[EM] [MG] Public parties: a Trojan Horse in the party system

[Ed Pastore]

On Aug 6, 2012, at 5:36 PM, Peter Zbornik wrote:

> 2012/8/6 Michael Allan <mike at zelea.com>
>> Peter Zbornik said:
>> > To become a member, you actually have to be a citizen in the
>> > municipality where Demoex works (being from Sweden, I checked it
>> > out).  This is a reasonable condition, and thus, unless we have a
>> > wold-wide public party, there needs to be some voter qualifications
>> > (except for being human, above 16/18/21 years of age, not seriously
>> > mentally impaired etc.
>> 
>> [snip]
>> The public depends on freedom of expression.  Voting is a form of
>> expression.  Placing restrictions on who can vote and who cannot (or
>> where they can vote, when, and how), Demoex is not a public party.
>> [snip]
> 
> Ok, so every citizen in every country in the world will be able to vote in the election of the municipal council where I live?
> I don't think I would like that and neither would the other people living in this municipality too, I believe.

Change that slightly: every citizen in every country in the world will be able to vote in every municipal council of every town in the world. Put that way, it becomes evident that people would have to choose where precisely they want to vote. Of the hundreds of thousands of votes I could cast, I would need to pare down to the elections I a.) care about and b.) have time to think about.

So I don't see much chance of everyone in the world participating in your council vote. However, they could if they really wanted to. So now imagine that you live at say the middle of the Amazon or Nile or Mississippi river, and your town council has come up with a way to divert that river in such a way that it will destroy the economies of everyone downstream. In that case, it is quite imaginable not only that those people would want a say in your town council, but also that they should have one.

I also do not see the point in restricting voting to any of the other conditions you define. If an intelligent chimpanzee cares enough to participate in a vote, why should we deny it?* Same for a 10 year old child, a criminal, an insane (by someone's judgement) person, etc. With public voting, the community can look at who has voted and decide later if it wants to impose those restrictions. But it does not need to impose them beforehand. In some particular cases, we could learn a lot from the votes cast by the traditionally disenfranchised.


*If your note about "human" was to exclude sock-puppets, that is corrected for in software and by public voting, where people can validate the authenticity of their neighbors.