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Approximate Democracy
The obvious way to upgrade popular representation would be to digitize voting. Not only would this make one’s franchise much easier to exercise, but actual, direct democracy would then be conceivable, which in turn would promise an end to the petty corruption of special interest lobbying.
Unfortunately, security concerns make e-democracy all but impossible, at least for the foreseeable future--until blockchain technology, for example, is fully tested. Fortunately, however, there's a way around security concerns, and that's Approximate Democracy. It promises a radical scaling back of petty corruption, all the while maintaining our current electoral landscape.
Here's how it would work in this country:
A. In today’s world, a voter who makes an opinion known to her political representative needn’t worry about security. As long as the politician isn’t required to heed it, this is simply political expression.
B. Now imagine many thousands of voters making their opinions known. Still no need for security, but the politician will likely pay more attention.
C. And finally, imagine a polling firm hired to accurately sample those thousands of opinions, and generate truly representative ‘voter opinion’ that will almost certainly influence the affected politician.
This three step walk-through points to our Approximate Democracy, a simple process that at a minimum begins to separate politicians from monied interests (due to voter opinion holding sway), and attacks the party line conformity that prevents important political progress.
First, let’s describe how approximate democracy would work, then we’ll address specific questions about its chances.
1) A participating member of the House of Representatives would have a webpage featuring videos (each perhaps five minutes in length) covering both single issues and more general topics.
2) Voters, after viewing a randomly assigned video, would register their opinions by choosing from among multiple-choice options on a series of questions.
3) Polling firms would sample constituent opinion, then publish results. Politicians could choose to abide by these opinions when representing their constituents, could decline to offer this service in the first place, or could select from individual polling results as they saw fit. That is, they wouldn’t be legally bound to concur with these polls, but could advertise their willingness to do so.
4) This system, once fully implemented, would tend to focus election campaigns on video presentation (actual issues), and adherence to constituent opinion, rather than the carefully constructed ‘talking points’ generated to mislead, since a politician’s actual votes on issues could be pre-determined by constituent input.
5) Importantly, a representative’s webpage would enable dissent, amendment, and other feedback. In this way, a politician would be one cog in a veritable thinking mind, grappling with alternatives, and defusing otherwise explosive issues with contextual background.
6) In an age of cynicism over the motives and performance of our politicians, Approximate Democracy draws the voter into the deliberative process, furnishes context, discussion and closure, all the while building political sophistication.
And now for specifics:
FAQ
Q: A District’s Polling Results Would Be Reflective of Constituent Age, Sex, Income, etc., Wouldn’t They?
A: Yes. First time visitors to their representative's webpage would be asked to provide basic demographic information. Then, when a 30-something female with a secondary education, and an income of $40,000 is needed to complete a sampling of 50 similar people, all opinions generated by that demographic are in effect shuffled and drawn from, as one would pick a single, unseen playing card from among many.
Multiple polling firms could be hired for relatively little to essentially plug in data, since a district’s demographic profile would change very little year-to-year once a polling firm’s proprietary profile were set. A polling average of those multiple firms would then refine results.
Q: What About Poll Reliability? We Recently Had An Election In Which The Unexpected Happened.
A: Yes, but in 2016's presidential election, the polling average (Real Clear Politics) was only off by 1.1 percentage points compared to the final popular vote. And because there was 1) an unusually large number of undecided voters late in the process, 2) the dramatic revelations involving the FBI investigation, and 3) the flood of Russian hacking and fake news, the misdirection that affected mainly rural, low-information voters was not surprising. Thus, a 1.1% divergence from pre-election projections actually makes the case that modern polling is worthy.
Besides, most of our proposed system's results won't be close. The minority, those within a point or two of 50/50, would naturally suggest a judgement call.
Q: Why Not Rate Polling Firms and Weight Their Results Accordingly?
A: This might best be implemented once firms have a chance to acclimate. Ratings could be based on projections for congressional elections. Polling firms would publish predictions the day before an election, and would be rewarded depending on how close they modeled the result. Success would mean both greater influence (additional weight in polling averages) and financial compensation (contracts with performance bonuses).
Incidentally, polling firms would likely report both constituent opinion, and likely voter opinion, thus, in some cases, allowing candidates further leeway in following that opinion.
Incidentally, polling firms would likely report both constituent opinion, and likely voter opinion, thus, in some cases, allowing candidates further leeway in following that opinion.
Q: What About Security? Is Any Internet Portal Safe?
A: Because ‘contacting your political representative’ involves a politician knowing how you feel about a given issue, our information exchange is two-way, much like a credit card company and its customers, rather than a one-way secret ballot. An email or text receipt could be sent to each constituent to confirm their expressed opinions.
Plus, because videos are assigned to constituents randomly—and eventually there would be hundreds of videos--there is little chance of intentionally influencing a particular issue.
Q: Are constituents voting on as many videos as they want?
A: No, a limit would be advisable to preserve sampling viability. A constituent who successfully opined on the content of, say, three videos, could be allowed to pick a fourth of their choice. In the case of all such fourth-of-four, ‘free choice' picks, however, opinions would be part of a separate tally that gauged ‘feedback ferocity’, only. Following their fourth video, constituents would be told they had reached their limit, and would be politely asked to return after, say, 24 hours.
Q: Those Sharing The Same Device In The Same Household Would Be Able To Register Individually, Right?
A: Right. A pin number based on an ID (possibly, eventually, fingerprints), would likely be used to distinguish constituents.
Q: How Would This Idea Be Implemented?
A: It would probably begin with several politicians and a handful of prominent issues. Then, in subsequent elections, challengers could offer the service if the incumbent hadn't yet done so. Videos, meanwhile, would likely be produced by political parties, factions or interest groups, and used by multiple representatives.
