Again, the very idea of the proxy vote is, pardon my bluntness, completely awful. It does the opposite of empowering people to voice their opinion and to have their say. It becomes ceded to an organization. So now, not only do you have powerful corporations influencing elections, you've just given a truckload of power to non-profits and charitable organizations to influence elections. Especially when the people they are receiving permission to be their proxy vote are desperate for basic needs. Those people, because of education an literacy issues, can very easily be taken advantage of. At least when they walk into a voting booth, they know they are casting their vote for their interest.
If only 5% are voting, we need more mobilization, more empowerment. Your solution doesn't do that. It invites more apathy as people can just give their vote away and let someone else do it.
There's two issues here - proxy voting for the 6% of people in poverty, which is my benchmark of incremental success, and proxy voting for everyone else. There may be people who try to scam - I've already debunked that though - so I won't repeat my argument here. But there will be trusted organisations for whom giving them your proxy will be more effective than voting D or R in an election every four years.
For that 6% of people in poverty, the proxy vote is not ideal, but at a bare minimum it gives them something better than they have today -- do you disagree on that point?
Forget the proxy vote. Focus on ways to get people to express their vote for themselves. Don't add layers and barriers, look to take layers and barriers away. Get more poor people hooked up with absentee ballots.
This is a thread about whether or not E-Democracy is feasible, not whether it is better or worse than some other utopian ideal.
If you have an implementation idea for E-Democracy which improves upon proxy voting, then I'll be all ears.
Another point, even if you exclude lawmakers from the construct where people can change their vote at any time, you still have the issue of totally fluid laws. That kind of fluidity is going to be just as bad for laws as it is for lawmakers. Changes in laws should be measured and considered. While the current system is bulky and cumbersome, it does protect against knee-jerk reactions. While less gridlock is certainly welcome, I'm not sure the body of local law turning on a dime is something we want either. Especially if those turns are really close together.
Please consider the point whereby the majority of issues would not be monolithic thousand-page reforms but minor informed tweaks.
Yes there may be a period of chaos. But consider this as a
process, it's not like we're stuck with a single idea for a decade, unable to modify our course - if things get too chaotic -
and a majority of people decide to continue, then who are we to say what is best for them?
If things really get chaotic though, doesn't it seem likely that we'd all just start talking about that problem and come up with a way to solve it by making things less fluid for a while?
How many charities would they have access to, and where would they find the charities? Which groups would have the resources and the willingness to canvas the poorest and most remote parts of the country, looking for disenfranchised voters?
Chances are good that only the best-funded groups (GOP, DNC) would be able to make a comprehensive push for proxy votes. So again, the big money status quo wins.
If they actually improve the lot of the impoverished - great. If they are a scam, it'll be common knowledge just by looking at their voting record, and since it's not exactly hard to change your proxy-vote, and since poor people aren't automatically stupid or unable to talk to each other, I don't see this as a looming concern.
