As part of his proposed "Citizen Engagement Portal"—a system intended give citizens more opportunities to communicate directly with city officials—City Council Member Bruce Harrell wants to poll citizens on major issues before the council, with the goal of determining whether the council is "in line" with what Seattle residents want.

The idea, Harrell says, came out of 2007's advisory vote on the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which cost the city $1 million and revealed only that citizens "preferred" neither the tunnel nor a larger new viaduct. "If the polling was available at that time, would that have been a better option?" Harrell asks. He says the polls would be confined to major, similarly hot-button issues—like the disposable-bag fee, KeyArena, and the city's budget priorities in tough economic times.

What would the council do with those poll results? According to Harrell, his goal would be "to make sure the priorities of the city council and the mayor are aligned with the priorities of the people." But what if they did a poll that said, for example, that the disposable-bag fee—which the council passed 6-1, with Jan Drago voting no and Nick Licata and Richard McIver absent—was unpopular? "Then you should know that," Harrell says, "and if you want to push that initiative, it’s incumbent on you to evangelize, to market, to sell it to the people."

That, of course, is a slippery slope. Representative democracy means that we elect representatives to serve our interests as a whole; if they fail to do so, we vote them out. Too often, direct democracy—AKA mob rule—leads to unintended consequences, or consequences that limit the rights of minorities: Tim Eyman's property tax caps, for example, or Proposition 8 (the gay-marriage ban) in California. Harrell says he personally believes "the elected body should show leadership on issues" even when their opinion differs from what the polling says. But will he be saying that when an opponent in a future election accuses him of ignoring or defying public opinion?

There are logistical problems, too. The overall idea—and it's a good one—is to allow people access to all city services (trash bills, land-use permits, electrical meter readings, etc.) with a single login to the city's web site, rather than having separate logins for every service (the current system). From a polling perspective, the thinking is that single-login access for every citizen would ensure that a single interest group didn't skew the feedback results, as mass email campaigns to council members do now. But that's asking a lot of a city computer system. One post on a big web site like Slog, for example, asking readers to vote a certain way could skew results almost instantaneously—making council members believe, for example, that skate parks should be the city's highest budget priority. I'm not against polling people to get their opinion—that's essentially what public comment does—but using those results as some kind of barometer to determine public policy seems like a potentially dangerous path for city council members to head down.