Why can't we all vote on issues instead of congress?

I've thought that exact same thing for so long. It started out like that because we didn't have the technology to have every person vote. Now we do, so there is really no reason to keep doing it that way. However, the idea of not letting certain people vote is kind of unfair. As long as their votes don't count for anything more than the votes of the people, they should be allowed to vote...

We should really try to get the government to consider doing this, because it is actually more "american" than what we do now!

What? And take the lobbyists and special interest groups out of it? They couldn't afford to pay every person to vote in their best interest, so we need a congressman to represent us.

Seriously, to save time and money, we have a representative that speaks for the majority of the people he/she represents. That is the basis for electing him/her to office. It would be too expensive and time consuming if we went to the polls every time a "pressing" issue came up to the government, we would all have to live in the polling places. No one would vote after a while, and we would be right back to square one.

The way it is done is the cheapest, least time consuming, and the best that anyone has thought of (at least in the time it was thought up). With the internet, maybe things could change, but you would have a lot of accusations of fraud and tampering if the internet was used.

And who would decide what was "pressing"? I mean, the religious right thinks that homosexual marriages are pressing, women think that women's rights are pressing, and so on. It would be a very messy process.

The more I think about it, the more I actually like things the way they are. But it is a good thought, and it would be nice to be able to do in a perfect world.

Because when the constitution was written, the founding fathers were worried that the common people would have too much power. So despite us constantly trying to spread democracy, we in fact live in a republic. A democratic socioty has no representatives and the people vote directly on all major issues.

That would be fine if we could be sure that everyone understood the issues being voted on. Although the system we have isn't perfect we can make our voices known to our representatives. We should also push for the line item veto. This will rid us of a lot of pork that gets included.

First of all, there are some pretty big differences between a democracy and a republic; we live in the latter.

Letting the country have direct control over its own well-being would involve our government voluntarily giving up quite a bit of control. I don't see that happening any time soon.

1) It'd be to susceptible to hacking & multiple voting.

2) Not everyone's allowed to vote; how to you determine who gets to?

3) There's WAY too much Congess does that we don't know about. They hold lots of "little votes" which would keep us busy ALL the time.

Even though they're idiots, I like having people do the dirty work for me. That way, I have someone to blame when there's a screwup.

Issues cannot act while people can. Thus, vote for candidates that will fight for the demands of the majority and for the good of the people.

We can`t have that, because then we would live in a true democracy. This is a republic remember like that song the pledge of allegiance states "and to the republic for witch it stands"

that would make this a true democracy and they dont want that.

just like the electoral college vote for the president not the popular vore

With all the allegations of election fraud we have now, do you really want to do that? Besides, we would spent all our time voting and not have time for anything else.