Daniel sent us a question about something he's observed comparing the two countries he's lived in — Ireland and Israel. He points out that in Ireland, politicians literally knock on doors and talk to voters face to face. In Israel, the closest you get is a staged photo op in a preselected stronghold. His question is whether any democracy has managed to strike a balance between giving the average person real access to their elected representatives and keeping those representatives reasonably safe. And embedded in that is a sharper question — is the security concern genuine, or is it a convenient excuse?
That sharper question is the one that makes this worth discussing. Because if it's just a security problem, you solve it with logistics. If it's an excuse, you solve it with something much harder.
The fact that he's lived in both systems gives the comparison weight. It's not abstract whataboutism. It's someone who's seen the Irish canvass up close and then moved to a country where the idea of an MK showing up at your door is almost absurd.
Let's start with what the Irish system actually looks like in practice, because the details matter. Ireland uses multi-seat constituencies with a single transferable vote. You've got about 174 TDs in the Dáil, each representing roughly 30,000 constituents. The districts are geographically compact — small enough that a candidate can physically walk them.
During an election cycle, a serious candidate will knock on 50 to 100 doors per evening for four to six weeks. That's the canvass. It's not a meet-and-greet at a community center. It's you, standing in your doorway, talking to the person who wants your vote, while they stand in your garden in the rain.
The Irish garden in the rain is doing a lot of democratic heavy lifting there.
It really is. And here's what's striking — the last political assassination in Ireland was Veronica Guerin in 1996, a journalist, not a politician. The last time a sitting TD was killed while canvassing was during the Civil War in 1922 to 1923. We're talking about a century of door-knocking with essentially no lethal incidents. In the 2024 general election, over 90 percent of the 174 TDs elected reported canvassing in their home areas without any security incident whatsoever.
Compare that to Israel. Yitzhak Rabin assassinated in 1995. Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi killed in 2001. Multiple mayors and local councilors attacked in recent years. The threat landscape is genuinely different.
But here's where we need to separate two things — the genuine threat landscape, and what politicians do with that fact. During the 2022 Knesset election, only three of 120 MKs held open town halls in mixed-population areas. Out of 120. And we're not talking about door-knocking in East Jerusalem — we're talking about renting a community center in Petah Tikva and putting out folding chairs.
The core tension is this — constituent engagement requires physical proximity, and physical proximity creates security vulnerabilities. But the Israeli response has been to essentially eliminate the proximity. And that's not a security protocol. That's a structural feature of the electoral system being reinforced by a security argument that's real enough to sound unanswerable.
Let me unpack the structural part, because this is where Israel and Ireland diverge fundamentally. Ireland's system is built on geographic accountability. A TD represents a specific place with specific streets and specific people. If the pothole on Church Road doesn't get fixed, the TD hears about it on Church Road, standing in front of the pothole, while Mrs. O'Leary points at it.
Whereas an Israeli MK represents... everyone and no one.
Israel uses a single national list system of proportional representation. 120 MKs for 9.8 million citizens. There are no districts. Your MK doesn't represent Tel Aviv or Haifa or Be'er Sheva — they represent the entire country. Which means no MK has a geographic constituency to be accountable to. If you're an Israeli voter and you want to complain about a local issue, there is literally no mechanism that connects your specific grievance to a specific MK's electoral survival.
That's not a bug in the system — it was designed that way. The founders wanted national unity over local tribalism. But the side effect is that MKs are accountable to their party lists, not to voters. Your political future depends on where you rank in the party primary, which means you're campaigning to a few thousand party members, not to the general public.
Which brings us back to the security question. Because if you're an MK whose reelection depends on impressing 40,000 Likud central committee members or 60,000 Labor party members, why would you ever hold an open town hall in a mixed city where half the room might vote for a different party?
The incentive structure pushes away from engagement. The security concern then becomes the publicly acceptable reason for something the system was already going to produce anyway.
That's the thing we need to test. Is the security concern genuine enough to make engagement impossible, or is it being weaponized to avoid something that's politically inconvenient?
Let's look at what happens when democracies with genuine security challenges decide to solve this problem rather than hide behind it.
Canada is the case study I find most instructive. Since 2015, Canada's 338 Members of Parliament have held over 50,000 constituency hours in public libraries, community centers, and church basements. Zero security incidents. Not a single one.
How do they structure it?
Advance registration — you call the MP's office, give your name and address, and you're scheduled into a 10 or 15-minute slot. The RCMP provides threat assessment if needed. The sessions are held in neutral public spaces, not behind locked doors. It's open enough to feel accessible, structured enough to be secure.
The numbers bear it out. MP Iqra Khalid in Mississauga-Erin Mills held 47 constituency hours in 2024. Average attendance was 23 constituents per session. That's over a thousand face-to-face conversations with voters in a single year.
