| Where Things Stand
The recent collapse of the nation's banking and financial system, and the increasingly severe economic recession that it helped trigger, have caused tens of millions of Americans to lose their jobs, homes and health insurance, or to be on the verge of losing them — adding to the nearly 60 million Americans who were already struggling to make ends meet before the recession.
I put the blame for the collapse and the recession squarely at the feet of the nation's lawmakers in Congress, as well as the presidents who have occupied the White House for the past two decades. For they have failed to carry out their constitutionally-mandated responsibility to "promote the general welfare" by ensuring that the economy has a job base of enough jobs paying living wages to employ all working Americans who need them.
A nation's economy can survive and flourish only when its working population has jobs that pay them high enough wages to purchase the goods and services the economy produces. This has not been the case for quite some time in America, and our working population has been falling deeper and deeper into debt because their costs of living have outstripped their stagnant incomes.
The nation's lawmakers are solely responsible for this catastrophe because they have refused to enforce anti-trust laws that prevent price gouging by ensuring competition among the businesses that produce the economy's goods and services. Their negligence has allowed mega-corporations, like oil and gas companies, to eliminate their competition and develop quasi-monopolies that charge consumers unfairly high prices for their goods and services. (Lawmakers' refusal to enforce anti-trust laws has also allowed mega-banks, speculative investment firms and insurance companies to become so gargantuan in size with financial tentacles gripping the entire economy that many lawmakers view them as "too-big-to-fail".)
At the same time, lawmakers have piled on by refusing to raise the minimum wage and step in when mega-corporations like Walmart refuse to pay their employees living wages. Moreover, these lawmakers have stood by and allowed these mega-corporations to erode the real economy's industrial capacity and job base by outsourcing jobs overseas.
Worse still, lawmakers have allowed financial services industries like credit card companies to reap windfall profits of 20%, 30% and even higher by forcing working Americans to pay usurious interest rates on credit card loans, forcing those who were already financially-strapped by their inability to make ends meet to take on even more debt.
Lawmakers' negligence in this legislative arena has engendered an even greater catastrophe for the nation's real economy. Because lawmakers allowed the financial services sector to make unprecedented profits from predatory practices like charging usurious interest rates, investors withdrew their money from the real economy, the one that creates real jobs for the majority of working Americans. They re-invested it in the financial services sector, a sector that creates jobs only for an elite minority of wealthy bankers and investors who are the richest of all Americans.
The laissez-faire stance of the nation's lawmakers encouraged investors to switch their investments from the real economy to the financial services sector where they hoped to share in the windfall profits that were being reaped from the issuance and sale to unsuspecting domestic and foreign investors of a new genre of high-risk securities, referred to as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Many of these securities would ultimately prove to be worthless. These were built around the increasing indebtedness of financially-distressed Americans, especially credit-card holders and homeowners with subprime mortgages.
By allowing the financial services sector to reap unfair profits by exploiting the indebtedness of working Americans and by siphoning investments out of the real economy, the nation's lawmakers bear full responsibility for the dismantling of the nation's industrial capacity and job base, and the subsequent plummeting of consumer purchasing power. For these practices have dramatically reduced consumer purchasing power, which in turn has weakened the economy by unleashing the vicious cycle of business failures and job losses that further weaken consumer demand and deepen the recession, which in turn cause even more business failures and job losses that prolong the recession.
The new Congress and president elected in 2008 have so far only made things worse by authorizing a $12.8 trillion bailout of insolvent mega-banks and speculative financial institutions that should have been broken up to create a decentralized system comprised of solvent, trustworthy, non-predatory institutions.
The trillions of dollars they are wasting in keeping insolvent banks operating is not in the interest of the American people as a whole, and working Americans in particular. The money should be invested in the real economy to create the tens of millions of jobs that unemployed American workers need. It would be better spent to re-build the economy from the ground up, rather than the top down, by providing sustainable jobs to American workers to green the U.S. infrastructure, create renewable sources of energy, establish a single payer health care system, curb climate disruption and rescue state governments from draconian cuts in essential services because they can not collect sufficient tax revenues from their beleaguered residents.
