DIGITALLY REVOLUTIONIZE THE GOVERNMENT SYSTEM
Today digital technology allows us to move towards modern forms of Direct Digital Democracy with an Advisory Council made up of a Committee of Scientists. Electronic voting can be channeled through loyalty e-mails based on identity document numbers, protected with three inviolable security keys.
Thanks to advances in modern digital technologies, it is possible to move towards forms of direct democracy. This will end the era of political parties and corruption within the power system.
E-mails can evolve to admit electronic voting and the new modality can be financed if the e-mail accounts are paid, in principle, from one dollar per month.
The emails must be faithful to the document number of each person. This will generate a cost and therefore the price of one dollar per month, which may be temporary. The giant Google may be the one to carry out the pilot test in the United States, the ideal country to experimentally develop direct digital democracy.
Legislators or representatives of the people will no longer exist. It will be this one that will directly vote the laws, the members of the executive, police, military and judicial power, and will be previously advised by a Council of Sciences. Irresponsible or corrupt officials may also be removed from their duties by direct vote.
Absolute power will reside in Parliament, made up of all the people, who will have access to electronic voting, via the internet.
By law, audiovisual media will modify their content, devoting 80% of it to training users in science and art and the other 20% will be dedicated to entertainment. In the emerging knowledge society, time will have a concept of fundamental value and will be educated so as not to waste it on trivialities. Mediocrity will be seen as the worst possible disease.
The change will be so drastic that the new mentality and the new freedoms will observe the previous era as a period of darkness and slavery.
MORE DATA
The so-called electronic democracy or digital democracy, known in English as e-democracy, is the use of ICT (informatics, Internet, mobile computing and telecommunications) to create spaces for dialogue and social reflection, access to information of political subjects (plans of work, ideology), exercise of participation/political rights, and in the improvement of electoral processes in the relationship between citizens, political subjects and electoral institutions.
It is democracy that uses new information technologies and alternative means of communication to meet their needs for the benefit of all and to improve processes within a democratic republic or representative democracy. It is a political development that is still in its infancy, and is the subject of much debate and activity within governments, civic groups, and societies around the world.
Etymology
The term is both descriptive and prescriptive. Typically, the kinds of improvements sought by proponents of electronic democracy are framed in terms of making processes more accessible; make citizen participation in political decision-making more direct and expansive, in order to exert greater influence on political results (since more individuals involved will produce more intelligent policies); increase transparency and reliability; and keeping the government closer to the consent of the governed, increasing its political legitimacy. Electronic democracy includes in this sense the practice of access to public information of political subjects, electronic voting, but it goes far beyond this single aspect of the democratic process.
Electronic democracy has also been called cyberdemocracy or digital democracy. Before 1994, when the term was coined within the civic movements of Minnesota (United States), the predominant term was teledemocracy. “Teledemocracy”, as political scientist Ted Becker defined it in 1981, combined elements of electronic democracy with some of “deliberative democracy”, both formulated almost at the same time. “Teledemocracy” is a general term that would include both “electronic democracy”, or “deliberative democracy”, as well as many types of “direct democracy”.
Motivations and promoting factors
The main motivation of e-democracy is to achieve, through the involvement of citizens and their active participation in decision-making processes:
Improving the quality of politics and democracy
Gain trust and acceptance of the political process
Share responsibility for political decision-making
Thus recovering the essence of democracy from the
origins, but with full levels of inclusion. Take advantage of the enabling characteristics of ICTs to promote instruments similar to the Greek agoras, in an environment that is also virtual and, above all, overcoming the borders of time and place.
Although the ultimate goal of e-democracy is aimed at the plural participation of citizens, it is difficult to achieve it directly and stages or phases can be defined, in a way that facilitates the successful achievement of e-democracy projects.
The IT4ALL e-democracy knowledge area working group, led by CALRE (Conférence des Assemblées Législatives Régionales d’Europe) in Europe, establishes this set of recommendations or essential factors for e-democracy: openness, commitment, proactivity , training in civic values and multichannel, each of which is described below:
Openness: representative institutions are required to operate transparently and facilitate citizen participation in their decision-making processes.
Commitment: it is not just a matter of objectives to be achieved, but rather they must constitute the basis on which the strategic design and corporate culture of the institutions are based. The commitment to openness must incorporate budget commitments and organizational transformation measures linked to these values.
Proactivity: citizens must act responsibly, getting information from the institutions, consulting their doubts and contributing ideas.
Multi-channel: a smart combination of the possibilities offered by each ICT must be opted for in order to reach all citizens without discrimination.
Training in civic values: offering real opportunities for citizen participation in decision-making processes is much more than just technology. Institutions must strive to encourage this exchange by simplifying languages and procedures, making the results derived from civic contributions as visible as possible and training, especially the youngest, in a culture of responsibility and participation.
Challenges for its implementation
The challenge for governments and administrations, and also for individuals and groups, is to develop tools and adapt processes to achieve the aspirations of electronic democracy. There are numerous practical and theoretical issues that still need to be analyzed, and progress is being made in this regard in several countries through a vast and diverse group of experiments and tests to try approaches and techniques.
One of the biggest problems that needs to be overcome for electronic democracy to be a success is that of citizen identification. To achieve safe elections and procedures from citizens to their governments, the former must have some type of identification that protects against hacking or identity theft (and that could even be used in Internet forums). The need to allow anonymous communication while, at the same time, certain permissions within the electronic system can be granted to specific citizens, could be solved using certain cryptographic methods. In the UK there is much discussion surrounding the introduction of a British national ID card. In Spain, the digital national identity document (DNI) began to be implemented in 2006, although its applications in electoral processes are still unclear.
