FUCK YEAH
Bring it.
Or to put it another way, people don’t agree with me, so democracy must be wrong.
UKGov is currently engaged in a long running denial of service attack against the population.
I’m going to print out your comment so I can wipe my arse on it.
Sif there’s nothing broken about politics! Could you be more absurd?
Bless you treacle. Use soft paper - you don’t want something else to be cross about…
Okay, smartypants.
In what sense? The ideal, or as practised? Because the wording of your comment heavily implies the latter.
If so, prepare for a torrential downpour of shit.
Political parties will game this system by making false pledges. That is, were I evil, I would make a false pledge to vote for a third party candidate if I thought it would help split the vote of the major party candidate I oppose.
It would be similar to the way that Republicans vote in Democratic party primary elections and vote for the weaker candidate so that the Republican candidate would face a weaker Democratic opponent in the General election. (Just an example - Democrats to this too.)
I like this idea. I’ve always been in favour of splitting the vote to ensure that governments are in constant coalition. No single party can possibly have the ideas and skills to run an entire country.
Spot on. Kickstarter works because you’ve made the commitment to pay up when the votes are counted. Unless the vote is committed in the same way, and is some way automated and taken out of your hands, To a greater or lesser degree (depending on implementations) this is what Proportional Representation is supposed to do.
I think far more likely is the type of behaviour you see with Facebook event RSVPs: just as it’s no effort to say you’re going/might attend, it’s no effort to say you’d be willing to vote for the Yellow Party candidate (and the Purple Party, and the Blue Party, and the Fuchsia Party…) Actually following through on it, on the other hand, requires effort and is an exclusive choice in that voting for the Purple Party means not voting for the Yellow, Blue, or Fuchsia candidates.
(This is, of course, assuming that everyone who pledged actually votes, which is probably a big assumption to make.)
The alternate option is to limit people to only one pre-election pledge, at which point I don’t see how it’s much different than yet another voter intention poll.
If you wanted to really make it work, you would go full kickstarter. People put in their votes a month in advance and get to see the tally. Candidates would then go around and do their speechifying and whatnot and you could change your vote up until election day. If you want to support some third party guy, you put your vote in for him early and try to snowball support. When it becomes obvious that he is a snowflake in hell you switch your vote to whomever is least detestable of the remaining viable candidates.
I’m sure there are problems with this approach, but I don’t see what they are immediately.
It’s not the full-time norm.
We should be able to fire the fuckers. One vote every few years is a mockery.
I don’t want every single decision someone makes up for public scrutiny and possibly getting them fired. That’s a recipe for total paralysis or tyranny of the majority.
Sometimes it’s important for leaders to have a spine and do something unpopular that’s for the good of the country. Stuff like allowing interracial marriage. If they consistently do stuff that’s unpopular though, then yeah, that’s when you vote the fucker out. That’s why regular but not constant feedback from the populace is important.
I imagine it depends on the exact implementation.
Though at first glance I don’t really see what advantage it adds over regular pre-voting day opinion polling other than a more expensive infrastructure and more immediate graphing of changes.
The big advantage is that you don’t have to stand in line, sometimes for hours, on election day. 
Well, the real advantage is that opinion polls are frequently conducted with flawed methodology and are unreliable. This method would be a lot more reliable, if for no other reason than you mostly eliminate the “I’ll answer something for the poll, but really I’m not going to vote.” problem.
How to set up a fair and accurate online system that can’t be hacked is a problem left to the reader.
This sounds interesting. Can you suggest it to Nick Clegg and the rest of the LibDems, who support the Conservatives at nearly every opportunity?
I have stopped arguing over whether people should vote in favour of getting the people who only vote at general elections, or don’t vote, to be more politically active. Firing bad MPs would fit nicely with my view.
Oh that’s because it’s early days. It’s still viewed more as having to let a few oiks into the old-boys’ club. I’m thinking far more inclusive multi-party government.
You have, in effect re-invented IRV, just in a rather more complex form.
The complexity is the price of the proposal’s independence on the govt’s election laws. No change needed to push through the bunch of old men in suits. Suddenly it looks like the simpler alternative.
