[alexpotato]

A couple years ago I stumbled upon this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz27n1tNNMg

The summary is this:

- Votes in the House and Senate used to be anonymous

- They then decided to make them public under the reasoning of transparency

- One side effect of making them public is that you got people like Grover Norquist and The Americans for Tax Reform who could see who voted for taxes and then use that to "name and shame" people (there was a pledge signing in there as well). For more details see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist

- This now means that it's MUCH easier for lobbyists and special interest groups to see where to spend their money as a Senator's voting history is public knowledge (which both sides are WELL aware of)

- As a sibling poster points out: you can easily see who receives money from defense groups vs not.

- This is probably good for us as voters in the short term but bad for the country in the long term (Due to the above)

[idiotsecant]

I'm not convinced that this is a problem. Lobbyists and special interests already knew how politicians voted, they just knew via old fashioned grapevine methods. There was an information asymmetry between well connected lobbyists and average people. The fact that no longer exists is a good thing, in the long and short term.

[fardo]

There’s a tension between the common belief that

“when private citizens are able to vote privately, it protects their ability to vote their conscience, rather than allowing some third party to explicitly buy votes or bully someone into voting in line with someone else”,

and the belief that somehow this doesn’t apply to congress members.

Additionally, on hard philosophical and policy qurstions, some bits of negotiation and dealmaking are bare-knuckled “the sausage gets made” affairs that are brutally hard on the ego and participants. Part of why nothing can get through Congress anymore in a timely fashion and without continual brinksmanship on important funding or to prevent shutdowns is because even if crossing party lines would very often be in the public’s interest, and to the public’s net benefit, haggling to make it happen or voting to make it so often doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of thousands of watchful eyes where an important deal may hinge on brutal haggling which the public couldn’t stomach seeing the intermediate steps and votes of.

One such example in practical terms: if the constitutional convention which replaced the articles of confederation took place in the internet age with modern real-time, to the minute reporting on how everyone was voting on every intermediate plan and how any compromise made was a betrayal of “party lines” on an issue, America as a country probably wouldn’t exist today.

Transparency has its own benefits, but it’s not without costs - you make a legislative body’s job more difficult, you get corresponding gridlock to match.

[lesam]

Sure there’s a tension, but one difference is that I know how I vote, but I don’t know how my representative votes unless it’s in the public record.

If you believe that electorates punish politicians for decisions in the public interest, and legislators’ jobs would be easier if they were less accountable to their voters, why support democracy at all?

[beau_g]

Elected officials should not vote their conscience, they should vote according to the wishes of their constituents

[int_19h]

Then what is the point of even having them and not just voting for everything directly?

[vinay427]

There are a variety of differences between having representatives vote with your interests and voting yourself, such as practicality, time expenditure and access to advising and expertise, etc. That’s perhaps why many direct democracy systems (California, Switzerland, etc.) combine the two with direct democracy used for relatively few decisions.

[pixl97]

The loudest ones?

The 51% that voted for them out of the 20% of total voters?

I mean, this does get very hard to define.

[godelski]

> I'm not convinced that this is a problem.

There's no "THE problem." There's a ton of "problems." Just to be clear. Because many of the problems we face today are through interaction of different things, often in a complex chain, rather than a direct easy to follow causal chain.

> via old fashioned grapevine

Treat the problem as an adversarial problem. Yes, your adversary will always be able to break your defenses. Nothing is bulletproof. How you defend is through forcing adversaries to expend resources. It is very clear that forcing lobbiests to learn through the grapevine is a more costly method than simply looking at a public database. And if you aren't familiar with this concept, people lie. No one need know your vote unless you reveal it (which... might be a lie).

The point also is that it can also prevent inner conflict, among parties. You're not voting along party lines? You think you're going to get as much support from your party when it comes to your bills and campaign funds? So you have plenty of incentive to not reveal your vote, even among allies.

I agree with you in that switching to private votes won't solve the problems we have. But would it improve? I'd guess some and I'd guess it would take time for the real effects to be seen. But the other side is, would it do harm? I doubt it.

[fnordpiglet]

The continental congress itself was entirely secret with no notes taken and no existing journal, diary, or any other record of the proceedings - and this was a bunch of folks who obsessively recorded their lives and thoughts for posterity. They also thought pretty hard about the side effects of such things and congressional and senate votes were private until modern times.

I’m not one who believes the constitution is sacred or that the founding fathers were infallible, but I do think the chance for a person to vote their conscience vs their politics is an important feature. While the grapevine might be a route to learn, it’s also a route that doesn’t have to be accurate. I can tell my lobbyist whatever I want about my vote, but only I know what my vote was in private voting. This feels like a feature not a flaw.

The point of representative democracy is selecting a person whose judgement you believe in. Public voting records lead to populist and party strangleholds on outcomes with consequences for breaking dogma. Practically speaking it also gives lobbyists proof positive of whether their money was well spent.