Why have the nation's lawmakers harmed the American people by creating these calamities?
My answer is that the large majority of them have been doing the bidding of their corporate campaign contributors in the business and financial services sector. According to the Center for Responsive Politics and its website, OpenSecrets.org, the newly elected president and a substantial portion of Congressional representatives have accepted, in toto, hundreds of millions of dollars over the years from the business and financial services sectors which lawmakers were supposed to regulate to ensure that their operations did not harm the public interest and the economy.
Instead of accepting money from business and financial interests and enhancing their profits via the legislation they passed or scuttled, these lawmakers should have been regulating them to make sure that they did not grow too big, unfairly eliminate their competition, erode the nation's industrial capacity and job base via outsourcing, gouge American consumers with high prices and refuse to pay living wages.
In my opinion, these lawmakers are well on their way to steering the nation off a financial cliff because there are not enough consumers with the purchasing power needed to revive the economy. What worries me the most is that our lawmakers in Congress not only have no plan in the works to revive purchasing power at the level of magnitude required to re-start the economy, but they also exhibit no understanding of their responsibility to formulate and enact one. They wrongly assume that by flooding insolvent "too-big-to-fail" banks with trillions of dollars at the top of the financial pyramid, it will somehow trickle down into the real economy.
There are virtually no signs that this is happening on any significant scale, or that it will happen. The recipients of bailout funds have transferred much of the money to third parties, invested it abroad, or spent it on bonuses for executives. According to the Wall Street Journal, Instead of increasing lending, bank lending overall has dropped since the bailout, demonstrating that the entire bailout strategy conceived by the nation's lawmakers to transfer taxpayers' hard earned money to failed bankers and speculative investors is a colossal failure on all fronts.
And even if lawmakers enacted a plan to re-start the economy by creating jobs that would revive consumer purchasing power, it is not clear where the money would come from to fund it, given lawmakers' aversion to redistributing the tax burden upwards towards those who have the means to shoulder it, and the possibility that the federal government itself is sliding towards insolvency. Indeed, the federal government has fallen so deeply in debt, due to the bailout and chronic budget and trade deficits, that it can only remain afloat financially if foreign governments and investors agree to lend the U.S. Treasury money by buying U.S. securities.
Unfortunately, there are ominous signs that major lenders like China, which is the largest of the federal government's lenders, are backing away from the U.S. dollar. They do not want to accumulate more dollars, either by buying U.S. securities or trading in the dollar, now that the U.S. is the world's largest debtor nation. For doubt is arising that it will be unable to honor its debts in the long run, due to the dire financial straits into which U.S. lawmakers have plunged the U.S. economy and the American people.
If the U.S. defaults on the interest payments owed on its debt, the American people may face the same uncomfortable and demeaning belt-tightening measures that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund typically force on third world debtor nations who default on their loans.
Yet, even while the out-of-control Congress and the Obama administration show signs of steering the federal government off a cliff into insolvency, they have agreed to spend upwards of $1 trillion annually for the foreseeable future to conduct military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as operate hundreds of military bases abroad. The expenditure of such a gargantuan sum cannot be justified in light of the broad consensus that the use of U.S. military force has been shown to be counter-productive in stemming attacks by armed militants and most experts agree that cooperative international policing is the most effective deterrent. The only unequivocal beneficiaries of these misguided policies are defense contractors and the military-industrial complex.
In the face of calamities of this magnitude, it is clear that the government that engendered these calamities is itself a calamity.
The American people will be on the brink of disaster until they wrest control of government from the influence peddling legislators and corporate special interests that are now running it.
Given the emergence of a progressive majority of voters who favor government intervention in the economy to help create jobs and promote economic equality, this would not be a difficult task to accomplish — were it not for the well-established pattern of the nation's two major political parties and both houses of Congress to flout the will of the people.
For example, lawmakers accepting contributions from the health care industry have been flouting the popular will for decades by refusing to enact policies that voters favor, such as the government-sponsored single payer health care system that a majority of Americans have repeatedly stated they prefer. A case in point is the Democratic chair of the Senate Finance Committee, who has received significant campaign contributions from the health care industry and continues to raise objections to health care reform proposals favored by a majority of the American people.
