Democracy is a flawed system, but it’s the best system we have (or whatever the actual quote is). I’ve been thinking about this for a while and have come up with what I think is a better system than the current version of democracy that we have. It ends up still falling under the umbrella of democracy, maybe even more than the current system of democracy. In my system:
Here’s how it works: Election Week is coming up. If you are happy to be voted for, you nominate yourself. When you nominate yourself, you must answer questions based on bills that were proposed in the previous/current parliamentary period (or whatever that’s actually called). This all goes on a database. I anticipate that something like 10,000 people would be on this database having nominated themselves. Nominations close two weeks before election week. In those two weeks, nominees must list where they want their votes to go if they are eliminated. It’s Election Monday. People can start voting (online only for the whole thing). You can see the answers people gave to the questions. You can either search for people and see their answers, or answer some of the questions which you deem “essential answers”, then see who has answered how you did. You have until midnight on Friday to submit your vote. Similar to the current system, you can pick someone and allow them to choose the preferences, or you can vote for multiple people and your preferences will filter down. Starting with the nominee with the fewest votes, nominees are eliminated and their votes are given to their preferences (or the voter’s preference if that’s how they voted). When there are either 250 nominees remaining or all the remaining nominees have more than 30,000 votes, those people are considered elected to parliament The results would be announced at 9am on Saturday. Those elected would have the following week to determine who is the Prime Minister, and they would follow a similar process to the voting process (preferences, etc.). Importantly, on this issue and everything they vote on while in office, they will have voting power based on the number of votes they finished on in the election. I think there should be some cap on the amount of voting power people have. It would be something like 5x the lowest amount of voting power is the highest and everyone is scaled between those two points. This means there will be a minimum of 250 and a current theoretical maximum of about 500 (based on current voting population and the 30k minimum) representatives of the people of Australia. Problems it addresses: At the moment each person has the choice between a bunch of people who aren’t really going to represent them in parliament. In the past week I’ve received letters from four people representing their party (I recently updated my enrolment address). I don’t like their party. Voting for them is basically a non-starter for me. And yet one of them will get elected as my representative in Australian Parliament. There will be nobody there actually representing my views, or anything close to be honest. The idea of having electorates (to the best of my knowledge) is so people who are facing the same issues (or perceive this to be the case) can vote for someone to represent them when those collective issues are up for debate. This made sense in the past but is becoming less and less important as people become more connected on issues with those spatially disparate from themselves (people take into account issues beyond their immediate surroundings). I don’t really see any benefits to the current electorate system over something which isn’t based on locality. It also eliminate those people who are some nobody in a political party who are essentially given a seat in parliament because they are put in a safe seat. They just vote with the party all the time and there’s essentially no point to them being there as an individual. In my system, if they aren’t actually getting a vote over all the other candidates, they don’t get in. It will mean each representative will need to have convictions which they are willing to stand on, not just toe the party line. It's helped by the fact that extra votes for someone who's definitely going to get in just means they have more voting power, rather then being wasted or passed on to the next person on the ticket. The fact that there’s a big change in the way voting works will (hopefully) mean that people actually think about how they vote (not just who they vote for). This means they might follow the part of my voting guide and vote for the person they truly want to get in, even if there’s no chance they will ultimately win a seat. It will also mean (in my opinion) that those elected are truly held to a higher standard than the rest of us plebeians. I don’t think this means their history should be heavily scrutinised, I’m thinking more along the lines of “let’s see who you actually are and if you’re worth voting for”. If someone was convicted of a crime 30 years ago when they were 20 years old, but has since been on a journey and by all indications is now a great person full of moral virtue, they shouldn’t pay a political price today for their crime long ago. Similarly, if someone say, I dunno, cheats on their partner, then the Australian Public have a right to know that, because it’s something that might affect their voting (not for all, but