What I find interesting is that the Canadian model didn't emerge from some grand parliamentary reform. It emerged from MPs realizing that being physically present in their ridings was the single strongest predictor of reelection. The security protocols followed the political incentive, not the other way around.
Which is exactly the inversion of the Israeli situation. In Israel, the political incentive points away from engagement, so the security protocols were never developed.
Let's look at Japan, because they've built something even more elaborate. It's called the kōenkai system — local support networks that function as both campaign infrastructure and a security buffer. A typical Diet member maintains five to ten dedicated local offices, staffed by volunteers who know the community intimately.
The volunteers are essentially doing the vetting.
Yes — and that's both the strength and the weakness of the model. When a constituent shows up at a kōenkai office, the volunteers already know who they are, what their concerns are, and whether they pose any risk. It creates a human security layer that's remarkably effective. Taro Kono's office in Kanagawa processed 1,200 constituent requests in 2023. Only two required police involvement.
Two out of 1,200. That's a 0.17 percent problem rate.
But here's the tradeoff — the kōenkai system is also a patronage network. Those volunteers aren't neutral civil servants. They're party loyalists. If you're not connected to the right political network, you don't get access. Critics argue the system excludes outsiders and reinforces political dynasties.
It solves the security problem by solving the access problem for insiders, while creating a new access problem for everyone else.
Which is why I think Taiwan's model is the most interesting of the three. Since 2020, Taiwanese legislators have used a digital check-in system where constituents pre-register through a government app. You verify your identity, you state your concern, and the system handles threat screening in the background. Over 80 percent of the 113 legislators use it, and participation rates increased 40 percent compared to pre-COVID open meetings.
The QR code as democratic infrastructure.
It sounds trivial, but it's not. The pre-registration system does three things simultaneously. It screens for security risks. It organizes the queue so meetings are efficient. And it creates a permanent record of who requested what, which makes follow-up possible. Legislator Huang Kuo-chang's office reported that 15 percent of attendees in 2025 were first-time participants who said they wouldn't have come without the digital option.
That last statistic is the one that matters. The people who show up to open town halls are the people who always show up — the politically engaged, the comfortable, the connected. The digital check-in lowered the barrier enough to bring in people who had never participated before.
Which brings us to the question of whether any of this is transferable to Israel. And I think the answer is yes, but not without confronting some uncomfortable truths first.
Let's confront them.
First truth — the security concern is real, but it's been allowed to become a blanket excuse rather than a solvable problem. The Shin Bet's 2024 annual report publicly stated that they can provide threat assessments for constituency meetings if given 72 hours notice. That's the domestic security agency going on the record saying we can do this. And here's the number that should make every Israeli voter angry — not a single MK has requested this service.
The agency responsible for protecting elected officials says the infrastructure exists, and no one has picked up the phone.
The Knesset Ethics Committee has never denied a request for security support for a constituency event. But fewer than five such requests were made in all of 2024.
This is what I mean about the security argument being weaponized. It's not that the threat isn't real. It's that the threat is being used to justify inaction while the institutions that could mitigate the threat sit unused.
Second truth — Israeli voters actually want this. A 2025 Israel Democracy Institute poll found that 68 percent of Israeli voters would attend a local meeting with their MK if offered. But only 12 percent had ever been invited.
There's a demand-side constituency for engagement that the supply side is simply ignoring.
That gap between 68 percent wanting it and 12 percent getting it — that's not a security gap. That's an accountability gap.
Let's talk about what a concrete model for Israel might look like. I'm not interested in abstract proposals. I want something that could actually function within the existing political reality.
Here's what I'd propose, and I'm drawing directly from the 2025 Knesset committee report that recommended exactly this structure but was never implemented. Regional constituency offices, funded by the Knesset, with mandatory quarterly open sessions. Each MK would be assigned a geographic region — not replacing the national list system, but layering geographic accountability on top of it.
An MK from the national list still gets elected nationally, but they're also responsible for showing up in, say, the Sharon region four times a year.
The Shin Bet provides threat assessment with 72 hours notice — which they've already said they can do. The sessions are held in public buildings — community centers, schools, libraries. Pre-registration via a government portal, similar to Taiwan's model. And the whole thing is transparent — attendance numbers, topics raised, follow-up actions, all published online.
The transparency piece is crucial, because it creates a second accountability mechanism. If an MK skips their quarterly session, it's public record. If they show up but don't follow up on commitments, it's public record.
This is the key design principle — the burden of figuring out how to make engagement secure falls on the elected representative and the state, not on the voter. Right now in Israel, the implicit message is that engagement is too dangerous, so voters should accept disconnection as the price of security. That's backwards.
It's also worth noting that this model already exists in a limited form in Israel's local government. Municipal council members hold open office hours. They attend community meetings. They're physically present in their cities. The security challenges are real — there have been incidents — but the system functions because the political incentive for local engagement is strong.
