A tech startup company in California, PlaceAVote, would like legislation to be voted on by citizens, replacing Congress.
“If a PlaceAVote candidate is voted into office, all bills that come before Congress will be decided by the district via majority vote online,” states the company’s web site.
The company has 2 candidates running for Congress who promise to vote according to tallies from the public.
More details from their website:
1. Registered voters can place a vote on all bills that come before the United States Congress.
A. They can place or change a vote as soon as the bill is made publicly available.
B. Voting ends 15 minutes before the elected representative is required to place their vote.
2. Registered voters can choose to delegate their vote to another registered voter in their district.
A. Registered voters may be allowed to temporarily withdraw delegation for a single issue.
3. Registered voters get real-time stats on the status of any vote at any time.
4. Registered voters can view their historical votes.
5. Registered voters can audit their vote and insure that it was counted.
6. Registered voters can discuss bills through a forum-style format.
7. Registered voters can quickly and clearly understand all the riders on a bill.
8. Bills will be summarized outlining key elements such as costs, who benefits, who pays and who or what industry lobby wrote the bill.
9. Registered voters can suggest new bills.
10. If a bill is authored by the district, it must receive majority vote before it is proposed in committee.
Your thoughts?
The startup, PlaceAVote, envisions Americans voting on legislation through their software system and is currently running two candidates for Congress, both software engineers, who vow to vote according to the tallies recorded by the system.
“If a PlaceAVote candidate is voted into office, all bills that come before Congress will be decided by the district via majority vote online,” states the company’s web site.
One of PlaceAVote’s candidates, John Catano, said that the Founding Fathers “designed a political system that countless others have been based off of.”
“That being said, if they had access to current technology, don’t you think they would use some of it to address the will of the people?” He asked.
While the push to bring back power to the individual is encouraging, especially when the congressional approval rating is in the single digits, there are, however, some pitfalls with the concept, which appears to revolve around the “will of the majority.”
For one thing, the creators of PlaceAVote announced they are “committed to democracy.”
But America was founded as a republic under the rule of law with respect to individual liberties, not as a democracy which only leads to mob rule fueled by the unrestrained whims of the public.
“Democracy is the ‘direct’ rule of the people and has been repeatedly tried without success,” states a U.S. Army training manual from 1928. “Our Constitutional fathers, familiar with the strength and weakness of both autocracy and democracy, with fixed principles definitely in mind, defined a representative republican form of government.”
“They made a very marked distinction between a republic and a democracy and said repeatedly and emphatically that they had founded a republic.”
In other words, the Founding Fathers did not want a democracy in which the birth rights of the minority could be voted away by the majority.
Additionally, there is always the possibility that voting software can be manipulated or hacked by corrupt officials, allowing the establishment to flip votes in its favor while also giving individual voters the false impression that they are more empowered than ever before.
It’s been well documented that electronic voting machines, for example, are extremely vulnerable to voting fraud.
The Government Accountability Office even admitted as far back as 2005 that it was possible for voting staff to alter electronic ballots without being detected.
“This critical finding confirms that rigging the 2004 vote did not require a ‘widespread conspiracy’ but rather the cooperation of a very small number of operatives with the power to tap into the networked machines and thus change large numbers of votes at will,” the GAO declared in its report on the 2004 presidential election. “With 800,000 votes cast on electronic machines in Ohio, flipping the number needed to give Bush 118,775 could be easily done by just one programmer.”
While steps should be taken to empower the individual in the face of collective tyranny, attempting to do so with mobocratic concepts and fallible technology is fraught with danger.
People STILL haven’t figured out what the Obama Administration’s end game is….Remember, he learned his trade from Saul Alinsky. Create confusion, denigrate decency and moral integrity, destabilize economic conditions, undermine the rule of law, nurture discontent among segments of the populace and, when you’re ready, trigger total collapse of all social institutions by creating a monstrosity that interrupts and eviscerates healthcare, hiring, jobs, education…. all the functions that allow a society to serve it’s members. When all is CHAOS, introduce the reason for all these machinations….SATANISTIC SOCIALISM BASED NOT ON OUR CHRISTIAN UNDERPINNINGS AND THE CONSTITUTION but instead based on ‘relativistic postmodernism’ where no one set of values rule the day. ANYTHING GOES! Rule by consensus of the Elite– Mussolini’s fascist utopia! It’s gone too far and I believe we will not be able to stop it. Peace and order will be a thing of the past…………
You should really think about think about, you do realize what some initiatives has done. Do you want everything run by the cities????
Would never work, because, as has been seen with all the gay marriage bans being overturned, the will of the majority means nothing these days. If someone doesn’t like the law, they will sue to get it overturned, even if there is only half a dozen that are like-minded.
Sounds like a GREAT idea to me!
The system we now have makes allowances for population differences…..IF THIS WERE NOT SO, THE LARGE CITIES WOULD DICTATE TO ALL OF THE COUNTRY and we know the urban experience is different than the rural life. Our founding fathers knew well what it was like to live under the tyranny of a greatly distant king who had no idea of what their life was.
They would just flip the vote to who they wanted in office.
This sounds to good to be true:how do you keep the sicko’s out of your prize system;there is always someone who has nothing better to do than $#%&!@* with any thing they can.they love to hack into any government system and cause havoc,that isn’t even taking into account what foreign hackers would try;better think out all the options!
That is true Snurdly, but, we now live under a not so distant tyrant, and it is about to get really bad. Worse even than it was during the civil war.
We are a Republic, not a Democracy. Congress can’t be “replaced”. Neither can the Bill of Rights.
Hell no then they would really rig it!