Very interesting article and many sensible comments.
Please let me answer you and some of the commenters in one post here.
Instead of steem you can use https://www.democracy.earth
They already work on a platform for voting with use of blockchain.
They also implement great concept of Liquid Democracy (LQDM) I strongly support. This is a mixture of the best features of direct and indirect democracies. System for XXI century and beyond.
There are also other platforms like Liquid Feedback and others however they do not use DLT (but someone told me you can verify if the database is not corrupt by comparing to yours, I'm not sure of that info). I think Liquid Feedback was already used by Pirate Party in Germany.
Both above systems have not only voting but also discussion panels that you can use to post your idea, show support and argue. If I'm not mistaken the democracy.earth allows for secret voting so preserves the privacy.
LQDM takes care of corruption you mentioned. You can vote yourself or your delegate can vote - you can take back the delegation any time and you can change the vote that belonged to you and was cast by your delegate - no room for lobbyists and groups of power to corrupt anyone.
@farq said "We need Representatives because they can make unpopular decisions for the good of the people." - the right way in my opinion is to educate people and being one community decide together. There are hard choices- for example: increase the manufacturing costs (international competition) and decrease your living standards by tax on carbon in order to save the environment and prevent global warming?.... Discuss, educate and let everybody find the best solution and decide/vote. I believe that educated society that cares for the planet and their own environment will not hesitate to do the right thing. So far, on many occasions, Representatives were doing many unpopular decisions for some small groups of power and not in the interest of the whole country.
You had very good point about the less educated. If they are underrepresented then they might feel abused. I think that for current political organization the ideal parliament distribution is very close to the society distribution. In future I hope LQDM will take care of problem of underrepresentation.
There were many discussions online that debated whether there should be obligation to vote. And I think there are many arguments on both sides. Ideally we have the society that wants to vote, that feels his/her vote is important, feels he/she is represented well. I know, I'm idealist :p
The transparency and online debates in the world full of fake news is another problem. I know that there are some Working Groups in Europe that try to tackle this issue. I have my own concept/solution that I will present here soon.
BTW: there are undertaking that we will provide us all electronic IDs by 2030. If that's true than LQDM and other systems could get more power. The problem of ensuring the voter has only one vote and cannot cheat will be solved :)