E-mail democracy

DANIEL ROSEN, candidate for Nevada’s 2nd Congressional District, promises to never, ever, make up his own mind about anything.

That’s some refreshing candor right there, but let Rosen explain. He promises that if voters send him to Washington on Tuesday, he will vote only the way his constituents tell him to. They will send their instructions via their home computers and a voting software platform that Rosen has set up just for this purpose. “American Idol,” eat your heart out.

This is the obvious response, the musician-turned-candidate insists, to a political system that is closed and fixed, operating in the interests not of the voters back home but for moneyed special interests and their lobbyists.

Rosen’s plan would cut out the middleman. Or, at least, turn the middleman into a kind of human voting machine. If his constituents vote for pulling out of Iraq, he votes for pulling out of Iraq. If they vote to open the borders, he votes to open the borders. If they vote in favor of the concurrence to the Senate amendments to the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 to provide for the expedited consideration of certain proposed rescissions of budget authority, then he votes in favor of ... well, you get the idea.

But isn’t the whole point of representative government to vest confidence in the judgment and expertise of an upstanding ... representative?

This is not a question of the “tyranny of the majority” potentially running rampant over the rights of minorities. More likely is what happens in online polls -- the tyranny of those with way too much time on their hands. If, say, the Federal Communications Commission based its indecency decisions largely on well-oiled outrage generators mass-mailing the same form-letter complaint ... oh, wait.

Rosen, an independent who is polling far behind the Republican and Democratic candidates, can speak volumes on the intentions of the founders and how his plan doesn’t contradict their visions. But his bottom line is this: No one in Congress is up on these details either. They also vote as they’re told. So shouldn’t the folks back home be the ones doing the telling?

Fascinating, creative idea. But no. Representative democracy has its quirks and, in fact, its crooks. But it is a fundamentally sound idea to allow the people to vest their power in elected officials they trust, to return them to office if they have done well and to eject them if they haven’t.

As Californians know too well, the last thing we need is a daily round of new voter propositions.