From Ballot Access News:
Steven St. John, an independent candidate for U.S. House in Nevada’s Third District, says if elected, he will arrange to let registered voters in the district vote tell him how to vote, on certain important issues. See this story for more details.
From the article cited, written by Chuck Meyer:
Steven St. John proposes assigning a pin number to every registered voter in the District. When important legislation is up for a vote in Congress, he says, a brief video will be posted for constituents to view. After voters cast their preference for or against the legislation, St. John says he will vote as his constituents wish.
There is a catch. St. John says 51% of the registered voters in the district would have to log an opinion before he will pass along their wishes in the form of his own vote on the legislation in Washington.
The Third District consists of over 700,000 people; assuming a little over half are eligible to vote, and most of them are registered, hundreds of thousands may have to register their opinion through a pin number before St. John would be obligated to their wishes.
I guess we’ll see.
How much dmaage could it cause if one representative tried it?
That old experiment called “mob rule.”
Even for those of you who don’t support direct democracy, I think this would be a valuable and interesting experiment