The CyberDemocracy

There have been a few rants on E2 pointing out that the USA is infact a republic by strict definition, not a democracy. The main rebuke to this argument is that a democracy in which each individual voted for a law, rather than a set of elected officials, was too inefficient and time consuming. The cyberdemocracy is an idea that was created to change this.

A cyberdemocracy would use computers and a sort of internet (doesn't have to be the internet, possibly for security reasons) to let citizens vote through a mechanical system that would make vote counting automatic and swift. This would rid us of the scalability problems encountered with a direct democracy.

From an objective viewpoint, the cyberdemocracy will probably never be implemented, especially in the US. Even if you simply throw away the observation that's it's unlikely that the US will completely rework its political system, you have to remember its founding principles. Social Contract Theory stems from the mutual agreement of individuals to form a pact, but a government depending on any kind of technology in order to work on a basic level promotes relying on external controls rather than the bond of mutual agreement.

Furthermore, there are the obvious security problems. Turning on a computer makes it insecure as the old adage goes, and doubtlessly an online voting system would be a delicious target for malicious crackers. Worse, in an anonymous voting system, there would be no proof other than altered files (which could be covered up), that the vote count was altered at all. Although polls could be used to gather data and generally garner if the vote was away off, there's no way to prove the fact and polls are often unreliable.