Ask Lemmy

Like Github PRs on an open source project. Anyone should be able to write an RFC or POC. It gets discussed publicly and implemented.

Elected representatives can be maintainers

Direct Democracy coupled with a constitution to protect the rights of minorities.

I dont want to vote for politicians, I want to vote for policies. It is a system that works remarkably well for Switzerland - and I doubt if many people can recall the name of a Swiss politician, for good reason - they are simply tasked with enacting policies rather than setting them. Another benefit of this system is it makes it all about policy, not personality.

How you'd elect the people tasked with carrying out policy would then become more about competence and track record than anything else. It would also mean that which system you use to elect those people would become less important, given that people would be voting on policies directly than along party lines

Representative parliamentary. If it’s a large country (both population and area) or geographically diverse country (eg an archipelago) it should be federal, if not unitary.

Proportional representation based on party lists. Getting on the ballot requires evidence of grassroots support. Silly example: you must have video evidence of you engaging with 5000 unique constituents in a 5 minute one-on-one conversation on the issues in the last year at their residence. The video must end with the constituent explicitly endorsing you. That means at least 5000 5 minute videos with 5000 unrelated people. That’s a lot of physical legwork were you must meet the people. There are better ways, this is just a simple example.

Choose a voting system that favours coalition building.

Elections should be publicly funded. Don’t ban political parties, do ban explicitly anti-democratic people. Antidemocratic ppl can’t work via proxies. They’re, justifiably, afraid that their proxy will steal the power for themselves.

Completely separate head of state (who should be powerless) and head of government. Lots of pomp, ceremonies, frequent press coverage of the powerless head of state. Let the portion of politics that is effectively a dog and pony show focus on him. Let people get emotionally swept up about him wearing a tan suit or sleeping with his secretary or get super proud about how totally not old he is. The head of state can be a show. The head of government should be a boring bureaucrat.

There’s more, but this seems a decent start.

The quick basics I would want are single transferrable vote (STV), as it has a ranked ballot, regional representatives (important in a large, diverse country, imo), and pretty (although not perfectly) proportionate results.

I would also increase salaries and pensions for elected officials, but on the stipulation that they and their immediate family must liquidate all investments in order to take office, including real estate. The reason for this is to eliminate ulterior motives and reduce risk of corruption, and the compensation of course would be a very generous salary and pension so they never have to worry about their financial situation during or after leaving office.

I would also constitutionally eliminate the ability to take away someone's vote, and to demonstrate why, I'll copy-paste an old comment of mine from my reddit days:

What people like this miss about democracy is it's more than just majority rule; democracy depends on minority rights, so the majority can't just vote to trample over the minority.

This is not only to protect the minority (as you point out), but to protect democracy itself. An example:

There are 10 people. 4 of these people want to ban all fruits except mangos. 6 of them don't want that.

So the 4 people scheme. One of those 6 people is really frickin ugly, and everyone can agree on that. So they propose to strip that ugly person of the right to vote (or just kill them or something). That vote passes 9 to 1. Ugly person is out of the equation.

The 4 people are still the minority, so they try again. One of those 5 other people likes to dip their pizza in marshmallow fluff, and everyone else agrees that that is absolutely vile. So they propose to strip that person with horrendous taste of the right to vote. That vote passes 8 to 1. Marshmallow pizza eater is out of the equation.

Now the 4 mango purists see they're half the electorate. They just need to boot out 1 more pan-fruitarian. Fortunately for them, one of those remaining 4 pan-fruitarians always unnecessarily explains the punchlines of obvious jokes, and it really annoys everyone else. So they propose to strip that annoying joke explainer of the right to vote. That vote passes 7 to 1. Annoying joke explainer is out of the equation.

And now the mango purists have a majority and can ban all other fruits, counter to the true majority.

If this all seems abstract and unlikely, consider fascist movements and their tendency to start as big-tent to gain allies and gain power and then, once they're in power, start trimming down who counts as the protected in-group until it's only the core group they cared about in the beginning, producing lots of r/leopardsatemyface material in the process.

Dunno if there's a more elegant term, but fractal representative.

Each person is part of a neighborhood, first level council of appx. 100 citizens, like an apartment building or suburban block, which elects a representative from among them.

That representative must personally know every member of their neighborhood, and participate in a second level council of appx. 100 such neighborhood representatives (representing a total population of appx. 10,000).

