Voting and accountability

One of the key issues being discussed these days is accountability. Once a representative is in office, what can the electorate do if they're dissatisfied? When applied to entire governments, this becomes an issue of legitimacy as well as accountability. Does a party manifesto establish what policies can or should be pursued? What about policies not in the manifesto, or the failure to achieve a promised goal?

Referendums are often proposed as solutions, but they suffer from a host of unintended consequences. Referendums have led to the paralysis of government in Florida, near-bankruptcy in California, and it's very difficult to defend the 'vote until you get it right' series of referendums on the EU in Ireland. This doesn't mean that all referendums are bad, but it does mean that referendums do not solve the accountability problem.

Recall elections should theoretically result in greater accountability, but in practice there's no greater accountability in US states that have them than in those that don't. The process is so expensive and politically charged that it's rarely used (there have only been 14 attempts at recalls in the US in the hundred or so years there have been recall elections, including everything from mayors and county supervisors to two state governors).

The real problem is that elections occur only periodically. It is the election itself that grants legitimacy to both an individual representative and to a government, and that legitimacy is only questioned when a difficult to pin down balance between public satisfaction and the time elapsed since the last election is upset. The actual requirement, from a system design point of view, is to always have zero time elapsed since the last election, such that every representative is reelected every day.

Permanent elections? Is this even possible? It is, and I call it 'Anytime Voting'.