Another example is Congressional lawmakers who have flouted the popular will by enacting policies that a majority of voters oppose, such as bailing out insolvent banks, investment houses and insurance companies. It is noteworthy that the members of the House of Representatives who voted in favor of the bailout received 41% more money from the financial sector than those who opposed the legislation, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
But it is the decades-old refusal of Democratic and Republican controlled Congresses to replace the nation's costly private insurance system with the far less expensive government-sponsored single payer system which shows that the chronic sacrifice of the general welfare to the profits of lawmakers' corporate campaign contributors has become part and parcel of the plutocratic American system of government.
While it is clear that the emerging progressive majority will have the votes to bring about a revolutionary re-alignment of U.S. politics by 2015 (they will be 103,000,000 strong by 2020), the calamities facing the country make it imperative that progressive voters be empowered IMMEDIATELY to exert maximum pressure on incumbent lawmakers and, most importantly, elect representatives in every future election who will "promote the general welfare" by ensuring that the real economy produces the sustainable jobs, living wages and consumer purchasing power that working Americans and the economy require in order to survive and flourish.
What Progressives Can Do to Accelerate the Progressive Revolution
Needless to say, there is virtually no chance that even the emerging progressive majority can force immediate legislative changes in the two key mechanisms that enable the two major political parties and their elected representatives to flout the popular will — campaign financing laws and redistricting practices that maintain and create new "safe seats" that free incumbents from having to face viable challengers. Incumbents who got into office using these mechanisms will be unwilling to pass laws prohibiting them.
But there are a number of options to compel legislators who are flouting the will of their constituents to immediately cease and desist from doing so. These involve the exertion of overwhelming political pressure on such lawmakers through signed petitions, telephone calls, email and visits to their offices that make it clear that a sufficient number of their constituents are opposed to their stances to defeat them for re-election.
Of critical importance are the recent campaigns of organizations like Change Congress to saturate the election districts of lawmakers who refuse to take the legislative action favored by their constituents with attack ads aired on TV, published in local newspapers and sent to the homes of constituents. The remarkable success of such campaigns, like those that have succeeded in pressuring key lawmakers to change their anti-constituent stances into pro-constituent stances on health care reform legislation, are vital weapons in the arsenals of the emerging progressive majority.
These campaigns, which are publicly funded by progressive activists, make it clear that the emerging progressive majority possesses an untapped potential to garner unlimited resources from progressives around the country to defeat in future elections lawmakers who oppose progressive legislation.
An organization that is playing a pivotal role in making such campaigns financially viable nationwide is ActBlue, which has raised nearly $100 million for progressive candidates so far.
Progressive activists everywhere should support these efforts to the maximum because they can have an immediate impact on lawmakers who are flouting the will of their constituents on specific pieces of legislation.
Unfortunately, while these strategies and the campaigns built around them are crucially important, necessary and indispensable, they will not change the fact that the emerging progressive majority does not have the political clout at the moment to re-set the nation's policy agenda and prevent the large majority of lawmakers from favoring corporate special interests over the vital needs and interests of their constituents in ways that pre-empt the enactment of the policies needed to produce a sustained recovery of the real economy.
For these strategies and campaigns are limited to specific policies and specific legislators. As such, their effect is likely to be an incremental one over the long haul, unless complemented by strategies yet to be deployed, like those embodied in my invention.
For it is designed to give voters direct and immediate control in setting the nation's policy agendas. It empowers them to build political networks and winning voting blocs that can wrest control of electoral and legislative processes from the major political parties and corporate special interests so they can elect progressive representatives who will enact their agendas into law.
Here are some of the assumptions behind the invention:
- Progressive activists most likely to embrace my invention will be members of the up-and-coming Millennial generation of voters born during the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, as described by Winograd and Hais in their path-breaking book, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics.
It is the largest generation in history. It is also the largest generation to espouse progressive values. The 48 million Millennials who were eligible to vote in 2008 already represent almost 25% of all voters, a far larger voting bloc than that of senior citizens, who represent only 16% of all eligible voters. By 2015, Millennials will comprise one-third of all eligible voters.
