I’ve often thought that a good digital identity system would allow provably fair random sampling, which, once the public were used to that, would allow a much greater number of referenda.
But do you think increasing the number of referenda by 100x might just overwhelm the (already generally low) capacity of the press to inform the public and lead to a lot more situations where the public are making badly uninformed votes? Or like, are referenda bottlenecked on the national discourse?
Currently in Switzerland, you vote four times a year, each time on some five of six referendum questions. But some of those are or cantonal or municipal level and thus not super interesting for the national media. Let’s say there are three Swiss-wide referendums each quarter, that is 12 a year. I think media can manage that.
Number going up 100x would be a problem, but the load is limited by:
For a referendum to take place at all, a certain amount of signatures have to be gathered. Lots of oddball referendums fail at this stage.
Significant portion of referendums is solved by negotiation (see article) and does not reach the voter at all.
Even if the voter is not properly informed they can either not vote (with no quorum that has no impact on the result) or vote “no” (which means “keep the status quo”).
I’ve often thought that a good digital identity system would allow provably fair random sampling, which, once the public were used to that, would allow a much greater number of referenda.
But do you think increasing the number of referenda by 100x might just overwhelm the (already generally low) capacity of the press to inform the public and lead to a lot more situations where the public are making badly uninformed votes? Or like, are referenda bottlenecked on the national discourse?
Currently in Switzerland, you vote four times a year, each time on some five of six referendum questions. But some of those are or cantonal or municipal level and thus not super interesting for the national media. Let’s say there are three Swiss-wide referendums each quarter, that is 12 a year. I think media can manage that.
Number going up 100x would be a problem, but the load is limited by:
For a referendum to take place at all, a certain amount of signatures have to be gathered. Lots of oddball referendums fail at this stage.
Significant portion of referendums is solved by negotiation (see article) and does not reach the voter at all.
Even if the voter is not properly informed they can either not vote (with no quorum that has no impact on the result) or vote “no” (which means “keep the status quo”).