https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/_en, This is the initiative I am talking about. You have to prove you are an EU citizen and then you can sign for the initiatives you want and if a million signatures are reaching within a year then it must be brought to the EU commission.
So if citizens of EU member states can sign online, why can’t they vote online for elections or referendums? If possible, this would decrease the need and power of representative democracy and move closer to direct democracy, which I argue is a good thing
While I love the theoretical idea of direct democracy, the EU is supposed to address high level issue with generic directive.
So complex laws on complex topics. Do you know the details of directives like reach? (and typical lemmy audience has more chance to understand REACH over finance) Do you know the details about every chemical substance allowed/banned? Even good faith politicians end up believing lobbyists, imagine a regural person without a team of assistant
Direct democracy is great, but the EU is a too generic level for it to work
because it’s much less important and so much less risky
Because
A: electronic voting is an awful idea in so many ways
B: direct democracy is an awful idea in so many ways
C: voting is supposed to be secret which the petition signaures aren’t
There is something people here didn’t mention yet, the vote is secret for many reasons, one of them is that you can’t get a receipt that you voted for one party and then use that to get paid or rewarded.
By voting online it’s not possible to keep the vote secret as there are always ways to prove without a doubt for a certain party.
Each country within the EU is responsable for their voting system and each country has their own and most are exclusively offline. The EU initiatives is an EU system and has nothing to do with the countries voting systems.
Because the entire idea of online voting is terrible and we should never ever ever do it except when it’s to name a boat. This is coming from a dev and sysadmin, we are the people who know and we are telling you it’s a terrible idea.