Instead of picking a party, why can’t we vote on issues

I would suggest looking at CA's referendum system to see how people really aren't good at voting on things with larger implications.

Arguably CA's wonky tax system has some of it's roots in an effort to keep taxes low, and to some extent backfired long term.

For one off items legalizing marijuana or so with limited repercussions on other things, those kind of referendums would seem well suited. But anything else voters I suspect would be happy to vote to eat and have their cake at the same time.

I don’t think more direct democracy is actually a solution. Most people are uninformed on the issues and frankly many civil liberties would evaporate if left up to the mob.

Instead we need a better way to get expertise and accountability from our representatives. A TV show host billionaire shouldn’t be the president in the first place, but that’s the current reality of a news-media driven voting system.

Some people have been working on a liquid democracy [0] platform, allowing people to vote directly per bill or delegate their vote to a representative, which they can change anytime they wish.

This is a technology problem to solve as distributed zero-trust isn't an easy problem to scale. Some attempts have been with using cryptocurrency per vote, but I haven't seen anything new in a few years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy#:~:text=Liqui....

Many European countries seem to solve this using proportional representation.

I'd love to see a state give that a shot.

I have sympathy for this because my particular combination of political preferences does not fit any party. And I am not even in the US where the choice is, let us say, rater one-dimensional.

The problem with it is that one might end up with the people voting for, among other things, more generous unemployment benefits, many nice infrastructure projects, lower taxes, and a balanced budget.

I guess one could attempt to solve this by putting a price tag on what people vote for as in 'we have this nice project but taxes would increase from this to that amount'. Of course, when actually doing it the project would go over budget and what do you do then?

You get political parties because you are a minority of 1. In order to get anything done, you need allies.

Most people simply don't care about the things that matter to you. It's not that they're opposed, but that they are apathetic, and it's certainly not their top priority. Even if they roughly agree, they almost certainly prefer some other version of it.

A party is a way of trying to reach a majority by putting a selection of issues together that you can all at least agree to, if not favor. You hammer out one acceptable version of legislation: not anybody's favorite, but one nearly everybody in the group can at least tolerate. The less they like it, the more they will need some encouragement to vote for it -- which includes your promise to vote on their favorite thing.

Every proposal to change the system seems to be predicated on the idea that if only your idea could be presented in isolation, people would leap at the opportunity to pass it. That's simply not the case. Most people simply do not care, and any effort to make them care is going to be some variant on a political party.

Democracy is, at core, about getting large groups of people to compromise. No variant of democracy absolves you of the need to negotiate with people who at best don't care about you. There are many, many different ways to govern ourselves, but none of them will give you that sense of purity you seek, where you get to vote on your favorite issue and then ignore everybody else's.

It's fundamentally messy and will always, in the language familiar to HN readers, be full of "smells". Systems predicated on eliminating the smells, rather than living with them, are always going to be toys.

So, I am going to put political parties aside and focus on the purely American absurdities.

* We live in a two party system. China has one party only and others are not allowed. Most countries have multiple polical parties. In the US it comes down to money. It take a huge amount of money to become a political party with access to various jurisdictions and media influence which is more challenging than it sounds because funding is required via donations only and donations are limited by campaign finance laws. A two party system is limiting to us versus them arguments, which are often invalid and absurd.

* People don’t pick presidential candidates. Political parties do. This occurs via primary elections that differ from the general election that really matters. Primaries are scattered so that political parties can experimentally field test their candidates among their primary constituents. These constituents are often not the general voting body comprised of moderate people. This is often how candidates emerge that are generally unpopular and/or incompetent, because it’s a reflection of party tooling opposed to actual voter concerns.

* Even with the support and nomination of a political party candidates need more money to compete. Generally the candidate that raises the most money performs better. Therefore the ingredients to become president are party nomination and fund raising.

People are already free to group together, pool their money and persue a common goal and solve an issue, you vote with your wallet.

However, if you intend to use the government's monopoly on the use of violence to force other people to do something or pay for it, you'll need to move to another country which doesn't have a constitution that expressly forbids that and allows its citizens to arm themselves to protect themselves from this sort of coercion.

This is under the assumption that the voters will have an informed opinion on the issues. With how much the internet have created echo chambers, I highly doubt this will be possible. In reality, I think the results will be determined by whichever interest groups that can mobilize more supporters through clickbait propaganda. Even if they eventually get caught, does it matter after the policies get passed?

I'd rather see changes to the system to allow/incentivize good-faith leaders to prosper. All I want is for my leaders to make decisions based on science and taking into account of _every_ stakeholder instead of just their corporate donators. Right now, too many politicians (at least the ones that affect me) get away with "undemocratic" decisions for personal gain without repercussions.

Most people (as in statistical majority, not HN readers) don't read anything about issues and just vote with their emotions or who they like or for whatever party they identify with.

In the US, guns and abortion are the common "issues" the politicians use to divide even though those are things that are likely to not change on a federal level.

A better way to govern ourselves is to have term limits across the board - legislature (Senate and House) and judiciary (federal judges and Supreme Court). That would be a check/balance against people becoming too powerful.

In some countries parties put up a platform of policies before an election, voters learn about each party platform and vote based on the policies they agree with most.

If people actually did the most basic of research about what each party intends to do (and how they have historically behaved when elected) rather than making everything a personality contest, then just maybe they’d get representation that puts forward policies they believe in.

