The Jury Analogy

I have previously suggested that direct democracy is analogous to judge and jury working together in a court of law, the judge being equivalent to the politicians, the jury equivalent to the electorate. Experts and laymen.
But there are important differences. The decisions made in a court room, though complex, may be narrowly defined: guilty or not guilty. The evidence is closely controlled, dismissed by the judge if inappropriate. The jury members must only consider the evidence presented to the court. Advocates from both sides may cross-examine.
Most of these aspects can also appear in direct democracies. Politicians can narrow multiple Initiatives into a single referendum. Opposition parties can present alternative opinions. But to my mind controlling the quality of the evidence is the most important. This is why I want to see sanctions against lying in public life and national bodies that assess and present scientific information.
Garbage in - garbage out may be just as appropriate to democracy as to computer programming!
Yet people who oppose direct democracy may point out that the judge may dismiss jury members for a multitude of reasons, something I'm not advocating for Interactive Democracy, in the interests of fairness, diversity, bias-reduction and empowerment. A single inept juror has much greater power than a whole mass of inept voters. A juror may be 1 in 12, a voter 1 in 40 million. Using these numbers a single juror has the power of 3.3 million voters!

Prejudicial Web

There has been simmering concern in our law courts that jurors are being prejudiced by information they have surreptitiously discovered on the Internet. If we take trial by jury as analogous to Interactive Democracy, judges as Parliament and jurors as voters, then doesn't the Internet pose equally serious problems for direct democracy?

If the ID site is designed to present the opinions of MPs and their approved sources of data, then this balances the free for all nature of the rest of the Internet. The millions of voters involved in ID also mean that false information discovered on some obscure filament of the web is unlikely to sway the final decision.

12 Peers

One point of view in politics is that referenda have no place in democracy, perhaps because the public can't be trusted to reach a sensible decision on complicated issues? This seems to me to run contrary to our whole justice system - "12 good men and true".