Indirectly, direct democracy

Sydney – It could be called “the party of unrepresentative polls”, it could be called an experiment in indirectly direct democracy. It was conceived by a whimsical Australian, explains The Age, and the Australian Electoral Commission approved it in view of the next elections: Senator On-Line, the symbol with which they will run; act in the Senate as mercenaries representing netizens their only election program.

Is the Australian Senate incapable of representing citizens, rigid in party dynamics? The representatives of Senator On-Line, spearhead, a mayor who is a die-hard Elvis fan, intend to delegate their every choice to citizens, acting as amorphous intermediaries, defending in the Senate the proposals that emerged from the polls conducted through their website.

They will dismember and deconstruct the proposals that will pass through the upper house, they will dissect every aspect with the help of experts, they will try to translate the Legalese into a language accessible to anyone. They will offer a discussion space online and ask the site subscribers to vote and vote again, for shape the position that the On-Line Senators will have to take during the parliamentary debate.

At the heart of the mechanism, their website is still under construction which, they promise, will guarantee the privacy of its users – both as regards personal data and as regards the positions taken by voters – and will have the priority to prevent polls from being falsified. . The only detail revealed so far: to ensure that the citizen votes only once, the IP address, personal data, voting card number will be compared.

Not an experiment of super-democracy, of direct democracy via the internet,
not a gimmick like the improbable and enjoyable Internet Party that has been discussed in Italy in recent years, but rather a proposal similar to that of Internetcracy, aimed at introducing instruments of direct democracy into the political system, exploiting the coordination opportunities offered from the network.

While there is no shortage of curious and enthusiastic commentators, however, many are wary of the Senator On-Line initiative. The tools of direct democracy can only work if civic and political culture are strongly rooted, and representative democracy seems to be an adequate political tool precisely because of its ability to relieve citizens of tasks they would not be able to cope with, many Slashdot users argue. , convinced that the experiment of direct democracy through neutral mediators is a stratagem devised by the aspiring Senators to grab a seat in parliament.

Gizmodo Australia also spoke in this regard: which netizen would entrust their vote to a party that weighs down the “online” with an old dash?

Gaia Bottà