As suggested previously, boosting the currently anemic turnout in city elections is obviously one of them. A large turnout would give the successful candidates for City Council a broader mandate. Chances are council members who have a broad base of support are less likely to be sympathetic to special pleadings and more likely to resist trying to solve problems by oiling squeaky wheels instead of doing the greatest good for the greatest number. A broader electoral mandate could serve as an antidote. However, the real attraction voting by phone holds for me is that it provides avenues for more direct citizen involvement in the decisions that affect their lives, initially by providing a mechanism by which citizens can register advisory votes on issues before the council by phone, and eventually making it possible for the council to refer important or controversial issues to the voters in special elections conducted by phone.
Representative democracy is based.
That may have once been the case, but I think that today that proposition is highly questionable. I served six years on the Boulder City Council, and during that time I saw little evidence to suggest that the council had intrinsically better decision-making capabilities than the people. If anything, I saw a good deal of evidence to the contrary. It was not unusual to find that citizens who testified before the council were b etter informed on issues than either council members or city staffers. As for the council's value as a deliberative body, the number of times that the members actually debated, or even seriously discussed, issues before voting on them could have been counted on the fingers of one hand.