Thinking on Sunday: Save Democracy – Abolish Voting

Referendums have a popular appeal. They promise to put ordinary voters in control, and sideline the self-serving elites.

Save Democracy – Abolish Voting sets out to offer an alternative way of managing a democracy that will achieve both of these aims in much more effective, and incorruptible way. It is a proposal that takes the best aspects of representative government while also introducing a much more direct and fair link between the citizen and their own government.

It is more than just an attack on the crude binary referendums though. It takes a radical route out of the sterile debate around electoral reform, questioning everything that is popularly thought about how democratic decision-making should be done.

The book, and this talk, attempts to offer a version of democracy that we would choose now if we were starting to create liberal democracy from scratch, knowing what we know about feedback loops and the democratic flaws that have grown more pronounced as electoral government has evolved.

Save Democracy – Abolish Voting is a meditation on the nature of democracy in the digital age. It concludes with a proposal – a better alternative to electoral democracy for choosing and directing our government fairly and well.

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Paul Evans is a trade union official working in the TV and Motion Pictures industry.

Save Democracy – Abolish Voting, (2017) was his first book. It draws on a range of life experiences, including the creation of large-scale e-Democracy platforms and programmes, establishing a successful worker co-op software company, union organising and various consultancy roles addressing problems around democracy in the digital age.

He lives in London with a wife and two children.

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