My last post is not optimistic, it wasn’t meant to be. I tried to use few examples to find one of the possible explanations for current events happening around the world. Democracy dies under repeated blows from greedy, corrupt, power-hungry and arrogant people convinced of their own greatness.
What can be done to change this? How to restore power to the people and make sure that the right people are at the top for the right time and right reasons?
I have a couple of ideas to start the discussion off:
One – change the one person one vote schema and cure voting system.
Each citizen would get one vote by being born in the country, by being a citizen. Another vote for finishing basic school. Yet another for finishing middle (or high) school. Fourth for college. Fifth for additional science (or any other) degree. Person finishing two colleges gets a vote for each, the same as for two additional degrees. College graduate would have 4 votes, but each could be used only for one traditional vote. In addition, anyone having more than 1 vote would be obliged to vote by law. Failure to do so would mean financial penalty equal to monthly salary for each vote wasted (of course documented excuses would be accepted). Each presence would be awarded by tax break of 500 EUR per vote.
To complete the system, whoever would be convinced of any crime would be punished by stripping all votes from him and having the right to be voted on removed.
Votes would be registered by bio-technological devices collecting our DNA samples. Alternatively, we could use two biological properties: retina scan and fingerprints – all this to limit to absolute minimum any possibility of abuse.
What would that change? It would force us to vote in the first place; therefore the results would be closer to true will of the people. Secondly, educated people tend to make educated choices and are not so easily drawn by populism. What this system does not change is who to vote on.
Two – who to vote on would be really chosen by the people.
Every voting process would now be done in stages. Each city would define small communities from which one candidate would be chosen by people who would intimately know him or her. The communities can be block houses, villages, neighbourhoods, or even taxi drivers. Those chosen people would create new municipal government and they would determine what is being done in the city or a region for two years. After that, from them only, new representatives to country seats would be chosen. Of course then not parties, but personal community engagement would be more important. In addition, clear information as per who voted for what in municipal or regional governments would be available to all. Everyone could then ask for reasons of decisions over email or social media. The same practice would be then transferred to country government.
It is also clear that each government would be bigger and reach size of small parliaments. But why not? Especially if a time limit would be introduced on any decision (as in by when decision needs to be made, not how long it can be deliberated).
Those two changes would then work together to change the current status quo. Of course small details would need to be ironed out, but that I will leave to smarter than me.
Naïve? Maybe. But someone better come up with something soon or we all are going to end up in anarchy or dictatorship.