Instead of having career politicians can we have all , or most, decisions by referendum?

No

No. Too much voting overload would make it possible to pass things with very small numbers of people.

There was a book written In the late sixties called “Superstoe” about people voting through their TVs on every little thing. They got so bored that the coonstution was changed and the country taken over by a handful of people.

We can’t even get our representatives interested enough in voting on everything to show up half the year.

You weren’t paying attention in political science class were you.

I hope she was worth it.

@SecondHandStoke She wasn’t.

That happens.

No. Referendums are hugely expensive. And technology is not sufficiently fool- and tamper-proof to allow us to use Smartphones/Apps to make important democratic decisions.

I also think the vast majority of voters are uninformed and/or apathetic. Elected officials have access to the best information and experts (if they choose to engage with it) before they vote on issues. We don’t have access and we can’t speak to those experts. We vote for these people because we deem them the best person (from our individual perspective) to make important decisions for our communities and our country. They don’t always (often) live up to these ideas well, but at least we can hold them to account and vote them out next time if they do underperform (in theory anyway). If every decision was made by all of us, I don’t even want to imagine the mess we’d be in.

I can guarantee you that it would be abused to enact tyranny against minorities (remember proposition 8?) and to pass nonsense like shutting down rotten tomatoes for giving bad reviews to DC movies

No, please.

Most people know only what they know on TV, and don’t understand the difference between news and a political advertisement. You can buy an election if you buy more ad time.

We could, but that would be for policy decisions, and that’s just the sort of thing career politicians won’t want to give up. Attempting to replace legislation with referendums would be madness.

Let us go back to the system that the founding fathers envisioned when they wrote the Constitution:

1776

Right to vote during the Colonial and Revolutionary periods is restricted to property owners

And, since I own several properties I get to vote several times.

Finally, mobile homes are not considered property but disposable assets so if you own one tough; no voting for you.

The constitution was written in 1787, not 1776. Mobile homes did not extist at that time. It is interesting, though, that in Pennsylvania, a woman could vote if she inherited the property of her newly deceased husband. But after the revolution, they changed all that sh*t.