I read today’s copy of Metro on the bus – even though the newspaper generally is crap i tend to read it for one thing: the letters people send in are fucking hillarious sometimes. Today there was a serious one though, asking why Sweden’s goverment doesn’t set up an internet-based voting system so we can have a proper direct democracy, just like Switzerland.
This, however, is a terrible way of running a country, unless the population is less than 10 people (i.e. The Principality of Sealand), for several reasons. The first problem, which anyone should be able to spot, concerns the voting itself. Making ten million people go vote once a month is not a reasonable solution. Using a web-based voting system sounds better, but there will always be ways to abuse such systems, enabling people to vote more than once.
Participation will probably be low too – if people don’t have time to care or investigate the issue at hand, they might not vote, or worse – they might vote without knowing the consequences. This is probably the most important reason not to have this type of democracy. It has always been my opinion that the Swedish people, being frightened or just plain conservative, made the wrong decision regarding the EMU but also the nuclear power issue – unfortunately. People are easily manipulated in these situations and unless they really do some research of their own they are inevitably going to make decisions based on someone else’s opinion. How is that democracy?
We have to keep the system we have today, where small groups of representatives from each party can really research the issue and come up with a good solution. Anything else would be a catastrophe.