Which is exactly Corn's point from previous discussions — local politics in Israel is where governance actually happens and where the system proves it can serve citizens. The dysfunction is concentrated at the national level, where the electoral structure severs the connection between representation and geography.
We've got three working models from other democracies, an unused security infrastructure from our own security agency, and a demonstrated demand from voters. What's actually blocking this?
The party list system. And I want to be careful here, because electoral reform is one of those topics where everyone has a pet theory and most of them are useless. But the specific mechanism that blocks constituency engagement is that MKs are selected by party primaries, not by geographic districts. If your reelection depends on impressing a few thousand party activists, you optimize for party activists. You show up at party events. You give interviews to party-aligned media. You do not spend Tuesday evening in a community center in Kiryat Shmona listening to complaints about the bus service.
Knesset bill 5786-2026 proposes regional primaries and mandatory constituency offices. It's being debated right now. The committee is expected to release final recommendations in September.
Here's where I want to inject some realism. Electoral reform alone won't fix this. Even if Israel moves to regional districts — which is what the bill proposes — the culture of engagement has to be rebuilt from the ground up. You can't just pass a law and expect MKs to suddenly start knocking on doors after decades of never having done it.
The Irish canvass works because both sides trust the process. The politician trusts that showing up at a stranger's door won't get them attacked. The voter trusts that the politician is there to listen, not to perform for cameras. That trust took generations to build, and it's maintained by the fact that the system consistently delivers on its promises.
Can that trust be engineered? I'm skeptical. I think it has to be earned one doorstep at a time. But what you can engineer is the infrastructure that makes earning it possible. Right now, Israel doesn't even have the infrastructure.
Let's address the misconceptions that tend to come up in this conversation. The first one is that door-to-door engagement is inherently unsafe in high-risk environments. Canada and Taiwan have demonstrated that structured, pre-registered meetings can be both secure and accessible. The Canadian model has a zero-incident track record over a decade. Taiwan's QR-based system has broad adoption and no reported security breaches.
The second misconception is that Israeli politicians don't do constituency work because voters don't want it. That IDI poll I mentioned — 68 percent want it, 12 percent have been offered it. Voters are way ahead of politicians on this.
The third misconception — and this is the one that gets trotted out most often — is that security concerns are the primary barrier. The Knesset has a security infrastructure that's never been used. The Ethics Committee has never denied a request. The Shin Bet has publicly offered threat assessment services and no one has called. The barrier isn't security. The barrier is political will.
I want to be fair here. There are MKs who do constituency work. They have local offices. They meet with citizens. It's not zero. But it's ad hoc, it's not standardized, and it's not part of the institutional expectation. The difference between Israel and Ireland isn't that no Israeli politician ever meets a voter. It's that the Irish system makes it mandatory through electoral pressure, and the Israeli system makes it optional through electoral indifference.
What does this mean for the voter sitting in Tel Aviv or Haifa or Be'er Sheva, wondering why their MK has never knocked on their door?
First, know that the infrastructure for engagement exists but isn't being used. Second, you can push on it. The Knesset website has a contact your MK portal that tracks response rates. If you and a group of neighbors request a joint meeting, that creates a record. Enough records create pressure.
The portal tracking response rates is actually an underappreciated accountability tool. If an MK's response rate is publicly visible and consistently low, that becomes a political liability. It's not as powerful as losing your seat because you didn't show up in the district, but it's not nothing.
This connects to the broader question of whether Israeli voters would actually show up if given the chance, or whether the culture of disengagement has become self-reinforcing. I think the IDI poll suggests the demand is there. But demand without supply eventually atrophies. If you've never been invited to a town hall, you stop expecting one. You stop asking. The absence of engagement becomes normalized.
That's the self-reinforcing cycle. Politicians don't engage because there's no electoral incentive. Voters stop expecting engagement because it never happens. The gap widens. And then when someone proposes constituency offices, the response is why bother, no one would come anyway.
Which is why the September 2026 committee recommendations matter. This is a live policy window. If the Knesset endorses regional primaries and mandatory constituency offices, it creates the institutional skeleton that engagement can grow on.
The skeleton needs flesh. And the flesh is political culture. Ireland's canvass isn't just a legal requirement — it's a cultural expectation. If you're running for the Dáil and you don't knock on doors, people notice. Your opponent uses it against you. The system enforces the norm.
Japan's kōenkai is similar — it's not mandated by law, but it's so deeply embedded in political culture that not having one is electoral suicide. The Diet member who tries to run without a local support network simply loses.
Taiwan's QR code system is the most engineered of the three, but even that succeeded because it solved a problem legislators already felt. They wanted to engage more efficiently. The digital tool amplified an existing impulse, rather than trying to create one from scratch.
