This is a terrible idea, because it allows voters to be coerced. Any voting system that exposes who voted for what has this problem, even if vote-buying is technically illegal. It happens on a small scale with absentee ballots, where dependents can be coerced by their spouses, parents, or children. It could happen on a much larger scale if the voting records were public. Think of the social implications from people's churches, their friends, or their employers if voting records were public.
Allowing votes to be explicitly sold would be even worse. It would lead to much more control by special interests and the powerful. For someone who is poor, selling their votes as a package deal for a chunk of change in the short term would seem like a great deal. In the long term, they've probably just made their future even worse. Who knows what the end-game would be in this system, but it's almost guaranteed to be miserable for almost everyone.
Well-picked, I missed that altogether. Publicly-visible voting is very bad for a fair system. On a re-read, I notice another fundamental flaw: "voting on every issue is too onerous, so voters will assign their votes to someone, a 'politician' to vote for them" -> "a single bad vote will scupper that politician's support". If the voters don't have the time to inform themselves and vote on every issue, then how on earth are they going to have the time to analyse each of their selected politician's choices? There's no real offload here.
Comments
This is a terrible idea, because it allows voters to be coerced. Any voting system that exposes who voted for what has this problem, even if vote-buying is technically illegal. It happens on a small scale with absentee ballots, where dependents can be coerced by their spouses, parents, or children. It could happen on a much larger scale if the voting records were public. Think of the social implications from people's churches, their friends, or their employers if voting records were public.
Allowing votes to be explicitly sold would be even worse. It would lead to much more control by special interests and the powerful. For someone who is poor, selling their votes as a package deal for a chunk of change in the short term would seem like a great deal. In the long term, they've probably just made their future even worse. Who knows what the end-game would be in this system, but it's almost guaranteed to be miserable for almost everyone.
Well-picked, I missed that altogether. Publicly-visible voting is very bad for a fair system. On a re-read, I notice another fundamental flaw: "voting on every issue is too onerous, so voters will assign their votes to someone, a 'politician' to vote for them" -> "a single bad vote will scupper that politician's support". If the voters don't have the time to inform themselves and vote on every issue, then how on earth are they going to have the time to analyse each of their selected politician's choices? There's no real offload here.