for some). Here are the flaws: Money. It takes away a lot of the motivation to be in a political party (the way they are currently structured). This puts the onus on the candidates to raise funds for themselves which is usually straight up bribery. I’m not really sure how to get around this one, but there are a few whacky ideas that I’ve heard. One I like is to get a little “election economy” going. It would be something like nominations close six weeks before election week and every nominee gets $100k worth of $20 and $30 advertising tokens. These can only be redeemed if filled out by an enrolled voter, and each enrolled voter can only fill out $50 worth, not for the same nominee. The only money allowed to be spent on election campaigning comes from these tokens, and that’s the only way the money can be spent. As I’m typing this I can see that it adapts poorly to this situation because the barriers to entry are so low that many people could nominate themselves, then spend all their advertising money on votes for themselves (as this would be mandated), then farm out their preferences to another candidate. This may be solved by having to provide some sort of proof for genuine intent to win, but that would make it messy. Let me know if you can think of a way to either solve this, or circumnavigate it. Even if the above plan or something like it were to work, that would make elections super expensive, though I think the only answer can be that elections are expensive. If the money comes from business, then that’s essentially businesses buying votes. If the money comes from individuals, that’s kind of spending money to buy votes too, isn’t it? I think what people really want is for the money side of things to not be an object, so basically anyway can nominate themselves, and they gain votes based on their merit alone, not their financial situation. The only way that can even vaguely work is if the government (taxpayer) funds it. It probably means less advertising, more references to whatever the database is that allows us to look up each candidate and more work to be done by the voter (I’ll need to research rather than have whoever pays for it blast images at my eyeholes, which is a good thing, but will people actually do it?). The funding waters are also muddied by the power of social media to essentially “create free advertising” and the power of news media (funded/owned by not that many people) to report on certain candidates, also creating free advertising for them. Trump used this to great effect in 2016. Parliament won’t work well without parties. That’s the whole reason things get passed, right? Yeah, at the moment, but that’s not how it’s supposed to work. Anyway, I’m going to come up with a new way that parliament works too, more on that now. Things required for this to work: For all this to work, we also need to “fix” the way parliament works. I don’t know much about how parliament works. I know there’s a theory about the way it works, then there’s the actual way it works. I think the actual way it works is trash, its relationship to the media is trash, hence its relationship to the public is trash. I’m going to look a bit more into the theory of how it works before I full criticise it. I know the above change to democracy has the flaws I mentioned, and the changes I’m going to propose to parliament will hopefully address them. What prompted this and why am I posting it: Firstly, watching the Crash Course Philosophy series on Youtube has taught me the value of rational argument. This will feature more prominently in the “how to fix parliament” post.
Secondly, I’m reading Mein Kampf because of the conversation between Dan Carlin and Daniele Bolelli. The reason that book did what it did is because it correctly identified a lot of problems people saw in the political system. You can’t flout racism amidst a bunch of trash ideas about politics and get away with it, you have to scatter it on something which resonates well with the public. I don’t really know jack about the historical reality of politics in Vienna and German-Austria pre-WWI, but a lot of what Hitler wrote is relevant to the shortcomings of the political system in Australia today. His solution is to get rid of democracy, among other things, but I’d like to keep democracy, and make it closer to actual democracy, rather than the super pseudo-democracy which we currently have. And before you say “dude, Chris, mate, you probably shouldn’t be taking political advice from Adolf Hitler”, don’t worry, I’m not, it’s just thought-provoking. Also, actually read the book and tell me that his criticism of politicians in the first three chapters isn’t accurate for many of those in Canberra (and everywhere) today. As to why I’m posting, I’m really hoping for people to critique it. I’m not an expert on these things, so I assume there are some major, probably critical flaws. I can’t see them with my current depth of knowledge, so I’m hoping my smart friends will be able to shoot it down for specific reasons so I can change it to something that actually does make sense. Also, let’s go easy on the “the biggest flaw is that how would it ever get through, anyone in politics (who are the people voting on it) stands to lose” flaw for now, we can look at that once we have the final version.
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