Which brings me to the uncomfortable question. Does the existing Israeli political class actually want more engagement? Or is the current system, with all its dysfunction, serving their interests?
That's the question that sits underneath the security excuse. If you're an MK who benefits from a system where accountability is diffused across a national list, where your reelection depends on party machinery rather than voter satisfaction, where you can spend your career in the Knesset without ever having to stand in front of a constituent and explain a broken promise — why would you vote to change that?
You wouldn't. Unless voters make it impossible not to.
That's the actionable takeaway. The Knesset committee is deliberating right now. Bill 5786-2026 is on the table. The Shin Bet has said they can do the security work. The models exist — Canada for structured accessibility, Japan for community-based screening, Taiwan for digital efficiency. The pieces are all there.
What's missing is the political pressure to assemble them. And that pressure has to come from voters who understand that the security argument, while grounded in real threats, has been stretched to cover something much simpler — a system that lets elected officials avoid the people who elected them.
The Irish canvass works because it forces politicians to be known quantities in their communities. A TD who's been knocking on the same doors for 20 years isn't an abstract figure on a national list. She's the woman who helped your mother navigate the pension system. He's the man who showed up at the community meeting about the school closure. Those relationships are the real security infrastructure. They're built one conversation at a time.
They can't be faked. That's the thing about the Israeli photo-op tours — everyone knows what they are. The politician surrounded by cameras, shaking hands in a preselected settlement, saying preselected things to preselected people. It's the theatrical version of engagement, and the audience knows it's a play.
The question Daniel's prompt raises is whether the play is all we can hope for, or whether something more genuine is possible. And the evidence from other democracies says it is possible. Not without risk.
I keep coming back to that Shin Bet statistic. The security agency says it can protect constituency meetings. No one has asked. That's not a security failure. That's a failure of something else entirely.
It's a failure of obligation. The obligation to be accountable. The obligation to show up. The obligation to listen to people who didn't vote for you and might never vote for you. That's the hard part. The security logistics are solvable. The willingness to be uncomfortable in front of your constituents — that's what can't be legislated.
It can be incentivized. If the September committee recommendations include mandatory constituency sessions with public attendance records, suddenly the discomfort of showing up is weighed against the discomfort of your opponent running ads about your empty chair.
That's the mechanism. Shame, sunlight, and electoral consequence. The same things that make the Irish system work, just adapted to a different political structure and a different security environment.
Let me add one more data point that I think is telling. In 2025, the Knesset committee that studied this issue produced a detailed report recommending regional constituency offices with mandatory quarterly sessions. The report was comprehensive. It addressed security protocols, funding mechanisms, and implementation timelines. It was never brought to a vote.
It died in committee.
It died in committee. And the members who let it die faced no electoral consequence whatsoever, because there is no mechanism by which a voter in Ashdod can punish an MK for killing a bill about constituency engagement.
That's the loop. The system protects itself. Breaking that loop requires either top-down reform — which the committee is considering again now — or bottom-up pressure that makes inaction politically costly.
The reform creates the structure. The pressure creates the culture. Neither works without the other.
The answer to whether any democracy has balanced access and security is yes — several have, in several different ways. The answer to whether Israel could is also yes, because the security infrastructure already exists and the models are proven elsewhere. The open question is whether the political will exists to bridge the gap between what's possible and what's currently happening.
That question is going to be answered, one way or another, by what happens with bill 5786-2026 this September. If it passes, Israel starts building the infrastructure for genuine constituency engagement. If it dies in committee again, we'll know that the security argument was never really about security.
It was about convenience. The convenience of not having to face the people you represent. The convenience of a system where accountability is distributed so widely that no one person ever has to hold it. The convenience of treating voters as an abstraction rather than as human beings with specific problems in specific places.
The Irish canvass is inconvenient by design. It's cold and wet and people are angry about potholes and hospital waiting lists and you have to stand there and absorb it. That's the point. The inconvenience is the accountability.
In Israel, the system has been optimized to remove that inconvenience entirely. The question is whether voters are willing to accept that optimization, or whether they'll demand something different.
The IDI poll suggests they want something different. The question is whether they want it enough to make it politically impossible for MKs to keep saying no.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the 1780s, the cuttlefish's ability to match the polarization patterns of light reflecting off its skin — not just color and texture, but the actual wave orientation of photons — was an optical property so precise that it would take human physics another two centuries to even measure what the animal was doing.
The cuttlefish was running experiments we couldn't design.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Our producer is Hilbert Flumingtop. You can find every episode at myweirdprompts.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you got something out of this episode, leave us a review — it helps other people find the show.
The committee releases its recommendations. That's the window. If you're an Israeli voter who's been waiting for your MK to show up, now's the time to make some noise.
