As readers of my sidebar know, an election has been scheduled for November in Australia. Semi-frequent commenter Chris Zorn passed me this Slashdot article about a party called “Senator On-Line” which promises that its candidates will vote, if elected, in accordance with public preferences as measured by online polls of qualified Australian voters.

If nothing else, it’s conceptually an interesting experiment, although I suspect that once the public novelty wore off and Aussies went back to having lives (instead of playing legislator) the process would quickly get captured by intense minority interests acting contrary to the public good.