Millennials are accustomed to using the social networking technologies on which my invention is based, and to taking an activist role in electoral politics. Winograd and Hais credit them with giving Obama his margin of victory in 2008. Millennials voted for Barack Obama by an overwhelming 66 percent to 32 percent, providing almost 90 percent of his victory margin, according to analyst Ray Teixeira.
- Progressive activists who already use social networking websites and already espouse progressive values will see my invention's consensus-building tools and services as providing them a unique opportunity to build consensus about policy priorities online within their own self-directed socio-political networks. As the nation's lawmakers continue to neglect their responsibility to rebuild the real economy so that it engenders the jobs and income that Millennials believe they have a right to expect their lawmakers to provide, they will spontaneously turn the socio-political networks they have built around policy agenda setting into winning voting blocs. They will have the motivation and the numbers they need to win at the ballot box.
- Since many Millennials already have experience working in electoral campaigns, they will immediately see how they can use their networks to pressure political parties to let them participate in party agenda-setting and candidate selection processes. If the parties they approach are unresponsive, they will know how to run their own candidates on party lines without party support, or, failing that, how to run their candidates on Independent or unaffiliated lines.
If that fails or seems unlikely at the outset, it will not be much of a stretch for them to envision creating their own political parties and using social networking technologies to merge their parties with other parties to increase their reach to successively higher levels of government, including the presidential.
- My invention can certainly be used for policy consensus-building and candidate nomination processes by political parties themselves, organizations like MoveOn.org and Democracy for America, labor unions and others.
But my primary purpose is to provide any voter access to a single website where he/she can use free of charge user-friendly tools and services that enable them to set their policy agenda across the board, and identify and contact (indirectly) any number of other voters whose policy agendas are statistically similar to their own so they can pursue shared objectives using state-of-the-art social networking technologies.
- I am also assuming that when the invention is fully developed, the generic policy options will have been fully tested and framed in the simplest, most easily understood language, so that they resonate with voters across the political spectrum, including those who espouse values and policy goals that are far from progressive.
The basic idea is to give voters across the political spectrum a full spectrum of generic policy options from which to choose, and the opportunity to carefully sift through and learn about their options individually and in interaction with other voters. Each option contains links to online sources of information about the option. These links will be continuously updated. Voters can also create entirely new options.
- Last but not least, let me address the issue of fragmentation and a possible splintering of the electorate. Because the invention is fundamentally a social networking-based, consensus-building instrument that uses statistical techniques to identify which voters' policy agendas are statistically similar and put these voters in touch with each other, there is no inherent limit on how many voters can decide to group themselves within a single political network that decides to function as a voting bloc within an existing political party — or as an entirely new political party.
But instead of splintering the electorate into a multitude of fragmented groups or parties, any number of networks/voting blocs can use the invention's consensus building tools and services, which are accessible on a single website, to come together in self-organizing federations they create at any level of government to build common agendas and use them to nominate and elect candidates who will enact their agendas into law. They can transform their political networks into formal political parties if they wish, or operate inside existing parties.
The federations can be short-lived or they can exist indefinitely, as long as there are people who want to use them to set their agendas and influence the political process to run and elect candidates who will enact their agendas into law.
The Interactive Voter Choice System
The following description of the origin of the invention and how it works is excerpted from my book, Re-Inventing Democracy: How U.S. Voters Can Get Control of Government and Restore Popular Sovereignty in America.
"This patent-pending invention was originally conceived by the author at an election campaign event held in 2004 to support the presidential primary bid of Howard Dean. Like many of Dean's events, it took place at a supporter's home. This one took place just outside Washington, D.C. Attendees signed up online using the open source Meetup platform.
While awaiting a conference call from Dean, attendees milled around for nearly an hour while engaging in light, directionless conversation. When the call from Dean finally came through, he made his usual proclamation that "You Have the Power". Dean used this slogan as the title of a book he wrote, subtitled, "How to Take Back Our Country and Restore Democracy in America".
Despite the congenial setting, the author felt quite powerless throughout the event and Dean's primary bid as well, except when making small contributions online to help finance his campaign.
