| > That's a very different thing from voting for pre-selected candidates whom you've never met and don't interact with, and then crossing your fingers. I'm a bit sick right now, thus either my math or my formulas might be off. I welcome any corrections. :) So. Copyright policy is decided at the Federal level. The people in charge of setting that policy are elected members of Congress. Let's assume that you can declare someone "met and interacted with" with a single five-minute conversation. According to Wikipedia, California is the most populous state and Wyoming is the least populous state. The CA Secretary of State reports that ~17 million voters were registered to vote as of the date of the 2014 general election. The WY Secretary of State reports that ~240 thousand voters were registered to vote as of that same date. There are 124,800 minutes in a standard 40-hour-per-week, no-vacations-or-holidays work year. (60x40x52) For Wyoming, each Senatorial challenger would need to spend 48,000 minutes per election cycle speaking to each registered voter. (240,000/5) That's doable. For California, a challenger would spend 3,400,000 minutes per election cycle on the same task. (17,000,000/5) For California, what you propose is not possible for Senatorial challengers... they'd have to do nothing but hold conferences for 27 years to get this task done. (3,400,000/124,800) So, what's the largest state where this is feasible? This might be South Dakota (the 46th most populous state) (with -I think- ~514,000 voters). [0] If it's not, it's definitely Alaska (the 48th) (with ~509,000 voters). So, it is physically impossible to even pay lip service to what you propose in either fourty-six, or fourty-eight of the states in the US. Before you get too cranky, I do acknowledge that the situation changes when one meets with one's Representative: In California the 27-year workload would -roughly- be divided over 53 representatives, meaning that they'd only have to spend just over half of a year meeting every registered voter in the state. But... this assumes a five-minute meeting. If that constituent meeting balloons to ten minutes, we're right back in the realm of impossibility. While the workload might be smaller in the smallest states, Representatives are apportioned by population, so I don't expect that the picture would vary very much from state to state. In short, your idea is promising, and would be really great to do... but there just aren't enough hours in the day to make it happen. [1] [0] I'm having a fuck of a time finding historical voter registration numbers for SD. So, that voter registration number is based off of what I'm pretty sure is current voter registration data. :/ (North Dakota doesn't even have voter registration!). [1] Yes, my analysis ignores the fact that a campaign could conceivably be a multi-year thing. It's difficult to get good numbers on the length of an average Congressional campaign, but it's... difficult to believe that a campaign would run for longer than two years. |
think tank mode: what if the current system is restructured in a way so that we will let them take decisions for us. But when we don't agree with his/her view point we can readily bypass it if the majority wants a different thing, like may be diagree button near to a decision and proposed alternative, which everyone can vote on or propose another alternative(only one alternative can be picked by a person). Its democratic, practical and doable right now. The alternative with which highest number of people agree is a clear win. This can be applied in all countries and any form of govt.
Its way better than any alternatives we currently have, like having to spend big time and effort on making petitions, or rally for cause, etc. Now a days even peaceful gathering gets violet due to govt mishandling the situation.