3 suggestions to improve Democracy.

[TteFAboB]

Disclaimer: First, not all Democracies are equal, these suggestions are based on my experience, my Democracy, my reality, not yours, most likely it wouldn't be easy to import these ideas even if you liked them, or you'd have to adapt them, so I'm only posting them here because:

1. Kapitain should not hold the monopoly of every poll.

2. To annoy Hitman, Type941, Skybird and maybe CCIP.

Moving on,

Suggestion #1:The Vote Against.
When you vote, you vote for somebody, for something, fair enough, so far so good, but, this leaves the populist door open, as long as a politician can seduce, offer/promise or outright BUY votes, he can get elected. However, the word spreads and this politician will be renowned for his behavior, hold on for a moment now, there's another case, the bad politician, those who are not necessarily populist but still manage to hold popularity even after corruption scandals or proven inneficiency.

For both of these cases, and more, we need the option to Vote Against, vote against them. Whenever there is an election, you vote for someone, you vote for a Mayor for example, then you vote against another Mayor candidate.

I think most people are more certain about what they DON'T want than what they do want, that's the logic behind it, also, you can vote for whatever conviction you have on your candidate, but you also make sure you vote against what you don't want for sure.

Rejection votes are subtracted from positive votes and the result is considered the valid number of votes. If the end result is a negative number, the candidate should be punished, fined, arrested, sentenced to community or forced labor, whipped, etc..

No matter the money or populism, bad candidates will not be elected, not as much.


Suggestion #2:Direct contact with the politician.
If you voted for someone in the past ask yourself these questions: did you kept track of him (his positions, speeches, votes, etc..)? Did you communicated with him or his cabinet? Did he represented you properly? Did you successfully assisted him with your expertise or proposed any project? If so, did he took it forward?

Most likely, you will answer No to most of these questions, but today we have a new ally that can help us turn this picture: The internet.

When you vote, you have the optional option of optionally inputing your e-mail which will be sent to your candidate IF he is elected, if he doesn't win the database is deleted, you should create an e-mail specially for this, such as ilovebush@hotmail.com, and the most suspicious should access his account in cyber cafes that don't keep your personal record.

This will allow you to directly tell your representative how you think he should vote, he will send an e-mail to you some time ahead of the voting sessions and ask for your opinion, comments and obviously your vote. Then he can decide what to do with it, if he disagrees with some of his electors, he can e-mail them back stating why, to which they can reply. If enough of his electors think he should vote one way, he will have no option but to do so, unless it goes against his set of values, the law, or Democracy itself.

This system is based on a fully electronic voting method, I haven't thought deeply about implementing such a thing with paper elections, in higher levels (ie.President) it would be impractible to have a dialogue due to the massive number of e-mails, but it would still be possible to ask for the votes. Always with the use of a proper sorting software.


Suggestion #3:The end of the political career.
Politicians, who are they? What are they? Why do we keep them? Why do we need a politician to spend his entire life with political seats? There are great politicians out there, no doubt, there were great politicians in history, no doubt, and we can use great politicians today, why not.

But the political career demands far too much from anybody who wants to venture into it, if somebody has a great idea or believes he can do a great job, he should be able to get in there and out of there easily.

Considering an ideal electoral enviroment (no need for absurdly expensive campaigns, possibility to join a party or run independent, etc.), a regular professional, a judge, a lawyer, a businessman, a doctor, an engineer, an economist, a farmer, anyone with the skills and dedication to run for a political seat who can convince enough electors. This candidate shouldn't have to be a millionaire like Mayor Bloomberg (which is an example of a non-political politician), but people with expertise to share, people which are often appointed for lesser seats, people who volunteer to manage public schools, hospitals, even universities. These professionals who are willing to spare some of their time to help could do much more if they were seating in a more powerfull position, but they don't want to follow the political career, they are halting their lives for a few years just to return for it later and probably never run for a political seat again. They are professionals, they become politicians for some time, then return to their professions.

This would bring an influx of competent politicians and demand the career politicians to be good enough, or else they'll have no chance to compete.

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To vote blank or vote against me, you'll have to reveal your identity so I can send, ehh, a special greeting card to you (actually, I've reached the maximum number of options, I had to remove options such as: Kapitain's polls are better).

[Kapitan]

why involve me ?

[TteFAboB]

You are the greatest Poll'er.