Despite Dean's good intentions and courage in initially opposing the Iraq war, there was no mechanism by which his supporters could exert any direct or significant influence on the policy positions he was espousing during the campaign, or help him remain true to his original positions in the face of continuous attacks by his opponents and the media.
Nor was there a systematic or comprehensive mechanism through which his supporters could convey to him their policy priorities across the board. Had there been such a mechanism, attendees could have taken advantage of it to make a productive use of the time spent at the Meetup event waiting around for Dean's conference call.
If attendees had each been given a comprehensive list of policy options from which they could select those they most preferred, they could have created their own policy agendas and then compared their respective agendas. They could then try to agree on a common agenda either by consensus or by voting on the various policy options they had already chosen, and rank them from most to least preferred.
To make the activity easy and fun, the author conceived the idea of printing each option on a separate card in a deck of playing cards. That way, attendees could lay out their chosen cards on a table or even on a carpet. That would give them a visible way to compare and contrast their respective choices. The Dean campaign could give a deck to each attendee to take home as a memento of the campaign.
Most importantly, since the Dean campaign was using state-of-the-art Internet technologies to build an online network of supporters, each attendee's agenda as well as the group agendas that attendees formulated at the event could be transmitted electronically to Dean's campaign headquarters for analysis and cross-tabulation so that he and his staff would know where his supporters in different locations stood on the major issues facing the country. He could then incorporate his supporters' views and priorities into his own agenda with confidence that he was truly representing the needs of those he was seeking to represent if elected president.
Since each attendee would have a deck of cards with an option printed on each card, attendees could re-order their priorities whenever the need arose and email their new agendas to Dean. These updates would let him know what their new stances were so he could stay abreast of emerging trends in his supporters' priorities.
In addition, Dean's staff could use modern statistical techniques to analyze the choices that his supporters made, which would enable him to figure out which supporters shared common priorities.
Once he identified supporters with common policy priorities, he could invite them to form collaborative online teams hosted on his campaign website tasked with elaborating policy recommendations that could later be used to enact their priorities into law if Dean were elected president. The teams could be provided collaborative wiki software, such as that used by the Wikipedia, so that team members could collectively create and edit web pages using a common web browser.
Although Dean's primary bid was unsuccessful, the author continued to develop the concept so that it could be used by all U.S. voters interested in shaping the nation's policy priorities across the board and electing representatives who would enact them into law.
By incorporating Web 2.0 social networking technologies into the concept, it became a comprehensive web-based system and website that voters could use to set their policy agendas online and identify and contact other voters by email whose policy agendas were statistically similar to their own. They could identify like-minded voters anywhere in the U.S., or in specific ZIP codes or electoral districts.
Once these possibilities emerged, it became apparent that voters could use this system and an open source, social networking web platform and website to identify their priorities and set their agendas across the board on all the issues of concern to them. By contributing their agendas to a database, they could identify and contact voters whose policy choices were statistically similar to their own. They could then join forces to build political networks consisting of voters with similar policy priorities.
The networks could comprise voters living anywhere in the country or restricted to those living within specific geographical areas, such as states, counties, ZIP codes, election districts or precincts.
By creating political networks of like-minded voters who live in specific electoral districts, voters could use their networks like pressure groups to pressure elected representatives to enact into law their shared policy priorities. The networks could also pressure candidates for elective office to endorse their policy priorities in exchange for the votes of the members of the networks.
Most significantly, it became obvious that if elected officials and candidates did not endorse the policy agendas of the voters' political networks, pledge to enact them into law and take steps to enact them after being elected, voters could use their political networks and shared agendas to run and elect their own candidates for office.
The system had evolved to the point that voters could use it to build political networks around shared policy priorities that could exercise the same agenda-setting and candidate selection and election functions as those performed by political parties. However, the policy priorities from which they could choose would not be limited to those espoused by party officials.
What makes this system more democratic than the methods that political parties use to put candidates on the ballot is that it enables voters to articulate their policy priorities in writing BEFORE candidates are selected to run for office. They can use their agendas as a yardstick by which to evaluate candidates before the candidates and party officials agree to put them on the ballot. In short, the system gives voters the power to use their agendas and political networks built around shared policy agendas to control the entire electoral process from beginning to end.
