In my view, America was intended to be self-governed. It was designed to give people power, which they’d wield through their representatives. But it wasn’t adequately designed, so parties quickly formed.

Politics is all made-up, a make-believe game we believe

There’s no such thing as politics. Politics isn’t a “thing”. Politics is made up of a huge set of societal conventions and rules about it plus the vast pattern of people’s political behaviors. It’s very complex. And it’s all made-up. Invented. It’s completely up to us.

Our rules and conventions help us build certain structures- patterns of behavior that we’ve named. Some of these are parties, elections, electoral votes, districts, Congress, candidate, incumbent, donation, budget, lobbyist, campaign manager, etc. After naming them, all these fuzzy behavioral patterns become “things” to us.

Support Structures

Let’s define “structure of support” as something we’ve invented that helps reinforce certain behavior patterns of society. We humans create words for certain patterns of behavior. These words of structures, things, that support behaviors. Consider all the political words in the paragraph above to be structures of support.

For instance, because we invented “campaign manager” and it’s in common usage, you can now look this up on LinkedIn or Monster.com and find jobs related to it, or recruit for such jobs.

Similarly, an “election” is a structure of support for voting. It’s on (or before) a certain election day. People assemble voting booths and hang up signs. We send everyone a sample ballot and a voting guide. There’s another “structure of support” called a “ballot”.

We can invent new custom whenever we want

We can change our customs and invent new ones whenever we want. In 1877 someone in England invented voting by mail. Today, elections are often a range of dates and you can send in a ballot early, by mail. In 1998, voters in Oregon passed an initiative requiring that all elections be conducted by mail. But some people are very resistant to change. 12 states still insist you give a reason for voting by mail, while 3 states only have by-mail voting.

Similarly, we have “plurality voting” where you vote for a single candidate. You might favor a third-party candidate. But if you vote for him or her, the major party candidate you prefer might lose. Plurality voting system helps keep us locked into not giving third parties a chance.

America intended to have representation and some accountability

There’s nothing in our rules and conventions that stop Congress from being accountable to people. In fact, some accountability to people was intended in the American system. The House of Representatives was designed to represent citizens. “No taxation without representation!”

And yet, our system doesn’t really support true representation, nor accountability. The main part of representation is knowing what people want. Most Americans aren’t involved in politics because being involved seems to make no difference. Many Americans don’t keep informed. Many would care, but caring about politics is frustrating, so many of us become apathetic. The only way we have of knowing what people want is using polling, but polling uninformed and apathetic citizens is expensive and pretty worthless.

The main part of accountability is reporting, which America lacks

And the main part of accountability is reporting. But currently, there’s no way a member of Congress can report to citizens on the issues they care about.

PeopleCount.org proposes to fix these problems by creating a system that empowers and rewards citizens so we can care and be rewarded for being informed. And it gives our politicians a way to report to us on the issues we care about.

There’s more, but this is enough to start. Please add your email address to our mailing list so we can invite you to the site when we go live.