Introduce e-voting at elections, and feasability of direct democracy.

Proposer
PaulJRobinson
State

Accepted

Vote Score

2

Age

3733 days


PaulJRobinson

@PaulJRobinson - about 10 years ago

This pull request has been automatically generated by prose.io.

@PaulJRobinson edited democracy.md - about 10 years ago

Introduce voting by proportional representation (Single Transferable Vote) in all General and Local Elections.

Investigate feasability of electronic voting at all elections, with a view to increasing accessibility and turnout.

Investigate feasability of direct digital democracy - using online tools to gradually replace representative democracy with increased direct participation in the legislative process by all electors.

Party Funding

Limit all donations and loans to political parties, campaign, lobbying and interest groups to a maximum of £5,000 from individuals and groups.

Devolution

Devolve all legislative powers currently enjoyed by the Scottish Parliament to equivalent devolved Parliaments in England, Wales and (eventually) Northern Ireland. The UK Parliament to retain control over macro-economic, foreign, and defence policy.

Devolve all legislative powers currently enjoyed by the Scottish Parliament to equivalent devolved Parliaments in England, Wales and (eventually) Northern Ireland. The UK Parliament to retain control over macro-economic, foreign, and defence policy.

Floppy

@Floppy - about 10 years ago

👍

I read a very interesting thing about Liquid (or Delegative) Democracy the other day, which I think we should investigate further and maybe propose later.

stringfellow

@stringfellow - about 10 years ago

I think I favour @Floppy's Liquid Democracy over Direct Democracy because I don't believe most of the population are well informed enough (myself included) to have an opinion about things for which facts may speak loud enough alone... Aside from that, people are far too influenced by centrally controlled mass-media for this to not be easily biased. @dangerousbeans and I had quite a good discussion about this which resulted in the idea of a tool to control how this might work. A very tech-heavy solution, though.

Liquid Democracy is probably not impervious to the same problems, but has a much more capable balance mechanism because you can defer your opinion on an issue to your favourite expert. That reduces the cognitive burden (and eventual accumulated apathy) on the lowly person trying to decide if they agree that food should have a blue elephant printed on it or not or whether we should fund a particle accelerator to find some new fundamental particle which may or may not solve all world energy problems (when all they care about, really, is living until next week).

Floppy

@Floppy - about 10 years ago

Yes - I'm going to write up a Liquid Democracy thing at some point, but I'm happy to accept the more general 'direct democracy' description here for now.

philipjohn

@philipjohn - about 10 years ago

I think we ought to take a look at The Pirate Party here. @Floppy mentioned the other day about their tools. I'd read that they can 'delegate' their vote on an issue-by-issue basis to different people.

That might mean we end up with candidates for individual ministerial posts, and people voting accordingly. 👍

PaulJRobinson

@PaulJRobinson - about 10 years ago

Yeah this article touches on it http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/22154/how-german-pirate-partys-liquid-democracy-works

with kind regards, Paul Robinson

about.me/pauljrobinson

On 8 January 2014 18:29, philipjohn [email protected] wrote:

I think we ought to take a look at The Pirate Party here. @Floppyhttps://github.com/Floppymentioned the other day about their tools. I'd read that they can 'delegate' their vote on an issue-by-issue basis to different people.

That might mean we end up with candidates for individual ministerial posts, and people voting accordingly. [image: 👍]

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/openpolitics/manifesto/pull/42#issuecomment-31863049 .

Floppy

@Floppy - about 10 years ago

I'd see liquid as a refinement of direct as used here, so I'd be happy to approve this one and open a separate PR for a proper liquid democracy proposal, which will need some proper detail in it.

👍

PaulJRobinson

@PaulJRobinson - about 10 years ago

Apparently the German Pirate Party use http://liquidfeedback.org/ as the tool for this. Without wishing to disrespect the wonderful system that has been built from the ground-up here, can you technical folks see anything in the Liquid Feedback system that would be useful for us discussing/approving our policies on here? Can we incorporate any of their processes/methods/software features?

with kind regards, Paul Robinson

about.me/pauljrobinson

On 8 January 2014 19:18, James Smith [email protected] wrote:

I'd see liquid as a refinement of direct as used here, so I'd be happy to approve this one and open a separate PR for a proper liquid democracy proposal, which will need some proper detail in it.

[image: 👍]

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/openpolitics/manifesto/pull/42#issuecomment-31867771 .

PaulJRobinson

@PaulJRobinson - about 10 years ago

As they mentioned in the article I posted earlier: their existing online discussion tools were fine when they had just 50 members but didn't work once they hit the first thousand. Might be one to put in our back pocket for further down the line.

with kind regards, Paul Robinson

about.me/pauljrobinson

On 8 January 2014 19:26, Paul Robinson [email protected] wrote:

Apparently the German Pirate Party use http://liquidfeedback.org/ as the tool for this. Without wishing to disrespect the wonderful system that has been built from the ground-up here, can you technical folks see anything in the Liquid Feedback system that would be useful for us discussing/approving our policies on here? Can we incorporate any of their processes/methods/software features?

with kind regards, Paul Robinson

about.me/pauljrobinson

On 8 January 2014 19:18, James Smith [email protected] wrote:

I'd see liquid as a refinement of direct as used here, so I'd be happy to approve this one and open a separate PR for a proper liquid democracy proposal, which will need some proper detail in it.

[image: 👍]

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/openpolitics/manifesto/pull/42#issuecomment-31867771 .

Floppy

@Floppy - about 10 years ago

Useful links, thanks, and definitely something we can look at when this starts to creak. However, this PR (to get back on track) is about the process of national democracy, not merge policy, so let's merge this one in and we can improve the writeup to talk about liquid democracy later on.