system very much "sucks least".

We have plenty of evidence that governing by asking a large, diverse population over and over about local issues just leads to exactly the sort of tragedy-of-the-commons that government is meant to reign in.

Having too many votes simply doesnt work, because the voters can't put in the required effort per vote to decide on a prudent course of action.

The only reason to switch off paper ballots is of you're running so many elections you're just influence laundering by pretending to be democratic when you're not.

Interesting in the Chinese way :-(

well yea, you might not want to live there.....

  Paper works, and it works well. Anyone that can count can validate a single precinct

Add to that there's not really a need to speed up deployment of the results for elections and referendums in Switzerland.

Except for the "house of representatives" (Nationalrat) where it can take a tad longer due to the complexities of the vote, results are usually in at voting day before 6pm (Voting closes at noon).

I'm also deeply reluctant to accept the necessities of electronic voting. Given all parameters it's a really hard (if not impossible) problem to crack.

> voting day before 6pm (Voting closes at noon).

As a late sleeper, I find this voting system biased and unfair.

Sigh!

You don't have to show up on voting day in person. You can mail your vote in up to one month in advance. (Postage paid by your taxes)

You can chose not to vote for (usually dumb) reasons. But wanting to sleep in is not one of those.