Q: Is It Likely That Large Enough Samples Are Possible? A House District Is ~ 711,000.
Most likely, to begin with, politicians would only take opinion tallies under consideration, but could then switch over to actually abiding by poll results once polling firms were hired and samples were large enough.
To encourage participation, especially in smaller constituencies, there will likely be a place for prizes of some value. Most likely, though, because outside groups would organize members to take part in the separate, ‘feedback ferocity’ tallies (a viewer’s fourth, free choice video), and because constituents would have to make their way through three other videos first, this would likely create the necessary participatory volume for sampling to be successful. To quickly transform our democracy with overwhelming participation, we would almost certainly need prizes.
Q: Pretty Hard To Imagine Low-Income Constituents Using This System, Especially The Computer-less, no?
A: There is a gut-level truth here, obviously; if you don’t have leisure time, you won’t be able to sit through a 5-minute video, let alone four such presentations.
There are, however, fairly credible comebacks to this point. The first involves statistics. If there are 500 low-income viewers of a video, and 5,000 each for those with middle and high incomes, and there is only a need for 400 from each group, the polling interface would simply select all it needs, no problem.
A second comeback involves the question of prizes. If there are prizes, and if they are of some value, constituents with lower incomes will experience a greater relative benefit. For example, the chance to win $1,000 in Savings Bond might be worth five minutes for those with modest incomes, but perhaps not for the otherwise occupied wealthy.
Q: But Shouldn’t Participation Be Based On Interest?
A: Certainly. And yet the logic for replacing our current representative democracy model, with its marginally corrupt framework, argues for speed in implementation. The sooner that a representative has a constituent feedback loop up and running, the sooner that representative can tell a lobbyist “sorry, but my constituents have spoken”. And the sooner this happens, the sooner the representative’s unscrupulous challengers in the next election will be partially disarmed.
Imagine if, in the year 2023, all participants who visited their House of Representative's webpage at least once during a given month were eligible for one of ten $1,000 drawings. Ten drawings for each Congressional District (Washington D.C. adds one, for 436), involves an annual cost of only $52.32 million in savings bonds: 1,000 x 10 x 12 x 436. This is a very modest sum, and one we are comfortable in proposing, given the overwhelming urgency of the challenges we face.
Q: How Can We Be Sure About Constituent Data?
A: At first glance this would seem to be a problem. Wouldn’t some more cynical constituents pose as underrepresented demographic groups in order to increase their chance of being heard? First, the number of cheaters is likely to be very small, and unlikely to affect outcomes if the sample size is large enough (adding one or two duplicate opinions will seem all but futile to most people). Second, some kind of verification is possible. Public records, for example, can match residents with specific addresses. And third, polling firms use census data as the foundation for their demographic profiles. When census / polling data are mismatched in an anticipated direction, a slight adjustment to a demographic profile can be made. And when we remember that polling firms will be using their models to predict legislative races, and thus constantly fine-tuning them, this seeming problem evaporates.
Q: How Would A Video Allow For Dissent and Amendment?
A: The likeliest system would probably involve a comments section like those found on many websites. A poster could tag a comment as a ‘challenge’, which, if it gathered enough support, would become a ‘rebuttal’ that would be added to the original video. These challenges and amendments would, by law, be prominently featured on a politician’s website. They would then be linked to by that politician’s challengers in future elections.
To keep politicians honest, a general record of challenges and amendments should be kept. These could be sorted and accessed by:
- the amount of support they generate per hundred views (separated into several categories of popularity)
- the relative percentage of up-votes to down-votes
- the subject matter in question
- the date on which they occur
This alone should make our representative politics a more fact-based, consensus driven endeavor. What sane politician would want attention drawn to his worst biases, snubs, and factual errors?
Most likely, dissent and amendment wouldn’t be allowed for those choosing to view their fourth, free choice video, as this would encourage a flood of astroturf reaction.
Q: Why Haven’t We Seen Approximate Democracy Before?
A: In a nutshell: timeliness. Only very recently has the digital revolution--specifically internet access--approached 100% in most developed countries. This was always the biggest hurdle, since democracies require that everyone be at the table, and patchwork fixes like public library access are all but unworkable for large numbers of people.
There are other reasons, too:
· Refinement: In the US in 2010 a House candidate from South Dakota garnered 6% of the vote. He advocated a much simpler system than ours that lacked safeguards like polling, random video access, etc.
· Flexibility: While direct democracy may be an ideal for some, it can be critiqued as allowing the rabble to rule. We, however, allow politicians a choice of whether to pick and choose from among poll results, or, whether to solicit opinions in the first place.
· Interest: Even if polling had previously been considered as a way to render constituent opinion, there was always the problem of interest. Sampling requires not dozens, but hundreds of responses. This is where ‘feedback ferocity’ and savings bond drawings come into play.
· Two-Way Security. The internet is not secure. To be taken seriously, E-democracy must be an exchange accountable at both ends, rather than an attempt at a ‘secret ballot’ on one end (unless, that is, blockchain technology is proven viable).
Conclusion
Often, political reformers attempt too big a bite: a change to a country’s government structure, or a hoped-for rising up of the downtrodden. Instead, Approximate Democracy is easy. Just one politician is all it would take. Simply put up a webpage with the idea in brief, several dozen videos to get things started, and a ‘challenges’ page for critiques and mistakes. Send out notifications on social media. Compose a press release and send it to local and national news outlets. Contact key political journalists, inviting long-form articles. Most importantly, contact organizations with legislative outreach staff. All this should generate traffic to the website, and may induce some organizations to produce additional videos (once enough videos are in place, a polling firm can be hired). Finally, invite fellow representatives to join the digital revolution.
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