Another problem here is the possibility that there are many vested interests that could be affected by a more direct democracy. Among these are those of certain political figures, media owners, councils (lobbies) and large businesses and trade unions, which in some cases would probably oppose the meaningful application of the concepts of electronic democracy, to the extent that theoretically, they would bring decision-making areas closer to citizens.
Access to information on political subjects
Main article: Access to information of political subjects
The information of political subjects must be public, access to this information allows exercises of transparency and accountability.
online voting
Main article: Internet voting
Electronic democracy, and more specifically Internet voting, should have all the security advantages in the legal field in order to be able to develop, since it is considered that all the technological means necessary for it already exist. In this sense, it has, above all, the advantage of being cheaper, more efficient, safer and more truthful than traditional voting methods. It could be followed intuitively by all possible users, and for all types of votes or interactions with the State (voting for elections, referendum voting, sending popular initiatives, etc).
Internet as a political medium
The Internet is seen as a platform and delivery medium for tools that help remove the distance constraints of direct democracy. The technical means for electronic democracy can be extended to mobile technologies such as mobile phones.
There are important differences between pre-Internet media that are relevant to the Internet as a political medium. The most important is that the Internet is a many-to-many communication medium, unlike radio and television, which transmit from few-to-many, and telephones, few-to-few. In that sense, the Internet has much greater computational capacity that allows for strong encryption and database management, which is important for shared access to information, for deliberative democracy, and for the prevention of electoral fraud. In addition, people can use the Internet to collaborate and meet asynchronously—that is, they don’t need to be together at the same time to get things done. Due to all these factors, the Internet has the potential for more intense political use than other traditional means of political communication such as the telephone, television, newspapers and radio.
Electronic direct democracy
See also: Direct democracy
Electronic direct democracy is a form of direct democracy in which the Internet and other electronic communication technologies are used to improve the bureaucracy involved with referenda by electronically recording votes. Many supporters think that technological improvements to the deliberative process, or even to government management to bring it closer to citizens, can also be included in this notion. Electronic direct democracy is sometimes called EDD (many other names are used for what is essentially the same concept).
According to the concept of moderate application of technology to direct democracy, citizens would have the right to vote on legislative matters before parliament or congress, write new legislative projects and recall representatives at any stage.
A contemporary example that takes an evolutionary approach to Electronic Direct Democracy is where representatives conduct referendums independently using the Internet or other communication technologies. This potential step towards electronic direct democracy does not require constitutional changes as it simply strengthens the relationship between the elector and the elected. The extreme would be that in which the elected representatives of the people in a parliament or in a government are limited to transmitting to the citizens those projects that are proposed for their decision, and then making the results of those electronic referendums effective. Currently there are movements such as Digital Direct Democracy and the Internet Party in Spain or Asociación Civil Eudemocracia in Argentina that advocate for such a system.
Ross Perot was for a time a prominent advocate of Electronic Direct Democracy when he proposed Electronic Town Halls during his 1992 and 1996 US presidential campaigns. This concept has been recovered by other movements in various parts of the world today thanks to the possibilities of the Internet.
Electronic direct democracy as a system has not been fully implemented anywhere in the world, although Switzerland, already partially governed by direct democracy, is moving in the direction of such a system.
Advantages and disadvantages
Some traditional objections that come from direct democracy apply to electronic democracy, such as the potential for governments to turn to populism and demagoguery. Authors such as Kampen and Snijkers have expressed fear of populism since they consider that, in any case, minorities always suffer the cost of inefficient social choices. In addition, a populist model, within a representative democracy, usually prioritizes more direct forms of citizen participation, but if we aspire to a deliberative democracy, what is important is not that, but to ensure that it helps to promote and foster solid deliberative processes.
Making a deeper political analysis in this regard, J. Haskell points out that the mechanisms of direct democracy do not prevent the tyranny of the majority, based on the well-known “voting paradox” by which a social group, even made up of rational and aware, it is not always able to order its elections in a coherent way and therefore, majorities will always be composed of unstable minority coalitions, so they will rarely express clear and comprehensive political instructions, which, in turn, can lead to to conclude that the direct vote does not always express the popular will better than the decision of the representatives. Thus, according to the
author, a representative democracy could better reflect the public interest by representing greater diversity in a plural, diverse and complex society. Therefore, what would be truly necessary is to use the mechanisms of electronic democracy to create and consolidate procedures that allow reviewing political decisions and listening to all the interests of society.
On the other hand, there are more practical objections, related to the digital divide between those with access to the means of electronic democracy (mobile phones and Internet connections) and those without, as well as the cost of spending on innovations of electronic democracy.
Contemporary technologies such as email lists, peer-to-peer networks, group software, wikis, Internet forums, and blogs serve as potential early clues and solutions to some aspects of electronic democracy; Likewise, they are also signs of some issues associated with the territory, such as the impossibility of sustaining new initiatives or protecting against identity theft, information overload or vandalism.
C.R. Sunstein affirms the need to ask ourselves, when evaluating the new communication technologies, how they can affect us as citizens and not only ask ourselves how they affect us as consumers of a capitalist society, on the basis of requiring us to respond to the question of what kind of citizens we want to be, what role we want to play and what kind of democracy we want to live in.
Another drawback for its development is that it must be voted on and approved by the deputies and senators who constitute the traditional system, that is, to achieve its effective imposition, it depends on the current system.