• TWeaK
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    11 year ago

    You wouldn’t need everyone to vote on everything. However there is a natural incentive to vote on things that interest and affect you. Right now, people don’t vote because they don’t believe it will change anything - you vote for a person, but they’re no different to any other person. Meanwhile, if they were given the opportunity to vote on whether their tax money should go to fixing their roads or building a new school, more people will have an opinion on that and want to vote.

    For things they don’t care about, they could either not vote, or better they could join a representative group. Rather than voting for a person to represent you for a set period, you join or leave a representative as you see fit. If you want to vote on a particular issue, or if the representative doesn’t vote the way you like, you withdraw your representative membership. Representatives would have to continue to act in the interests of their members, else they would lose their status.

    I disagree that democracy led to Roe vs Wade being reversed. Trump was elected despite not having the most votes - which isn’t democratic - and then he appointed people to the court - not democratic - to rig the votes in their rulings. Even the opportunity to appoint new judges isn’t democratic, as they are appointed for life, so the timing of when one elects to retire or dies determines who gets to decide their replacement. This prevents the system from being democratic or fair - it is a political decision made by politicians, rather than a meritocratic decision made by experts of the profession. The legal profession should be picking judges, not politicians.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      I disagree that people would somehow be more compelled to vote for issues they care about. Most people care about who the president is but that still doesn’t get everyone to the polls. Forcing states to have more reasonable access to mail in ballots would be a step in the right direction but the problem in my opinion is really a out getting people to see it more as a duty than a chore. Say we used a tax credit to incentivize voting?

      As for the idea of just letting political parties do what they want, they kind of already do, see DNC primaries 2016. That system already exists and is being actively exploited by the ruling class. I don’t think that’s a fix.

      Again, we come back to term limits, people who are elected to office need to be forced out of politics after a set amount of time to prevent career politicians. And more specifically we need to make it so they cannot accept a job offer or payment for services from anyone who could have benefited from their decisions while in office. Maybe we have a pension for ex-representatives to live on for 8 years after leaving office, and make it illegal for them to have any other income? It should be a service to our country, not our country serving them.