I often find myself needing to tell people what PeopleCount is about. Let me take a fresh stab at it. PeopleCount is about accountability in politics, starting with the U.S. Congress.

PeopleCount arose from a fresh look at our problems with Congressional politics

I’m a professional problem solver. A few years ago, I took a fresh look at Congress and Congressional politics. After months of analysis, I found the root problem. From my view, politicians aren’t accountable to citizens.

Why are politicians not accountable to people?

Accountability is a relationship where the 2 parties communicate and act in ways that produce the accountability. If representatives were accountable to citizens, they’d be accountable all the time, not just in elections.

Our desires would steer our representatives. Knowing ourselves what we all want, we would have expectations of what they’d do. We’d tell them which issues are important to us — different issues for different people— and they’d report to us and we’d evaluate their reports on how well they’re doing their job representing us. The least of it, at the end, would be elections. And to guide us, we’d use our collective evaluations.

Simply put, our political process doesn’t work because we lack the relationship of accountability with our elected officials.

It’s about accountability- rich communication at low cost

This involves a lot of communication, both among ourselves and between us and our politicians. We vote on issues and see the results for our districts, states and the country, as would our representatives. We’d be telling them which issues we want reports on, and they’d report, say monthly. So we’d get a short report telling what they’ve done and what they’re planning on each issue we’re interested in. And we’d give it a grade, telling them we’ve read it and giving them feedback about what we think.

This would be rich communication, especially compared with the sound bytes we get in ads and post-cards. These reports might be viewable as written, audio or video, to suit the voter.

And it would be at a low price. Challengers could use it as well as incumbents. When most people are using the site, effective campaigns could be waged for a tenth of the current price.

Many benefits would arise

This could solve the party-divisiveness issue. Instead of having to adopt a party line, a candidate could appeal to centrists on issues. And if citizens are divided, the candidate could even propose compromises and see if people accept them. Or the candidate could say there’s no good solution yet, and propose that nothing be done for now or propose a stop-gap measure to ameliorate the worst of a problem.

Instead of people having to line up for one party or another, people could easily and quickly line up on each issue. In fact, candidates could give up their parties and simply represent the voters.

Coming soon

This is the solution I’m building. It’s been difficult building this alone. But it’s almost ready to launch. It’s now only two month before the election. I hope to launch a beta before the election, but it won’t be publicly available till after.

You’re welcome to add your email address to our announcement list and share it with your friends. A few dollars of donation would help a lot, too.

PS: If you want to read more, try this article, about how political accountability is in our blind spot.