That council elects a representative from among them to represent them in a higher third level council of appx. 100 second level council representatives (representing a total population of appx. 1 million).

Repeat as necessary.

The principle here is that each citizen can petition their 1st level rep., whom they know personally, to petition their 2nd level rep., whom the 1st level rep knows personally, to petition the 3rd level rep., whom the second level rep knows personally, etc. This provides an explicit chain of personal accountability between each individual and the highest authority.

I believe a lot of the issues in our present representative democracy models originate in abstract representation of millions of people, to whom one representative is neither morally nor functionally beholden. Campaigns are based on hollow promises and marketing slogans that most voters don't scrutinize. Additionally, local issues are decided at levels too high and separated to understand them.

In the US, this would look like a hierarchy of roughly: block/neighborhood -> borough/town -> city/county -> state -> nation.

So me and my neighbors confederate, voting on our immediate issues, including the election of Neil as our neighborhood rep. He knows us all and listens to our needs and concerns. He and the reps of the 100 closest neighborhoods confederate, discuss the issues of their constituents, and vote on issues common to all of them, including the election of Bertie to represent them on the city level. Bertie then listens to Neil and the other neighborhood reps to advocate their interests, including the election of Cathy to represent the city/county, which continues to the election of Steven to represent the state, and Nathan to represent the nation.

When I have a concern about the nation, I tell Neil, who advocates for the whole neighborhood when he talks to Bertie. Bertie now hears the combined concerns of all the neighborhoods, which she communicates to Cathy. Cathy hears the combined concerns of all the boroughs, which she communicates to Steven. Steven communicates the combined concerns of all the counties to Nathan. Every stage has a face. Each representative is accountable to, and personally familiar with, every consistent they represent. Votes bubble upwards, ivory towers are avoided, every citizen has a direct chain of 5 people, with personal familiarity, linking them to the president.

This is a really great question OP.

Personally, I do not have a great deal of faith in the democratic political systems as they currently exist. Political parties are motivated by self-interest and not necessarily the interest of the people.

As someone wisely said, politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.

I believe that our current systems, for example first past the post, and the electoral college, are vestiges of systems that were created hundreds of years ago, and don't work effectively enough to keep up with our rapidly evolving global technological society.

There once was a time before democracies, of monarchies, etc., but from various societal changes and historic events, democracy eventually emerged. But today, what we call democracy is a situation where the ultra rich and the for-profit businesses have gamed the system to their advantage, despite whatever democratic systems are in place. Wealth inequality is ever-increasing, one of the fundamental problems that is the cause of so many other problems. Rising economic inequality is one of the conditions that preceded the French Revolution.

It is my belief that salvation lies in the power of decentralized technology. Politics and nationalism are increasingly causing problems that are not for the benefit of the people of the world, but for the benefit of those entities. Those entities will always be self-interested, and they will continue to play the games of politics and geopolitics in the pursuit of their own interests. But most people in the world don't want to have war with each other.

What if there was a system that specifically represented everyone as maximally fairly as possible, in the most democratic way that you can imagine?

To me the answer to that question would be a system of some type where every person in the world gets the exact same voting power as every other person, 1 person gets 1 vote. Seems pretty basic and also fundamental to maximizing fairness. You would need some ability to somehow accurately account for everyone's vote, ensuring transparency and prevent any kinds of tampering or fraud in any kinds of voting records or elections. This could only be achieved using modern technology including the internet, and some kind of decentralized software network without any kinds of centralized authority, with hundreds, thousands of nodes ensuring consensus on what is "true".

Bitcoin is a great example of a decentralized software network that has a design like this. A system where there is no single authority that can unilaterally rewrite the rules to it's own benefit. It is a decentralized network that can achieve consensus without relying on having to specifically trust any other participants in the network, because all nodes can all individually verify the consensus data.

But bitcoin is a cryptocurrency governed by a decentralized set of mathematical rules that all participants mutually agree on, and this decentralized-technological-democracy network would not be a cryptocurrency.

