Representative democracies rely on the idea of democratic representation — all groups in a society should have proportional representation in the legislature so that political deliberation and decision-making reflect the experiences and sentiments of different groups it represents. Legal philosophers like Waldron note corruption as one of the “pathologies” of electoral systems, yet argue that in healthy functional democracies, existing processes are sufficiently legitimate, and this challenge shouldn’t be of significant threat to democratic representation. If electoral mechanisms that operate with some forms of corruption are argued to translate into a well-representative legislature and are sufficiently legitimate in representative democracies, then electoral and legislative decision-making without such pathologies in an E-democratic system could claim a higher degree of representation and legitimacy.

In representative democracies, elected legislators have to restrain their self-interest to represent their constituents. If the conditions for corruption are favorable such that costs of engaging in corrupt behaviors are low and the reward is high, then such self-restraint is unlikely. During their term in office, representatives might be tempted by bribery, lobbying, and the need to return favors to patrons in addition to their own intrinsic motivations for engaging in corrupt behaviors. Corruption in legislative decision-making minimizes representation as the decisions made on the behalf of the people are deliberately not representative of people’s will. In addition, when the legislature is considered corrupt, some citizens might be disincentivized from engaging in electoral processes as the efforts of participation do not pay off via reflection in political outcomes. This further reduces representation of popular will in legislation.

Direct voting system solves this challenge. First, the removal of intermediaries will guarantee that the will of individual citizens is not directly affected by third-party motivation without their consent. Second, in the event some citizens choose to engage in corrupt behaviors, it will not have secondary effects on the voting of another citizen. Some potential counterarguments could suggest that lobbying and bribing is easier to execute at the level of individual citizens, thus legislative decision-making in an E-democracy would be inferior to that made in representative democracy. First, representatives could be constrained by moral standards — as public servants they have a duty to operate with integrity and reflect the decision of their constituents. Individual citizens voting in a direct election are not subject to any such duty and are justified to make decisions in their self-interest, including accepting bribes and voting on decisions that don’t resonate with intrinsically-desired political outcomes. Secondly, when the actions of legislators in representative democracy fail to uphold their public duties, they become punishable. The smaller size of the representative legislature enables the establishment of anti-corruption institutions and civic groups that could monitor, identify, and punish corrupt behaviors. Such a system of monitoring is impossible at the scale of millions of citizens.

I would argue that the scale of E-democratic voting would make corruption an unlikely threat to democratic representation. First, as millions of people vote on thousands of issues, agents that want to exert power over government activity by bribing or lobbying citizens, will have to choose a select few issues to focus their limited resources on. As such, it’s implausible to assume that all of the policies and laws could be subjected to corrupt influences and fail to represent the popular will. Second, even if some agent attempts to focus their resources on influencing one single decision by bribing thousands of individual voters, it will not have a significant effect on the democratic representativeness of the outcome. To change the outcome of the vote cast by millions of voters, a significant portion of them will have to be bribed which is practically impossible.

In contrast, the corruption of one legislator in representative democracy has implications for democratic representation of thousands of voters that elected them. A counter-argument could appeal to the emergence of social media as an enabler of lobbying at scale. When this assumption is entertained in the context of the representative legislature, implications for democratic representation become more significant than for an E-democratic system. For example, citizens could be influenced by social media content engineered to emotionally manipulate them into choosing a certain representative. Candidates who engage in unethical manipulation would likely further engage in corruption during their term in office. As a result, the interests of manipulated citizens will remain underrepresented in policymaking at least until the next election. In comparison, the impact of such manipulations in E-democracy would be limited to specific legislative topics and points in time.