The system also gives voters the option of working within existing political parties or across party lines. They can use it to democratize the practices of existing political parties so that voters can define succinct agendas in writing that set the parameters of party platforms, as well as the platforms of individual candidates.
Similarly, candidates for office can be required to define their policy agendas in advance using the system's policy options so that voters will know where they stand, whether or not they want them to run on the party ticket, and whether or not they will vote for particular candidates. Furthermore, the agendas of voters' political networks can be used as the yardstick for evaluating the performance of candidates for office and determining the extent to which the legislation they support or oppose reflects the agendas of their constituents.
Moreover, the system can be used to conduct public opinion polls and publish their results on line, a critical function in times of national crises like the economic and financial crises now facing the nation. For it enables voters to periodically define and update their policy preferences as circumstances warrant and contribute them and their ZIP code to a database that is periodically analyzed to display voter priorities and responses to special surveys.
The results of the surveys and periodic analyses can be published online at regular intervals. They can be disaggregated by ZIP code and election district so that the stances of voters in particular districts can be brought to the attention of the media and their elected representatives to eliminate any ambiguity as to where voters stand. Voters whose representatives consistently vote against their expressed policy priorities can vote them out of office.
Below is a step-by-step description of how the system and website can be used by voters throughout the country. Advertisements on social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace will bring the invention to the attention of Millennials who are most likely to recognize its utility and take advantage of the benefits it offers to voters seeking to get control of government in America.
To view a prototype of the website, click here. To read the patent registration application for the system submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, click here.
Step 1
Setting the Nation's Policy Priorities
The first step is for voters to access the Citizens' Winning Hands website and define their policy agendas across the board, free of charge, by selecting their policy priorities from the website's database of generic policy options. (A prototype of the website can be viewed by clicking here.)
The options are displayed on cards in two decks of playing cards. The options cover a wide range of alternatives across the political spectrum that advocate divergent and even diametrically opposed policy choices. The options are divided into 8 umbrella themes. Each deck has 4 umbrella themes:
Deck 1
Livelihoods
Health & Welfare
Security
Civil and Political Rights
Deck 2
Economy
Local/State Government
Federal Government
International Relations
Each card contains the title of a policy option at the top of the card, the textual description of the option in the middle of the card, and a link to online information sources at the bottom of the card. (Note: the options as well as the umbrella themes are provided for illustrative purposes only.)
Voters who are weighing their alternatives and comparing their options can click on the link to access a wide variety of online information located on hundreds of websites.
The links, which are continuously updated, connect to a broad range of editorials, news articles, speeches and research reports analyzing the pros and cons of the options from different points of view and political stances.
Click here to view a list of the options (see "Key to Deck 1" and "Key to Deck 2"). Immediately below are 104 cards (52 cards per deck) containing the options and links.
If voters do not find policy options they favor on any of the 104 cards in the two decks, they can propose that new options be added to the Joker Pool of user-created wild cards. The pool can be searched using key words.
Voters can prioritize the policy options they select, define different agendas for different purposes, audiences and levels of government; update their agendas whenever their priorities change and save all their agendas in their own personal archive on the website for future reference.
Voters can use their policy agendas to set the nation's policy priorities at federal, state and local levels by contributing their policy options to the public opinion polls which are published regularly on the website. (For more information about how the polls work, click here to access additional information found on the website prototype.)
The database of the polls can be mined by the news media, polling organizations, political parties, elected representatives and electoral candidates to identify and track emerging trends.
For example, they can find out how many voters in specific areas of the country select particular policy options or combinations of policy options, and how the trends correlate with external events, changing conditions and demographic factors.
Voters contributing their agendas to the poll can query the poll database free of charge and send the results to selected news media, political party officials, elected representatives, electoral candidates, advocacy groups and other key players in U.S. politics.
Voters can use the database to publicize how specific voters' preferences converge with, or diverge from, those espoused by elected officials, candidates, political parties, advocacy groups and special interests.