This network would ideally operate on many thousand nodes across the planet, more nodes creating more resiliency. The primary purpose of the nodes would be their record keeping of the cryptographic identities of every person in the world, ensuring ability to verify uniqueness, kind of like a dencetralized digital directory. A digital identity in this context would basically be ownership of a set of digital keys that provide access to a digital public account that you would own and only you could possibly ever own it, not so different from how a digital wallet works for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

This would be ensured by having processes in place that make every person verify every other person that they know. For example in real life you know people by their faces, their voices, their mannerisms, etc., these features immediately identify the unique person that no other person is. You would have for example an address book of people you know, and you would perform a type of mutual digital key signing with each person in that list, you both verify to one another what your public cryptographic identity is that you and only you could possess. Everyone verifies everyone else that they know, and all of these cryptographic verifications would be stored on the nodes, and it would be an unbreakable database of public digital identities, serving as the foundation of a digital world where there is a common network that contains everyone's unfraudable identity, regardless of their location or nationality or political affiliation. There would of course need to be processes in place to recover any lost keys, but this is a minor point in the big picture.

A false identity could not be created because it would not be possible to verify the existence of somebody that does not exist. You could try and fabricate a false identity and maybe even collude with other people to create false verifications of somebody that doesn't exist, but over time it would be impossible to maintain such a fraud. If for example there was an organized effort of many people to collude and create numerous false identities, the way that troll farms do it today, it would become apparent to the network that this large number of false identities seem to only have identity verifications with each other, effectively demonstating that it is practically a separate group from the rest of the entirety of the network. There would not be very much decentralized trust in those particular identities.

Once you have this decentralized identity network where every person is in possession of exactly one unique public identity associated with themselves, and importantly that there aren't any additional false identities in the network, you would now have the foundation in place where you could create a new technological democratic system where every person on the planet is an equal participant. You have software that can take polls or votes or elections, and every individual person with their unique identity gets exactly 1 vote per issue.

What does the consensus of the entire world really want?

"Hello world, do you like access to things like clean water and electricity? Should we prioritize things like this and get to work ensuring that everyone in the world has equal access to clean water?" "No", vote the self-interested ultra wealthy, who don't want to have to share their hoarded wealth to fund such initiatives. "Yes" vote the billions of people who all rationally agree that it would be a good thing to prioritize things like clean water and that we should be taking whatever appropriate actions that fairly provide everyone in the world access to clean water. A clear consensus emerges: everyone in the world likes access to clean water and also electricity, and in the interest of maximal fairness, this creates the "political" will if you can call it that, to get it done. No longer would power of the government and the political system be beholden to the small number of ultra wealthy individuals that don't care about the rest of the world.

First, I'll take down the cubicle walls. Symbol of transparency. There'd be no titles. Everyone has the same job. Same goes for me. I'll take your job by rejecting the title. Everyone will be known for their accomplishments.

Hmm conflict. You know, Scratch everything from before. I'll tell you what: Go the other way. More cubicles. More division. Everyone is somebody's boss, and that person can fire the person below them. And once a month, the lowest person... [Imitates cutting throat] Buh-bye.

Can we appoint officials by sortition (by lottery) for a reasonable term, and then dilute power to where no one person is critical to conduct business?

Democracy should be to listen to the concerns of everyone (except the bad actors of course) and build a consensus, not just the 51 percent needed to win a vote. Listen to everyone's concerns, and help them solve their problems.

Otherwise, bad actors and grifters will take advantage of the minority people that felt they are being dismissed, promises to solve their problems with bad solutions, and make them angry and hateful.

A federated direct democracy with any delegation of power coming from the bottom. Supporters reserve the power to fire the delegate. Delegation of power should be allowed to rotate through the federation providing each member with experience.

Anyone can propose rules. Decisions are made via direct democracy scoped to effected parties. The goal of any decision is consensus.

Efficiency will be an issue since consensus and direct democracy require input from more people. Tools can help alleviate inefficiencies. Computers and artificial intelligence are examples of such tools. Voters would choose which tools to use.

A system where citizens could choose to be active or passive participants with no barriers. Passive citizens could submit their desires through annual surveys but otherwise live a live free of politics. Candidates for representatives would be chosen lottery style from the pool of active citizens weighted by the surveys, than voted on by the active population.

One in which the population is well-educated, possesses good common sense, has an appreciable sense of empthaty, and is politically involved.

After that, it's pretty much just details.

IDK... I used to want a true democracy, but that was when I still had faith in humanity.

