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?
Okay, so Town X passes a law to require your headlights must be on when you use your windshield wipers. Two months later,there is a movement to overturn this because people find it inconvenient to have to remember that, so the law is overturned. 3 days later, there is a horrific pile-up because someone didn't see another car coming because it was drizzly and they didn't have headlights on. A new movement reinstates that headlight law. So, within a few months you've had the law change 3 times.
Do you think the citizenry is going to be able to keep up with all of this. What about law enforcement officials who need to keep track of all these changes and adjust training curriculum and enforcement activities with each change?
So how about this instead -- each resolution needs to include a realistic plan for its implementation. By realistic I mean, if your plan involves changing regulations which law enforcement needs to train itself for and uphold, then you don't write into law that the regulation will be enforced tomorrow. Instead you solicit/accept input from the relevant stakeholders. If you need 21 days to retrain officers and advertise the change to the population, then you add that to the resolution.
You'll need far more than 21 days. The Arizona immigration will be going into law next Thursday and it was passed by the legislature months ago. It takes a long time to get these things into place. It will take 21 days just to make all of the phone calls to organize the trainings. This is what I'm talking about with the excessive fluidity of your model.
Okay great - in the proxy vote model, having just demonstrated a greater knowledge, you'd now be my proxy for deciding on implementation timelines.
21 days was just a number I pulled out of my ass, it's not relevant to whether or not the model could work if correct implementation times were given.
Key to the e-dem concept is that I could vote one way on an issue today, talk with a friend tonight, and change my vote - while the vote remains open. But once an issue has been decided/closed, a vote placed in that cannot be changed. A separate issue would be required to repeal, and it would also require its own implementation plan.
I see no benefit in this whatsoever. The way it currently works now is that the citizenry already knows what questions are coming up for referendum way in advance of the actual election. Citizens have ample time to talk to their friends, do research, and come to a firm conclusion of where they stand on the issue. Then they cast their vote. What's wrong with that?
It limits the amount of referendum issues a population can consider in a given time period. I don't see a good reason for an artificial limitation.
With an open voting window where you can see how an issue is progressing, if a pet issue isn't faring so well then you have an additional motivation to discuss and promote it. Perhaps you aren't as informed as you think on your pet issue, and maybe discussion leads to you changing your own mind. And maybe not, increasing the amount of discussion sounds like a good thing to me though.
And we already have a system in place where a separate issue can be put on the table to repeal. It happens here in Maine all the time. One year a referendum will pass to legalize X. Citizens gather signatures to put a question on the next ballot to repeal that. This can happen on an annual basis already. And honestly I think that is fucked up. Your system seems like it would amp that up and make it happen even faster. That fluidity in the law will put a lot of stress on the community.
Isn't it better to resolve the argument in a few months, then over a few years?
In the case of the Army and DADT, a populace may decide to call the bluff, and disregard the input from the stakeholders. I do have faith that if something like that turned out to be the wrong decision, then it would reduce the likelihood of similar mistakes happening in the future.
Wrong according to who? Mistakes according to who?
The majority.
Giving more control to the populace over their own destiny, taking off training-wheels off, is the only way I see of educating the populace in the medium-long term.
And it won't always be pretty.
You seem to have an assumption in your model that there will be this kumbaya rationality amongst the e-democracy participants. Maybe that works in a little WOW group playing e-democracy. But if you expand it to a community, a society, a populace, that shit goes out the window right fast. It's mob rule.
No. But neither do I assume that all of the participants in such a system would remain static. Attitudes will change. Reactions and expectations will change. People will find new ways to get the things they want in such a system. I don't think we'll all run around like headless chickens unable to find any new answers to the problems you predict which are made all the more vivid by virtue of living through them.
I may be incorrect in my estimations of how the motivations will play out, but until we start discussing in those terms, I don't see how we'll find any middle ground.