And before anyone claims it: no “the opposite of $otherTeam” isn’t a policy platform and neither is “own the $ideologyNickname”

It would give special interest groups a lot of power. A lot of people are against subsidies in general but for most of them it is not a core issue. Now suppose there were three issues you had to vote for; subsidies to group A, subsidies to group B, and subsidies to group C. Most people won't care and won't show up for these votes (no one except for politicians have time to vote on hundreds of issues every year). However, a large number of people in group A will vote for subsidies for them, as will people in group B and C.

Political parties and news orgs benefit from having ½ of Americans stoked with animosity toward the other ½.

As evidence I offer that the most obvious yet never-offered solution to 2016 election meddling is a less malleable voter.

voting on issues is not the only alternative to the current system.

the problems today stem from the way parties work. their only function seems to be to pit candidates against each other.

consider just abolishing the parties and making each candidate independent.

toeing the party line would no longer happen, and elected representatives be free to really represent their constituents instead of being forced to compromise in order to not loose their party affiliation and their chance at being reelected.

members of the house and senate (or your countries respective bodies) could collaborate on issues based on their own choices and not influenced by some party cabal that is pulling strings in the background.

another issue is lobbying. that should be completely outlawed, and any gift to an elected representative should be sanctioned as bribery.

there are more things that can be done to make the system more fair and actually represent its people, but start with those two and things will already improve dramatically, because energy no longer goes into parties fighting each other.

Voting on issues isn’t enough.

There’s no easy way to hold our representatives accountable.

We need to track the government’s progress on what they’re doing for the issues.

What does Netflix use to fire people?

See the ideas in this discussion on how to solve politics.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24263815

I don’t accept the arguments against direct voting on issues. Often those against direct voting are also the same people who claim increased turnout and reduced barriers to voting will lead to better outcomes and is inherently “more democratic”. And yet they arbitrarily draw the line there and are against direct voting on issues. You can’t have it both ways.

The problem is that you need someone to drive a coherent proposition ie. Select the subjects that are meaningful for an uneducated crowd to vote on.

Otherwise, someone will propose to vote for "x millions for everyone!" and it might have some success...

We can. Some states have direct democracy. California allows voting on anything directly. If a proposed law gets a certain number of signatures it goes on the ballot.

California voters could propose and pass a law requiring all new laws to be put to statewide vote.

There's no evidence that would work. The evidence is you need continuity.

Companies have employees for instance. Everything little thing is not contracted out.

So, this could be done in 1 of 2 ways:

1. There would be detailed ballot initiatives that contain full legal proposals, details of their execution, budget, etc. and voters simply vote "yes" or "no" to them.

We see this as referendums and ballot initiatives. When used sparingly for "big" questions, this works well, but when used routinely, it puts a pretty huge burden on voters to be continuously informed.

Take the California ballot this year. There was a ballot initiative about regulating kidney dialysis procedures. If it were the only ballot initiative, I might have had time to research it, discover the motivations around it (is it because of safety, or protectionism for an industry?) the consequences (does it need tighter regulation? do those regulation costs fall on the consumer?) etc.

But, there were like 20 of these things on the ballot. At some point, it becomes actual work to figure out all of them and research them thoroughly enough to know what the consequence of your vote would actually be.

Ideally, you'd have some sort of agent working on your behalf, sifting through the consequences and political motivations, and navigating the 'yes/no' votes in a way that aligns with your ideal outcomes. This is, theoretically, what politicians already do :)

2. Instead of exact legislation, you specify a general intent. Say that you were generally pro-environmentalism. All things being equal, you'd like things to go more towards environmental preservation, ending climate change etc.

Ok, cool, but now there's TONS of room for interpretation. Extreme case, as executor of this mandate, do I have carte blanche to do anything as long as it decreases the carbon footprint? Anything? Induce a famine to reduce usage and consumption of goods?

You'd probably need a more thorough statement of general intent and sentiment. Political parties (outside the weird US system) basically have this. They release a document, usually called a Party Program, which outlines their philosophies and intents.

Theoretically, you're voting for the party and the person you elect is someone who is ideologically dedicated to realizing the intents of the shared Party Program to the best of their ability.

This system works really well when there's a diverse collection of parties with different ideologies, different levels of concrete plans to realize these ideologies, and paths available for such parties to gain legitimate power and sway in the government.

The US 'parties' are missing quite a bit of the above, but I personally think having many parties and fixing our voting systems so such parties can eventually be in congress/the presidency would create a system where issues that people actually care about would be implemented (roughly) in ways they would approve of... at least much moreso than they are now in the US.

I would like to see more systems based around participatory democracy, like citizens' assemblies. With a CA, sortition is used to select a sample of the population, and they come together along with subject matter experts to do research and shape the policy itself.

I view the problems with our democracies in terms of information theory. Even if you move from representative to direct democracy and people can vote on issues, a vote is still a very small amount of information, and the bandwidth from the people to the policy-makers is tiny. Contrast that with citizens' assemblies and the bandwidth is much wider, because it democratizes the policy construction process and allows people to discuss the policy, instead of just signalling a single bit (yes/no).

Because then people will have to find hobbies and the recreational panic industry will go out of business?

In a way it's a shame that we don't have something like the Roman Caesars or even like the Chinese Communist Party structure with a leader like Xi. If we did, we would have no successful enemies and could easily crush all opponents beneath our heel like insects(yes, we're that capable!).

But we're a republic, so we're always chewing on each others' legs and scrambling to get to the monetary/political feeding trough.

- "Et tu, Brute!" the words of Julius Caesar in William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, upon being stabbed by his close friend Brutus in the Roman Senate):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Et_tu,_Brute%3F