Representative, federal, parliamentary, bicameral

The hard line I'll draw is proportional elections; I'm against. We should vote for candidates, not parties. Parties I like throw up duds, and parties I dislike sometimes put forth quality candidates; it should be I, not some party leader, who chooses who will represent me.

Wow huge question! I mean for me in the US I think our democratic republic system is great, that is democracy on a local level, and republic on a state and federal level. We're not in Athens anymore! I would love to see our country do away with the filibuster, the electoral college, and to impose very strict laws around lobbying. I think all elections should be publicly funded, which is such an easy way to level the playing field and negate the influence of corporate cash.

Those voting methods you mentioned of course is up to the states to decide already which is how it should be I think.

No I don't think parties should be banned and I wish we could have room for more parties. I admit I don't know why US has essentially only two where other countries have several. I don't know what the hold-up is or the mechanism for change, but I think competition is always a good thing (capitalism, baby!)

Okay, my answer is pretty removed, but I'd say I'd like a system where decisions are made by submitting automated proofs of their optimality, either absolute or over all submitted proposals in a defined time frame. The conditions of optimality would be pre-defined in a Constitution, and non-provable facts would be accepted or rejected via a decentralized voting system that would keep multiple diff chains and penalize e.g. voting for facts that are later proven false via a submitted proof. The proof system would hold all powers, but would be able to delegate decisions to entities under proven rules, which would come faster but possibly be overriden.

At this point I'm not sure I believe in true democracy anymore. People are fucking stupid. If an advance alien civilization showed up and was disgusted by us and just started wiping humanity out I'd just be like "fair".

I feel like ranked choice voting for leaders and representatives is the optimal solution. Its potential drawbacks outweigh its obvious benefits, and it actually gives third parties a fair fight.

As far as representation goes, I think it does have its benefits, because it's simply too much to ask of every citizen to weigh in on every single initiative. For big stuff (i.e. anything that will affect people directly), I'd obviously like to vote on it.

As far as ideology goes, IMO anything should go. Otherwise someone has to decide what is morally permissible in politics, and that decision can and will eventually be made by someone you disagree with.

A unitary psychic hive mind where every voice speaks in unison in the pursuit of biological and technological perfection.

Democratic confederalism.

My one: a bicameral parliament, with a lower house (like the US/Australian Representatives or UK Commons) doing most of the legislating, and an upper house of review (like the Senate or Lords). The lower house would be elected by a system of proportional representation, resulting in predominantly negotiated coalition governments as in continental Europe. (The layout would be hemicircular to facilitate this, as opposed to the Westminster layout of two benches facing off.) The government would be parliamentary, led by a prime minister who would appoint ministers (which would often be as per coalition negotiations).

The lower house’s electorates would be geographical, with each citizen living in an electorate with one or more MPs (having two, typically from different parties, could mitigate political minorities being unrepresented in their electorate). The upper house would break with this, but, unlike the Lords, would probably be elected. It could be geographical (as the US/AU Senate, with a number of Senators per larger region), or by some other division (perhaps different groups with specific interests and perspectives: industries, unions, young/elderly people, people with disabilities, remote regions, &c.). Alternatively, part or all of the elected upper house could be replaced with a system not unlike jury duty, where a number of randomly chosen citizens are drafted in to oversee the process for a period; hopefully in sufficient numbers, individual flaws would balance out, leaving a broader scrutiny of and input into the legislative programme.

There would be a head of state, who would be a ceremonial figurehead and largely apolitical, with no executive power per se. They may be popularly elected or appointed, and their terms would be longer than a parliament, providing a sense of continuity. Ideal candidates would be figures held in high esteem by broad cross sections of society; celebrated writers/commentators or other public figures, for example. Perhaps the role would absorb some of the duties of the poet laureate as well.

I definitely prefer parliamentary. As a Brit, though, I might be biased.

The power of the president largely lies in their support in the legislature anyway. If they have good support then they are too powerful (imho), if they don't then they're too weak.

The parliamentary system also has problems, of course, but, on balance, I much prefer it. I think the President tends to get far too much media focus as well; which, in turn, gives the impression that they're more powerful/influential than they are.

Delegative democracy. You have your own vote that you can use to directly vote on issues or you can delegate your vote to another person so how they vote is how you vote.

With the proper tech you could even set up some sort of tagging/category system so you can delegate to X person on issues in Y category.