LD and the 3 branches of government

Liquid Democracy only directly changes the Legislative branch of government. The people that write the laws.

It doesn't directly change the executive branch.

It wouldn't change how we pick presidents, governors, & mayors. Nor would it control day to day administration operations. It does have an indirect impact on how executive leaders do their jobs, because they'll need to convince the LD legislature to adopt new bills, rather than current Representative legislature.

It doesn't directly change the judicial branch.

And it's still kept in check by judges that test its laws for constitutionality. It does have an impact on how judges get appointed, if they require legislative approval.

Unless we passed constitutional amendments

Once we include constitutional amendments, if the LD technical system is widely trusted, we could use it to run executive branch elections, to simplify logistics.

More substantially, when LD is widely adopted, it becomes easier to introduce changes to the way we pick executive leaders. One simple reform I'd like to see is to use Approval Voting so that the winners have wider appeal, rather than winning with strategies that dominate the extremes.

Tweedledee and Tweedledum

It's easy to point at the presidential selection process as a particularly bad example of being forced to pick between the "lesser of two evils", but don't let that confuse the discussion about LD.

It's not clear how we could change the way we pick the president without constitutional amendments. And it's unrealistic to imagine the jobs of the president — Commander in Chief, vast managerial duties, highest public figurehead, and representative on the world stage — could be fulfilled by a Remote Control Politician.

And presidential approval ratings have averaged many times higher than Congressional approval ratings.

So let's focus on where the real problem is.

congressional approval rating

voteliquid / blog