nornerator

The Internet is here! The Internet is safe enough for us to conduct our personal finances on. We buy and sell things on the internet, some of us base our livelihoods based on an internet service. The Internet is a fairly secure medium for the transfer of information.

It is now possible to have a direct democracy where the people vote and pass legislation.

We just need to set up a system where each individual can vote on legislation over the internet. Here is how it will work.

There will be a legislation website on the internet.

*Each individual will have their own account for this website(similar to an account with your banking website)

*Bills to vote on can be viewed any time after they have been proposed.

*Bills will have a time limit on them. Say a 7-day time limit and people can vote at any time during the 7 days for or against it.

*After the time limit is up the votes are tallied and the bill either passes or fails

*No Secret ballot, each bill will be linked to a page that lists every individual that voted for it and how they voted. This will ensure there is no foul play behind the scenes.

*If there is a discrepancy between the way a person's vote is tallied and they way they intended to vote there will be a 2-day grace period after the votes have been tallied over which a person can switch their vote

What do you all think?

Wickedshot

In theory I like the idea.

But three issues:
1. Voter fraud is easy when theres no paper trail.
2. Intimidating people for their votes. Private ballots make intimidation nearly impossible.
3. Not everyone has internet.

None the less I'd like to see such.

SleepyJohn

There are Millions,and,Millions, of Old, Poor, Retired,Disinterested, Folks out THERE!
Look at how many voted, Last Time! We'd guess, less than ½ own a PC,and, are "On The Net". Not to mention, those That Don't know how to work it. We where taught,and still have,"Puiter Tuiters", who keep us up to date,. on the digital "Dash-Blank" comunications, not to mention, The WEB!! Sure allot of people where brought up with it. More wheren't. If it's "New", it's harder, than if it's alwys been there!+/-Money$$'s

Yana Usdi

Nice idea, but we aren't good enough to run a nation. How much do we really know about the economy? The rest of the world? Trade? The American public is real prone to swings in our tastes, it drives marketers crazy because every time they think they've got us pegged we change again. It keeps life from being boring for us but doesn't help with our education or consistency. Two years into the Iraq war surveys claimed most of us still couldn't even find it on the map. We don't even bother to show up to vote and when we do most of us can't answer simple questions about the issues. We need people making these choice who do know about the issues.

The problem these days I see as twofold. First is the perpetual campaign forced by big money in politics, they have to start collecting money for the next race almost as soon as they finish the last one and they've got to spend way too much time collecting favors which tends to get in the way of making the right choice sometimes. We've got to get big money out of politics. Public financing maybe? Something else? Buckley v. Valeo (money = speech) makes doing it through act of Congress problematic, even if they would pass it any bill so far that might be effective has been deemed to be unconstitutional.

We've also got to grow up as a people. Electing someone because they are a good Christian, or because they look like a working man, or any number of the other reasons we've used tends to get us politicians like we've recently had. The rest of the world knew better on WMD and such, why didn't we? The intelligence wasn't bad, the politics was. The politics was driven by what we wanted rather than what was, we simply saw what we wanted to see and ignored the rest. We need to stop electing politicians who we like and start electing ones who are smarter than us, who will take the time to read and know the things we don't read and don't know. As a people our job was to judge them by the results and we've stopped doing that in favor of a beauty pageant instead.

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