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by brnt 55 days ago
> partijgedrag

So happy to see they're ingesting voting data again! They stopped a few years ago (which is also a few elections), which I thought was such a shame. Knowing what representatives actually do, and not just promise, is really the only thing that matters.
2 comments
ramon156 55 days ago
Elwin had some trouble with getting the API going. I ended up helping out, but I was in a big time crunch at the company I was working for at the time.

That's vastly different now, so I want to take a look at how we can properly do ingestion. Currently it's an ETL that is pretty flakey, even with tests. The backend-frontend is also a mess, wondering if we can just go vanillaJS without the mess that is pgtyped/prisma. I'm kind of wondering if we can use ATProto too, but I'm not too familiar with it.

Elwin is also looking at municipality-independent instances (this is less about code and more about communicating with municipalities). They all want money, which is fair, but we're not sponsored or funded anywhere. Supporting this is fruitful thinking on our side.

The code is still on my gh [0], but i might make an org on codeberg for this and mirror to this back to gh

0: https://github.com/van-sprundel/partijgedrag

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miki123211 55 days ago
Public voting data isn't always a good thing.

On one hand, it makes representatives accountable to the public, which is good. On the other, it heavily encourages voting among party lines, and makes lobbying a lot easier (as the lobbyists know whether the representatives voted the way the lobbyists wanted). This effectively moves the heart of government from the representatives themselves to lobbyists and high-level party officials.

It's a bad idea in the same way letting you photograph your ballot and upload it to social media is a bad idea; there's a reason most democracies disallow that.

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HardlyCognizant 55 days ago
That just means the forms of lobbying being permitted are antithetical to democracy, and is just bribery in a different form. The problem is with the lobbying, not the accountability.
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vanviegen 45 days ago
The public ballots are what makes the bribery possible. It also prevents representatives from voting for what they believe is right, due to internal pressure from their party or from broader society. Just look at US congress: it's hard to be believe that all Republican members want to support tearing down democracy. Yet they do.
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