[Skybird]

:doh:


I like #1, #2 and #3.
I like #1 and #2.
I like #1 and #3.
I like #2 and #3.
I like #1 only.
I like #2 only.
I like #3 only.
I like #1 and Vote Against #2

Dying young is preferred over here.

[Mustang]

Your Democracy sounds like an episode of Survivor.

I want an immunity idol from the IRS!

[TteFAboB]

Glad you guys liked it :up:

I don't want to influence the poll, but I find #1 to be the best by far. :rotfl:

[Type XXIII]

Number one is a good idea, but your description would not be the best implementation. The reason for this is that you haven't considered tactical voting. If you have a vote for and a vote against, it is a great chance that you will vote for the party (canditate, option) that you support and vote against the party (candidate, option) that you consider to be the most likely rival.

The result of this is that it wouldn't be the option with the most support in the populace that wins, but rather the option with some support and a low profile.

As an example, assume an election in which there are three options, A, B and C. Prior to the election, it seems clear that A and B split 90% of the population fairly evenly between them, while the remaining 10% supporting C. In the election, many of those who vote for A, vote against B, because they consider B the most dangerous rival. And vice versa.

The end result is that the votes for and against A and B pretty much cancels each other out, while C, supported by only a minority of the population, wins.

#2 is a good point, but I think it would be better to decentralize power and distribute it to local legislative and executive bodys. When more power, and more focus is given to the local administration, there will naturally be more contact between politicians and the people.

The same goes for #3, with more decentralization, you will get rid of a great deal of national politicians, and, with more local rule, there will be smaller areas in which to campaign, and therefore less costly and less of a career for the politicians.

[TteFAboB]

Thanks for your comments Vikinglander. :know: :up:

[Type XXIII]

Oh and on another note concerning #1: If everyone has one vote for and one against, we can consider the vote for as positive and the vote against as negative. Each voter can be considered to have a total of zero votes (1 vote - 1 vote = 0 votes), 0 multiplied by any number of voters is still zero, so the total number of votes is zero. Therefore, for there to be any options with a positive total, there have to be options with a negative total. So in other words you can expect a lot of talented politians doing forced labour.

Now if the vote against only counted as half of a vote for. :hmm:

[Gorduz]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system

A nice article on different voting system. Its not as simple as it seems ;)

[TteFAboB]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_Principle

[Hitman]

The most realistic way of improving democracy is improving the education of the citizens. If they can't be foolished by politics or religious leaders, are able to think by themselves and have a solid humanistic formation, they are not as easily influenciable, and the democratic election gains in quality. This is probably why here at Spain all political parties that access government inmediatelly modify laws about eductaion and try to ensure that we keep being one the countries in Europe with less school success :roll:

[Wim Libaers]

Number one is dangerous. The stated intent is to prevent dangerous populist gaining power. However, what if the populist is not participating in the elections himself (part of a lobbying group for example), but is running a hate campaign against a competent politician that threatens his private interests?

[TteFAboB]

If the hate campaign is a fraud, it can be unveiled or it simply won't work, I know of a few examples, but if the "competent" politician was hiding something, lobby or no lobby he deserves to be discovered and destroyed, he shouldn't even receive the title of "competent".

A competent politician has nothing to hide and is invincible to personal attacks, either because there's nothing to be attacked or because his defense is superior. It is not enough to be honest, you have to appear to be honest. But when you think of megalomaniacs like George Soros I suppose anything is possible when people can't find another way to spend all their money.

In truth, the unstated intent is for the social-democrats and the klepto-stalinists to exclude each other opening room for a fresh liberal.

When you reach a point where there's two dominant forces with a bad 20+ years divorce case, hating each other mutually but being very similar in essence, "COUGH" molotov-ribbentrop "COUGH COUGH!" (with the exception of minor details: The social-democrat plays by the rules to exploit and undermine the game itself, the klepto-stalinist doesn't bother following the rules and go straight for the kill), then you want Type23's C option to rise above the A and B.

Getting back to Type23, maybe the vote against should have double weight, but first plenty of prisons will have to be constructed.

And I agree with Hitman, where there is data you can see the small fraction of the population with 10 years or more of education always vote better than those who never studied anything at all, and this type of research can't even measure the quality of the education per se. That's why in 40 years of social-democracy politicians who built a decent education are the exception and not the rule, quite the contrary, most prefer to drastically lower the quality and breed a generation of zombies who might fall for lies and sell their votes, but even zombies have a brain and they learn from their mistakes, unless they get their heads cut or shot off first.

Thanks for the contributions. :up: