An Ikanocracy Infographic

It appears Ikanocracy is gaining some support. One of its supporters, Ryan, who is a friend of my son Zack, created the following awesome infographic about Ikanocracy.

You can see the full sized version here.  Thanks Ryan.

Bender vs the Board of Education

While I have been pointing out all the problems with our current representative democracy, and trying to convince you that a system based on Ikanocracy would be better, I have to admit there are still a few wrinkles to work out with Ikanocracy. One of the ideas of Ikanocracy is to take advantage of new information dissemination technology, namely the internet, to modernize our governmental structures.

However, there are still some problems with electronic voting, as was illustrated recently in a election for the Board of Education in Washington DC. They thought they had such a foolproof system, they dared hackers to hack it, and it turned out that it wasn't too hard to do, as Bender (the Robot from the TV show Futurama) won in a landslide.

Technological tampering is a serious concern with electronic voting, and we still have no clear solution. What about open source for all software running the electronic voting system, or multiple servers processing the raw data at distributed sites?

Just like "Brown vs the Board of Education" paved the way for integration of schools and the civil rights movement in the US, perhaps Bender vs the Board of Education can be a pivotal moment in the development of tamperproof electronic voting systems and in the Ikanocracy movement.

Too Stupid to Vote

I saw this article : "People Aren't Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say" and I had to bring it to your attention. It certainly fits in with the narrative I have been describing about why Ikanocracy is better that Democracy. We shouldn't make assumptions about what demographic the people who are making stupid decisions belong to, but once a person has a track record of making stupid decisions, we should make their vote count for less.

Subversion

I am really disgusted by the latest affront to Canadian democracy. Apparently, in the last Federal Election, there was a coordinated attempt to mislead voters by phoning them with recorded messages, claiming to be from Elections Canada, and giving them misinformation about location and times of polls. The persons receiving calls seem to have been supporters of either the NDP or Liberal Party. If even a small part of what is being claimed about this robo-calling scandal is true, we have reached a new low in Canadian democracy. A decade ago, the Liberal Party subverted democracy with the sponsorship scandal, and it has led to their near destruction. Now the Conservatives may have done the Liberals one better) or should I say "one worse".

We also had a local case of subversion of democracy closer to home last year. During municipal elections in a nearby small town, there were rumours that the mayor and council had squandered over a million dollars on a concert that wasn't going to happen. During the campaign, the mayor flatly denied these rumours. The mayor was re-elected, but a number of new councillors were also elected and after the election they refused to be part of a coverup and so it came out that the rumours were true. In my opinion, the mayor's deception during the election campaign was far worse than the actual wasting of the money, because it robbed citizens of something more important than money ... their franchise ( i.e. right to make an informed decision about who governs them.)

The Sponsorship scandal and the Robo-calling scandal similarly robbed citizens of their franchise.

Unfortunately there are many other similar cases of abuse. Remember Watergate? (OK maybe that was before your time... look it up.) What happens when politicians are elected under false pretences, or by employing unethical or illegal tactics? It is very hard to get these abuses exposed and addressed after the fact. As we've mentioned in previous posts, one of the problems of a representative democracy is that representatives often put their own interests ahead of the interests of the citizens who elected them, and nothing is more in a politician's own interest than covering their own posterior.  The elected politician often now has the power to delay, obfuscate or stifle investigations. Even if the abuse is able to be exposed and the perpetrators punished, it often takes so long that the politician gets to serve their term, and meanwhile, the business of governing suffers as the politician is diverted by their posterior protecting, and public confidence in the process is degraded.

These abuses keep happening, and no one seems to have a fix for our representative democracy to stop them. In Ikanocracy this wouldn't be a problem, as in general you are voting for ideas, not people, and ideas have no self-interest.