When media attention is focused on sharp contrasts that are discovered in poll results between voters' policy priorities on the one hand and the priorities and track records of elected officials and candidates on the other hand, the negative publicity may well prompt the officials and candidates to change course if they want to win upcoming elections.
Step 2
Pressuring Elected Officials and Candidates for Office to Adopt and Enact Their Constituents' Policy Agendas
Voters can email their policy agendas to anyone they wish, anytime, as often as they find it necessary to keep key individuals abreast of agenda updates that reflect new priorities.
One important way voters can use their agendas to increase their influence in U.S. politics is to email their agendas to their elected representatives and candidates for office with their own comments and recommendations for enacting their policy priorities into law.
In addition, voters can request representatives and electoral candidates to visit the website to define and email them their policy agendas and legislative priorities. Then voters can compare their respective stances on the policy issues they care most about.
If, after comparing their agendas, voters find their key policy priorities are similar to those of their representatives, voters can initiate a dialog with them to develop a shared agenda that their representatives agree to support in legislative decision-making. If these representatives are running for re-election, voters can support their bids for office.
If, on the other hand, their respective agendas are too divergent, voters can point to this divergence when they inform their representatives and candidates that they will not support their electoral bids unless they change their priorities and pledge to take action to implement the policies advocated by their constituents.
Step 3
Finding Allies and Building Political Networks
If individual voters decide they can not support their representatives for re-election or any of the candidates who are running, they can use the website's tools and services to find allies with statistically similar policy agendas with whom they can make common cause to elect representatives who will enact their agendas into law.
They can contact their prospective allies with similar agendas and work with them to build political networks with enough voting strength to run and elect their own candidates who pledge to enact their policy priorities into law.
Here's how voters can use the tools and services to find allies and build political networks:
Individuals who contribute their policy priorities to the public opinion poll published on the website can authorize the website administrator to forward them internal email in their own mailbox on the website from voters whose agendas are statistically similar to their own and seek to contact them. (For more information on hows this feature works, click here to access additional information found on the website prototype.)
The administrator will forward to individuals who have authorized them to do so emails from voters who have queried the poll database and received notification that their policy agendas are statistically similar to those of the individuals in question. (Voters will not know the names of these individuals until they are contacted by the individuals.) Once the individuals and voters contact each other, they can decide how they wish to proceed to get their shared agendas enacted into law.
They can use the website's collaboration and consensus-building tools and services to create and manage political networks of like-minded allies with statistically similar agendas. They can then define agendas with policy priorities that attract to their networks the number of voters they need to elect candidates to office who pledge to enact their policy agendas into law.
They can create political networks of any size at local, state and federal levels and operate them inside or outside party lines.
The website's tools and services enable the members of the networks to take advantage of the site's database of generic policy options, its public opinion poll database, its internal email service and its tools for managing contact lists, list-serves, blogs, chats, wiki-type documents, event organizers and calendars.
The tools also include a vote counting utility so that as the number of network members increases, its members can periodically vote on their policy priorities to develop consensus and update their policy agendas to reflect emerging priorities.
Ideally, if these voters wish to operate their networks inside existing political parties, political party officials will welcome their participation and willingly accept adding network candidates to the party's ballot for primary elections, caucuses and general elections. If so, party officials will collect the number of signatures from registered party members required by the state in order to place the candidates on the party's line for the elections.
If party officials do not welcome the participation of voters' political networks in their internal processes and the addition of the networks' candidates to election ballots, and do not agree to collect the required signatures for the candidates to appear on the party's ballots, the members of the networks can collect the required signatures themselves and put their candidates on the party's ballot without the cooperation of party officials.
If the candidates placed on the party's primary ballot by the voters' political networks win the primary election, their names will appear on the party's ballot in the general election in spite of the lack of official party support.
If the candidates also win the general election and political party officials recognize that voters who use the website's tools and services can build powerful political networks that win elections, they may then decide to welcome these voter-driven networks into the party.
Party officials can also opt to have the party itself take advantage of the website's tools and services in order to actively involve a greater number of voters in defining their party's policy agendas and selecting their candidates. They can use the tools and services to build broader, more diversified electoral coalitions that win elections despite current popular dissatisfaction with political parties and incumbents and the growth of the Independent and unaffiliated bloc of voters.
