The fundamental issue is that elections are too expensive so we don’t do collective decision making that often, and usually only for our state or national governments.
People tend to elect representatives for long terms instead and then complain about them, rather than delegating their vote to experts or trying other systems like Ranked Choice Voting.
Many people complain about having to travel far to a polling booth, and disenfranchisement, whereas they could vote for their phone. Elderly and minorities in rural areas often have bad access.
If elections were cheap, people could easily engage in collective decision making of various types and choose various ways yo tally votes. None of that is possible today, we are like the people before computers, or before the industrial revolution - having a limited number of options, newspapers, etv.
We would also have more confidence in the results as we’d check using the Merkle tree that our vote was counted. It would be user friendly to do so.
And we could also implement many of the results on-chain, such as how much UBI to give out in our own community’s currency, or how much to tax transactions.
The fundamental issue with elections is that the mob is easily swayed and because most of us are unqualified to hold opinions about most things. What is best or true is not decided by majority vote. Never in a million years would I want mob rule. I don't know where this strange doctrine of mob wisdom came from, but it is dangerous and false. The vote is open to all adult citizens only because we need a hedge against corruption in leadership, and even then, it is a vote for leadership, not a system of referenda and direct democracy. Even this "hedge" can easily enable corruption and vote the worst tyrants into power.
And the reason we localize voting, or should do so, is because of the principle of subsidiary.
Back in 2014 there were a lot of studies on wisdom of the crowds. You’d have to explain why they beat experts at many fields yet in others they would be worse. Most of the failures (FTX, MtGox, Softbank, invasions of Iraq and Ukraine, wars in general) are the result of centralization, not the regular people (who don’t want to kill others en masse). Centralizing power and decision making in a few hands leads to a lot of consequences:
That's not hard. Most cases where wisdom of the crowd works fine is when the crowd does not have a personal or emotional stake in the outcome. Such gatherings attract mostly people that have an interest in that particular area, so the crowd self-selects for competence.
What is your expected outcome when you let the crowd decide how much taxes they pay, or how much to spend on road/water/electricity grid maintenance?
My point is that general elections are intrinsically mediocre at decision making. You can make them cheaper, more efficient, make sure everyone can vote, add a delegation system, and so on, but you'd just be polishing a turd.
It's pointless to improve voting technology if people don't understand the ramifications of what they vote for, and they will never know that unless they invest hundreds of hours of careful study into it. If everyone does this, there is no way it won't be insanely expensive.
IMHO there is a very simple solution to all of these issues that could have been implemented a century ago: pick representatives at random. Send them all to the capital, lodge them and pay them to think about the issues full time, talk to experts directly, interview candidates for Prime Minister and other executive positions directly, coordinate with each other, and so on. Give people the time and the information they require in order to cast the very best votes they are capable of.
I'd say the very simple solution is to have representatives decide. Then there's a separate debate about how to the representatives are assigned. At random, based on voting, based on competitive self-appointment by means of heavy weaponry, etc.
Blockchain may or may not make it easier to bypass the concept of having representatives decide, but this assumes we'd want to in the first place, which I am in full agreement with you: this is a feature, not a bug, so I don't wanna, so I don't need blockchain.
People tend to elect representatives for long terms instead and then complain about them, rather than delegating their vote to experts or trying other systems like Ranked Choice Voting.
Many people complain about having to travel far to a polling booth, and disenfranchisement, whereas they could vote for their phone. Elderly and minorities in rural areas often have bad access.
If elections were cheap, people could easily engage in collective decision making of various types and choose various ways yo tally votes. None of that is possible today, we are like the people before computers, or before the industrial revolution - having a limited number of options, newspapers, etv.
We would also have more confidence in the results as we’d check using the Merkle tree that our vote was counted. It would be user friendly to do so.
And we could also implement many of the results on-chain, such as how much UBI to give out in our own community’s currency, or how much to tax transactions.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Just see https://intercoin.org/applications