Virtual Democracy: An Institutional Plague
As Phillip Wallach recently noted, remote voting threatens to turn representatives into simple mouthpieces, capable of expressing the unfiltered views of their constituents, but largely incapable of genuine deliberation. This turns the role of the legislature into simple “preference aggregation.” Real, person-to-person discussions can force representatives to put aside the intractable partisanship that is so easy to adopt from hundreds of miles away and work with other flesh-and-blood humans to solve problems. Congress was intended to be a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, not simply a vote-collecting body that could work just as well on an app.