If party officials follow the lead of these voter-driven networks, they will be helping voters re-democratize not only party politics but U.S. electoral processes as well.
Party officials will have learned from activist voters using the website's agenda setting and consensus building tools and services that it is possible to build larger, more powerful electoral bases of supporters if they allow voters to select policy options from anywhere along the political spectrum. The policy agendas of political parties do not have to be limited to the more restricted sets of options that fall within the confines of traditional party ideologies and platforms.
Since the voting bloc comprised of independent and unaffiliated voters has become so large that it can determine the outcome of elections, political parties and voters' political networks that use the website's tools and services to their advantage can play a vital role in building political consensus across party lines.
They can keep refining the agendas of their political networks and the policy agendas and platforms of their candidates until they have the right mix of policy options to attract the number of votes their candidates need to win elections.
Step 4
Building Autonomous Winning Voting Blocs
Voters who do not wish to operate their political networks within particular political parties to put their candidates on the party's election ballots have the option of building autonomous winning voting blocs on their own. These blocs can become new political parties.
Voters can operate their political networks outside of existing parties to put their candidates on the general election ballot as independents and unaffiliated candidates by filing the number of nominating petitions signed by registered voters that is required by the state.
While many states have passed laws designed to make it as difficult as possible for political parties other than the two major political parties to get their candidates on the general election ballot, especially by requiring a large number of signatures, the website's tools and services enable these parties to surmount these obstacles.
First, political parties that use, or have been created by voters' political networks that use the website's agenda setting services and opinion poll, can query the website's opinion poll database to ascertain whether there are a sufficient number of voters who share their policy priorities to provide the required number of signatures. They can also find out in what ZIP codes they reside to make it easier to locate them in order to obtain their signatures.
Second, if they find that this number falls short of the number they will need, they can still get the signatures they need by broadening their policy agendas to appeal to a greater number of voters. By submitting their broadened agendas to the website's poll database, they can identify and contact voters whose agendas statistically resemble their broadened agendas.
Forming autonomous winning voting blocs whose candidates are victorious in general elections is also made easier by the website's tools and services. If the number of voters in their voting blocs equals or surpasses half the votes cast in prior elections, their candidates have a good chance of winning if they just make sure their members show up to vote on election day.
If not, they can get vital help in winning these elections by frequently querying the database of the public opinion polls published on the website to locate and contact new voters in their electoral districts who have recently submitted policy agendas containing policy priorities statistically similar to those of their voting bloc and candidates.
They can keep refining their agendas and the platforms of their candidates until they have the right mix of policy options to attract the number of votes they need to elect their candidates in the upcoming elections.
Once their candidates are on the ballot, they can add to their voting strength by engaging the members of their political networks in grassroots organizing efforts aimed at publicizing their candidates and their policy platforms in the months leading up to the elections.
Step 5
Using Shared Agendas as Policy-Making Mandates
Voters can use their political networks, policy agendas, voting blocs and voting strength to provide their elected representatives with policy-making mandates specifying what they are expected to accomplish in office.
They can use the website's tools and services to keep the agendas of their networks and voting blocs updated. The updating process can be used to continuously build consensus regarding their emerging priorities so that their agendas keep abreast of changing conditions.
They can use their evolving agendas to collaborate with their elected representatives to build a comprehensive common legislative agenda. They can also use their common agenda as a benchmark to address issues that arise when their representatives endeavor to translate their policy priorities into law.
Voters can also request their representatives to inform them of all legislative actions they are planning to undertake that affect their legislative priorities so that voters can give them instructions before they act.
They can also use their comprehensive legislative agenda as a yardstick to track and evaluate their representatives' votes on legislation by surfing into such websites as Opencongress.org: One-stop Shopping for What's Really Happening in Congress to get the inside story on how faithfully they are adhering to the agenda.
Voters can reward the representatives who exert their best efforts to enact their policy priorities into law by voting for their re-election. They can vote out of office those who have not exerted their best efforts.
For a diagram of the Interactive Voter Choice System, click here.
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