Anarcho-capitalism

Zion, IL
By A.B. Dada
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An interesting question came into my email inbox yesterday from someone who must have come across an older article I wrote castigating the idea of voting, and why I’m an anti-voter (meaning I do vote, but I write my own name in on every line). The question he asked was simple: “If you don’t agree with the process of voting, why not recommend a change in the process?” I emailed him back right away, but it piqued my curiosity into what others thought of my ideas of “fixing” Democracy, if it would even work.

First of all, I believe Democracy is an evil word, based solely on the idea that 51% of the people in a voting district can tell 49% of the people what to do. To me, it doesn’t work. The only Democracy I could theoretically accept would be one that operated under a strong barrier to unlimited power. The U.S. Constitution, as well as many State Constitutions, theoretically were formed with the barrier to unlimited power in mind, but we can see that they’ve all been stretched way beyond their original intent. You can’t stop powerful people from pushing their powers a tiny bit at a time, which snowballs into tyranny. Democratic tyranny is worse than Dictatorial tyranny, since you can’t easily blame millions for bilking the fruits of your labors. I’d rather blame on Dictator than try to convince hundreds of millions.

That being said, I do think there are steps we can take to make Democracy more palatable. Of course, the first point is to restrain those powers to a very slim definition of what government should do. The second step, I believe, is to extend the voting timeframe, along with regular updates of the current tabulated results. Real-time counting of ballots is not difficult to do, even with punch voting systems.

As each punch card is submitted by the voter, a receipt is printed for them detailing who they voted for and where their vote is recorded. If there is a problem, they don’t press the “Submit” button. They press “Cancel” and redo their vote. Then they return to the tallying machine until they’re happy. Upon “submit” being pressed, the numbers are uploaded to the central servers. In this day and age of DSL and cable broadband, getting real-time votes recorded centrally should not be a 3 week process.

At the end of the voting day, the votes are tabulated and provided to the media or to a website where people can look at them. The voting period, in my opinion, should be one week long. If after the first day of voting the non-voters see how the results are proceeding, they can then make a decision to pop in the car and head to the polls tomorrow. I seriously think this would get the lazy and apathetic voters to turn out if they saw how things are going. There’s nothing worse than hearing someone complain about their candidate losing when they didn’t show up. This way, they have a reason to go, especially if their candidate is losing or the margin is close. If the difference between one candidate and another is huge, i.e. a landslide, then people likely won’t turn out.

While this won’t fix democracy, it will be a huge step in getting the apathetic out to vote. This would be especially true at the local level, when tax addenda and bond issues are voted on. It would increase the media’s profits from covering elections, as they’d have more traffic to post results. Bloggers would profit with the additional traffic as people who haven’t voted would be able to get opinions on the various issues.