Candidate Daniel Rosen has a proposition: Vote for him, and he'll vote for you. As in, he'll vote for you, like some kind of democratic, labor-saving automaton. Rosen's pitch to the people of Nevada's Second Congressional District is that if they send him to Washington in November, he'll vote exactly the way his constituents tell him to. Really. Each of the district's 358,000 registered voters would be able to log in to a secure Web site and record their preference for every piece of legislation that comes before Congress. Rosen has heard all the objections before. Fraud? When people register on the site, their identity is verified against official voter rolls. Hackers? Anyone can examine the open source voting platform (built by Rosen's software firm) and point out security holes. Digital divide? Those without Net access can use special phone or mail systems.
But did the Founding Fathers really mean for America to operate like ancient Greece? Doesn't representative democracy mean placing trust in, well, representatives, who read the fine print for us? "No one in Congress even reads the bills they're voting on," says Rosen, who trails badly in the polls behind Republican Dean Heller and Democrat Jill Derby. "How can you read a bill if you're busy meeting with lobbyists to raise money for your next campaign?" Besides, he says, New England towns practiced direct democracy for centuries. "You don't have to go back to ancient Athens for precedent." Just back to, you know, American Idol.
