[martin-t]

And that's why we need more direct democracy. People (correctly) feel like they have very little power over laws which affect them day to day.

If someone represents me, then logically I should have the right to vote directly instead of him, or remove him at any point.

[megaman821]

That's why planes should be flown using direct democracy. Passengers (correctly) feel like they have little power over the maneuvers planes make and affect them moment to moment.

Representational democracy is far superior. Decisions need to be weighed against both their popularity and their effect with input from experts and other affected parties.

[atmavatar]

The problem with representative democracy arises when it stops being representative. Alas, at least in the US, Congress nearly always votes according to moneyed interests over the desires of its constituent voters.

That isn't to say we should use something other than representative democracy. I believe the best option is to fix the system rather than replace it. However, it does explain why people currently feel they have very little power of the laws that affect them.

[EvanAnderson]

I think increasing the size of the House would make representatives more responsive to their constituents. I also don't think it'll ever happen for exactly that reason.

[martin-t]

As an European, the biggest issue with US politics I see is that you only have 2 parties. It makes no sense. As a voter, you can only express a binary choice and whatever you choose for the issue you care about most effectively decides what you vote for regarding all other issues.

I'd like to see more separation. If we are to keep indirect democracy, at least have separate representation for criminal law, economic decisions (taxes, healthcare, ...), social decisions (abortions, marriage, ...), etc. But even where to draw the lines is difficult. I think that too should be in some ways decided by voters.

Of course, in a country which can't get rid of FPTP/plurality, despite being objectively the worst voting system[0-3], that's never gonna happen. If you need to explain math to people to convince them, you've already lost, because people are not smart enough and definitely not educated enough.

[0]: https://rangevoting.org/

[1]: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-...

[2]: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

[3]: https://ncase.me/ballot/

[EvanAnderson]

I'd love to get rid of FPTP and the two party system. I feel like small enclaves of alternative voting systems are happening but I feel pretty hopeless about it being wider spread. In general I feel pretty hopeless about all of it after Citizens United. My interests aren't aligned with big money, therefore I have no speech.

[martin-t]

The vile thing is that people work for a company and make it a lot more money than they end up receiving and then the owners of the company go and use the remaining money against the people's interest.

[pandaman]

It indeed makes no sense, do you have parties voting in Europe? In the US we have representatives each casting their own vote.

[martin-t]

It depends a lot on the country. Pretty sure most/all have more than 2 viable parties. Still sucks because usually you can only vote for one party so it still leads to strategic voting. And ou might be able to prefer certain candidates from the party, in which case it might or might not be broken in other ways.

Oh and Switzerland has 7 presidents (effectively). No kings, no dictators.

[martin-t]

See, with a plane, you get to choose which one you board.

And the pilot is not a random guy from the street with no education or at best a completely unrelated degree. And he's probably not 90 years old. And he's the engineer, mechanic, ATC, pilot, stewerd, advertiser, accountant and TSA in one person.

Direct democracy shouldn't be the only change, obviously. As you correctly point out the issue is when uninformed, uneducated and not sufficiently intelligent people make decisions for everyone.

The issue with direct democracy is that you're describing a highly dimensional vector (your opinion) by picking one of a small set of predefined points (the political parties). Some countries only have 2. That's obviously stupid.

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For example we should weight votes by how informed they are. How to determine that? That's a difficult question. But shooting down the idea does move us closer to a solution.

Making voting indirect only has the effect that all nuance is lost. You still get dumb people voting for populists, fascists, narcissists, rapists, etc.

[pstuart]

We need better democracy, where opportunities for corruption are minimized and proper representation is possible.

Campaign finance reform would be the foundation for this, otherwise we will continue with legalized bribery.

The other need is for daylight and accountability. As much as I loath the Web3 cryptocrowd, having some sort of public ledger of government operations would be incredibly valuable. Anything and everything related to government actions should be public record with the small exception of sensitive information (which itself should have oversight on not being abused).

This is an easy problem to solve (on a technical level), but the established political base will always fight against it they like things the way they are.

[martin-t]

I agree and we need to talk about specific things if we have any chance of turning ideas into change. The issue is these are complex topics not suited for a discussion platform where most activity on a post ceases within a day (and if it continues longer in rare cases, nobody sees it). But there are no really good platforms for this so everything is simplified into short statements which lose nuance.

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It's impossible for every person to have a well-researched opinion on everything. Opponents of direct democracy use this to shoot it down. But it applies to indirect democracy too.

The real issue we need to solve is how to make sure people (whether all citizens or representatives) only vote on what they actually understand.

I think votes weighted based on the score of a knowledge test would be a good start if the test is well-designed. But we need to figure out how to decide what the questions are (what is relevant, what is enough in-depth, what is too specific, etc.) and what the correct answers are (some topics are still a matter of debate even among experts). And that's hard.

It's hard in a cooperative environment (e.g. engineers deciding which factors are relevant to their proposed solution) and it's even harder in an adversarial environment like politics.

[pstuart]

I would love to see something like that. The trick would be to keep it from being gamed to lock valid voters out.