Re: [WDDM] Democracy axioms

[Joshua Petersen <joshupetersen(at)gmail.com>]

In some ways, initially, yes as only people interested in a topic will seek it out at the beginning. However, as the topic comes more to the forefront, people will seek it out from both sides. Further, the self-selected polls are harder to corrupt. Many politicians and corporations have done 'random' polls designed to get specific results. By controlling the way in which the people are randomly contacted skews results (such as a poll on the street is more likely to hit city people - in the U.S. that'd mean a higher concentration of democrats, phone polls which are more likely to be answered by people who have time on their hands - more less productive members of society, etc., etc.) The strength of self-selected polling is that at no point does their have to be a single entity controlling it. Self-selected polling, however, is very good for determining the interest in a topic. So when it comes to legislature and final votes, it shows that the legislation being voted on is what's important enough to the people to bring to all of their attention, which is really the whole point of this stage of the process.

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 11:21 AM, <Joshua N Pritikin> wrote:

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 11:09:26AM -0500, Joshua Petersen wrote:
> The problem, in my opinion, with doing issues by a poll or by signatures is
> that it raises the possibility for citizens to be swamped by many
> legislative actions at once, not to mention it often limits the number of
> people who can show support for it. I think in this, we can take a wonderful
> democratic notion from internet sites like youtube and diggit: the "Vote up"
> option. If there's a limit on the number of legislative actions that have to
> be voted on at any given time (of course this number is alterable by vote of
> the people), and there is a single location/forum/etc for government
> legislation, then people can go and 'vote up' what they view as important
> issues. Of the submitted issues, the top (however many the people have
> decided on) will go to be voted on. If the ability to also 'vote down' an
> idea is available, then the process has many of the advantages of both a
> poll and a survey, and few of the disadvantages, while being even more
> democratic in many ways.

Self-selected opinion polls are vastly inferior to randomly selected
opinion polls.