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Old 11-30-2016, 04:37 AM
 
Location: Santa Monica
36,853 posts, read 17,363,818 times
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Do dead people still get to vote under the new plan?
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Old 11-30-2016, 04:56 AM
 
4,279 posts, read 1,904,317 times
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Originally Posted by eok View Post
Our system of democracy is considered by almost everyone to be seriously flawed. We could use modern technology to rework it, and possibly reduce its flaws a lot.

Here is one possible scheme: There would be no election day, but just a constant opportunity for people to vote any time they wanted to, to vote someone into office or out of office. People would nominate themselves. There might be millions of candidates. Instead of a majority, they would only need a plurality. Everyone could register their votes via the internet. Their votes would be static, not as our present dynamic single-election votes. People's votes would exist until such time as they changed them or abandoned them. To keep their votes current, they would have to log in at least once every certain number of months, or their votes would be considered abandoned. The elected person would remain in office till the total number of votes in their favor dropped significantly below the votes for someone else for that office. To account for daily fluctuations in votes, nobody would take office till a certain number of days after being elected, and would still have to be the favorite at that point.

And that's just one of many possible schemes that could take advantage of modern technology to make democracy work better.

Another thing we could do that might help some would be to give all voters a test of their knowledge of American History and other subjects they learn in school. And give their votes weight according to how well they did on those tests. That way we wouldn't be ruled by ignorance. A person who did very well on the tests might get 10 times as much weight, so it would be like voting 10 times in the same election. A person whose scores were average might get 3 times as much as a person who did very poorly.

We could also give more weight to older votes than newer ones. If you voted for someone years ago, and you still maintain your vote for that person, you've probably spent more time thinking about it, and it might make sense to give you more say than someone who just voted for them on the spur of the moment.

All of these are just examples of the kinds of suggestions people could make, for a new system that might work a lot better by taking advantage of modern technology. If we ever do enact such a system, it will be a big deal, and will take a constitutional amendment. Therefore, for the time being, it's just something to think about, but not to take very seriously.

One problem here, and I think it is very important to your entire argument.

We are NOT a democracy.
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