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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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I'm for direct democracy and I was trying to push in that direction but I'm all for fighting against gerymandering !
Props to you for fighting it since 2016, the plan bill look very nice !
When you say direct democracy what do you envision?
I'm all for that where practical, but the complexity of the necessary tasks and knowledge of issues quickly exceeds what people can realistically keep track of. Governing and legislating needs to be a full time job I think.
It's hard to conceive a perfect system but to paint broad stokes :
Direct democracy mean that the final say is always in the hand of people rather than elected politicians. That doesn't mean they aren't people whose job is to draft up and propose legislation ! But thoose people can't decide instead of everyone and have to listen to specialist and concerned people. To vote a law they have to convince and prove to everyone that it will be a net positive.
Think about it, how many time did you see senators that don't know what a computer is vote laws that reshape internet for the worse. Or think about how leftist in the US are stuck with a center-right party ( Democrats ) that only listen to their donors.
Having direct democracy doesn't mean that everyone has to be politicaly litterate or that legislation specialist stop existing. Ideally it's a system that reward people solving problems and discourage self interested politicians.
Of course they are a lot of obvious flaw in what I said ( the first being how to decide what people mean ), it's an ideal after all and I'm sure that there is a better way to define it. But that's the neat thing about direct democracy, we can all find something better together. ( rather than beg a politicians whose only skill is being elected ).
Thanks for your reply. I'm still having a hard time understanding how it would work. Say for example that there needs to be a new law. How would it get written, and then how is it passed?
The same way public petition work, if a law is needed people will campain around the issue and among thoose people some will draft legislation that could be made into law.
So in this system, would all citizens have to vote on a bill in order for it to become law? How would it be determined that a law is valid/good enough to be brought up for a vote? You could imagine thousands of proposed bills each year. And certainly most citizens wouldn't pay the kind of attention you'd hope would be given to legislation affecting the entire nation, even if it was only a hundred bills.
I do like the idea of a referendum, where if you get enough signatures then it goes up for vote to the entire electorate. But I think that needs to be in tandem with professional legislators.