On May 14, 2007, at 13:26 , [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Juho wrote:
> > (2) Direct democracy generally requires open voting. Coercion
seems
> > to be rare;
>
> Open voting opens a door to coercion. A violent husband of might
> easily tell his wife how to vote. Open votes also are likely to lead
> to less votes to candidates that represent minorities and/or values
> that the voter does not want to reveal publicly. This could apply to
> minorities (political, ethnic, sexual, religious) or any deviation
> from the family, village, working place or country tradition and
> favoured values.
David Friedman has posted on his blog that when he lectures, one of
the issues he has is
determining if the students actually understand what he has just
said. The problem is that
if he asks "Did everyone understand that?", nobody will raise their
hand as they don't want
to be seen as the one who doesn't understand.
His proposed solution is that each student would be given a yes/no
button. They can
then answer questions using the button. This would not achieve
perfect privacy, but
it would likely greatly increase the accuracy of the result. He
could then repeat any
section of the lecture that doesn't hit a threshold.
Yes, good example of a situation where privacy pays off. I have spent
many hours in meetings and sometimes wondered also if other real-time
feedback like "I agree", "proceed a bit faster" etc. could have been
useful.
Something similar could be used in a town meeting type setting.
OTOH, it might break
the consensus building effect of the town meeting. If there is no
penalty in acting to
prevent consensus, then it is less likely to occur.
One could also combine discussions and anonymous feedback so that
even though extensive discussions, lobbying, propaganda,
argumentation, questions and negotiations would take place the
results of those discussions could be seen in the outcome of the
private feedback/polls/votes.
Juho
Raphfrk
--------------------
Interesting site
"what if anyone could modify the laws"
www.wikocracy.com
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