[izendejas]

I think you should reconsider watching the video.

Don't support elections in the first place? So continue business as usual? I am not sure I understood correctly, but your solution IS the non-solution we're practicing today.

It's really difficult to summarize this video, just watch the first 5-10 minutes (that's what I tried) and you'll be hooked.

For added value: I'll buy you a beer for each filler/non-lexical sound (eg, "uhm", "eh", etc) you catch Lessig making whenever you're in the south bay.

[loup-vaillant]

> Don't support elections in the first place? So continue business as usual?

Not quite.

Basically, I do not condone elections for anything bigger than a small city, and neither should you. They don't work. They don't empower the people. They're an illusion.

That was the problem. Now my solutions:

(1) Don't vote for elections that don't make any difference. This means most elections bigger than small cities. Or do vote, but put a blank entry.

(2) Spread the word.

(3) Think of alternatives, such as random trials. Some of those have already been tried. Look for instance at ancient Athens.

If we can get the majority of citizens to acknowledge the problem and know about the possible solutions, there will be a revolution. Hopefully this one won't be too violent.

[dragonwriter]

> Basically, I do not condone elections for anything bigger than a small city, and neither should you. They don't work. They don't empower the people.

Since there are empirically measurable difference in how well different electoral systems work in empowering the people in nation-scale polities (see, e.g., Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy), I don't think it is at all the case that they don't work or are an illusion in general.

Its true that the electoral systems in certain large polities (the US among them, but not the only of them) work exceptionally poorly, which might lead to the faulty generalization that elections in large polities are fundamentally broken for those for whom the ones with exceptionally bad systems are the only referents, but that's a flawed generalization from limited information.

[loup-vaillant]

Okay, then, how effective is the high end? I expect not very.

And more importantly, are elections the best we can do? Handing over nearly unlimited power to a group of people we hope will not use it unwisely in the next few years?

No way. There's got to be a better system.

[dragonwriter]

> And more importantly, are elections the best we can do?

I would say elections are almost certainly an essential element of the best we can do; elections alone aren't a complete system of government.

> Handing over nearly unlimited power to a group of people we hope will not use it unwisely in the next few years?

Elections don't imply that. It sounds to me like your problem isn't actually with elections at all, but with the details of the powers given to officials who are elected.

[loup-vaillant]

> It sounds to me like your problem isn't actually with elections at all, but with the details of the powers given to officials who are elected.

A bit of both. Elected officials have way too much power, and not enough ways to control them. Look for instance what it takes to revoke someone. But the way election themselves work suck too: by nature, elections will mostly select a narrow elite, which right now is mostly hereditary. And when we vote, we can hardly judge the wannabe official on his discourse: many are lying to gain the favour of the people.

If you get only one thing, get this: policy making shouldn't be in the hands of a few policy makers. The people should vote their own laws directly. The people should even write their laws directly, though I don't know how to do that technically (with computers networked together, we should find a way).

[dragonwriter]

> A bit of both. Elected officials have way too much power, and not enough ways to control them. Look for instance what it takes to revoke someone.

Recall procedures (and whether they exist at all) vary considerably. There are lots of means of control available with elections -- the particular means implemented in particular places vary.

> But the way election themselves work suck too: by nature, elections will mostly select a narrow elite.

That is not true at all. Whether that is true depends both on the form of elections, the rules of eligibility for election, and what people are being elected to.

In a population of the same size, elections by STV in 5 member districts for a 2,000 member national legislature from which a government is formed by typical parliamentary-government rules are different than election of a strong President indirectly by elections of electors in multimember districts apportioned disproportionately to population by winner-take-all plurality who then elect the President by majority election where a failed majority goes to a different body to resolve coupled with election of a bicameral legislature by FPTP elections in single-member districts, where the house which has both legislative and quasi-executive functions isn't apportioned by population.

> which right now is mostly hereditary

Its clearly (and trivially) possible to avoid this in an electoral system itself (though, really, I don't think elections are the source of the problem, the problem is that the economic system favors hereditary wealth. And this has been generally true throughout all of history, even without elections, so blaming elections for it is way off point.)

> And when we vote, we can hardly judge the wannabe official on his discourse: many are lying to gain the favour of the people.

Its hardly as if discourse is the only thing available to judge by.

> If you get only one thing, get this: policy making shouldn't be in the hands of a few policy makers. The people should vote their own laws directly.

That still involves elections. And, more importantly, why do you think that people who can't successfully educate themselves sufficiently to elect good candidates every few years will do any better when they are called on to vote on every law?

And, even if the legislative function was in an assembly of the whole population this way, it wouldn't eliminate the need for executive and judicial officers, who still need to be selected somehow. Without elections, how do you propose we do that? Or do you imagine that the laws the people pass will magically implement and enforce themselves?

More importantly, I don't see how that does anything to address the problem of a hereditary elite exercising the most influence and power -- after all, in the present world, they do that through economic power and control of the means of communication; to the extent that there are hereditary electoral political dynasties, that's a symptom of the problem, not a root cause.