Would American democracy work if everyone were educated about political matters? Could they then all vote equally and intelligently?

Probably not. There are more forces messing up our democracy than just being educated.

Why does democracy not work?  Money.

As the wealthy have cornered more and more of the country’s wealth, they’ve had more and more money to spend on politics. Partly, they spend it on elections. 91% of the time, the better financed candidate wins.

It’s not just that they’re influencing elections for political leanings, either. Last year, a Princeton study found the US to be an oligarchy, run by and for the wealthy elite, not a democracy. Their influence is buying them legislation that benefits them.

The more concentrated the power, such as in a committee or in a lone, powerful “speaker of the house”, the easier it is to corrupt. And though anti-corruption legislation was introduced in 2012 and a survey says 97% of voters support it, it hasn’t come to a vote.

Strong parties stop democracy from working

A large part of our problem is that we have a two-party system that no longer represents voters. A recent poll found that 44% of voters identified as independent, while 45% identified themselves and Democratic (29%) or Republican (26%). While most of those independents said they lean one way or another, they still weren’t well-represented enough by the parties to identify with them.

It might be that most of those independents are centrist on a few issues. That would mean congress might be 70-30 on that issue. But with Congress split roughly 50-50 between the parties, they have no ability to influence issues.

This article lists ten ways in which parties control your vote. Their enormous power in elections keeps other parties out of the running. We saw this graphically a few months ago when the Democratic Party changed its rules at the last minute to keep Lawrence Lessig out of their debate. The party faithfuls want to only let mainstream Democrats be heard.

Another way the parties stop democracy from working is with congressional gridlock. The parties have, over the years, become more extreme. Conservatives have left the Democratic party to join the Republicans, and liberal Republicans have joined the Democratic party. This leaves the two parties locked in philosophical disputes on many issues.

We’ll continue reasons about why our Democracy doesn’t work in the next article.

Donald Trump appears to be a liar, says this Washington Post article. Starting with, he’s not worth $10 billion. He says he’s not prejudiced, but he has a long history of using racial stereotypes as well as prejudice. He says he’s self-funding his campaign, but most come from others, some of his funds are loans, and his biggest expenses pay his own businesses. And he has fabricated several of the big stories that he has used in his campaign, such as the thousands of Muslim cheering on 9/11. Some people tell me that Trump is just too narcissistic to know he’s lying. He was once worth $10 billion, he started out self-funding his campaign and he’s often not prejudiced.

Still, a lie is a lie, and instead of apologizing for them he repeats them. It doesn’t bode well for his potential presidency. Bush’s lies ended up destabilizing the Middle East, caused traumas to millions of lives, and cost us trillions of dollars.

Is Hillary Clinton any better about lies? Clearly she lied about the Bengazi emails. And again, she keeps white-washing them instead of saying they were a mistake. She lied publicly about the reason for the Benghazi attacks, but these seemed to be an intentional strategy generated by the administration. Perhaps it was done to lessen the chance that a flood of radical moslems would join the fight- but the culture of allowing lies for “national security” doesn’t allow us to know.

This article says that China lies about the basic promises made to Britain about Hong Kong, that it wouldn’t send police.

Those abducted include five men connected with a Hong Kong publisher that was working on a tell-all biography of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Abductions apparently took place in Hong Kong, though China had promised Britain it would not send police there, and Thailand, a neighboring and (ostensibly) sovereign nation. One missing man held a Swedish passport, another a British passport, but those proved no deterrent either.

And here’s an article that says the CIA deceives it’s own employees.

The common link in all these is the belief that the end justifies the means. Often, lying works. But it has its costs and, as we saw with Bush’s lies, the costs can be huge. And their lies add to the opposition Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton face, adding huge costs to their billion-dollar campaigns.

Even if our political system can withstand all the lies, it shouldn’t be built on lies. And currently it is.

The lie it’s built on is that the necessary political accountability we need can happen in elections. It’s a lie. And it allows all sorts of other lies. Since we don’t have a system with which we can truly hold politicians accountable, they can lie and not be held accountable for them.

We justify this lie by wanting America to be good, wanting to preserve the myth that our founders did a good job. America being good is the ends. We pretend it justifies lying about it.

The truth is that good and bad are relative. America was great in the beginning. Then it was bad, people lacked fundamental rights. Then it was good after the bill of rights was added. Then it was bad and the next amendment was added.

Is America really good or bad? No. Good and bad are relative to what we want. Rather than worry about judging America, let’s just concentrate on solving problems and improving our lives and our future.

Solving the problem of the influence of money in politics is a lofty goal. It’s the purpose of MayDay.us. It’s a key effort of Public Citizen and Democracy Matters. The status quo solutions for the problem are to limit campaign financing by the wealthy and to support campaign financing by the masses.

What’s the problem? One way of looking at it is that money decides elections, and elections are supposed to be decided by voters. Another way is by analyzing public policy in America, and seeing that America is much more of an oligarchy than a democracy.

The Cato Institute makes some good points in its blog about why campaign finance reform never works:

…every House incumbent who spent less than $500,000 won compared with only 3% of challengers who spent that little. However challengers who spent between $500,000 and $1 million won 40% of the time while challengers who spent more than $1 million won five of six races.

In an election, the incumbent has the advantage. He or she has name recognition and a large pre-existing contact list. The incumbent has a head start. They’re arguing that if you limit campaign financing, it’ll just help incumbents preserve their lead.

This isn’t completely true, though. It’s true if you limit campaign costs, the amount a campaign can spend. But it’s not true if you limit campaign contributions from individuals, or increase the number of donations from small donors.

If you limit the size of campaign contributions, the more popular campaign can amass more funds and win. This is why Represent.us (click on “A Real Solution to Corruption” on this page) proposes to give “voters an annual $100 tax rebate to be spent supporting the candidate or party of their choice”. Rather than limit campaign costs, they propose to empower voters. This might work. Note that it pumps billions of dollars into politics.

It’s complicated, though. If you limit campaign contributions, the wealthy can still contribute to PACs which could create their own organizations that go door-to-door as well as continue to pump out ads.

So we need to solve the problem of money in politics.

Consider, though, the analogy with the Drug War. Many of these solutions propose to limit the inflow of money into politics, just like the drug war tries to limit drugs into America.

As long as candidates need money and money wins elections, this war will continue.

Yes, if Congress were ethical, it would adopt these solutions. But these ethics are difficult because to many of them, the ends justify the means. Each one believes the country is served by he or she winning. For most, changing the system like this just adds risk to their ability to stay in power.

The Drug War hasn’t worked. In the next post, we’ll see a solution, both to America’s drug problems as well as to the corrupting influence of money in elections.

In the last post we saw the current solutions for the problem of money in politics – reducing the amount that wealthy people can contribute to campaigns, and increasing the amount the masses contribute, through a tax rebate.

Plus we saw an analogy to the Drug War. These solutions are like trying to limit the supply of drugs, or also supplying legal drugs. Neither of these solve the drug problem.

A solution to drug addiction points to a solution for money in politics

Watch this TED talk to see the real solution to America’s drug problem. People take drugs because they lead disconnected, unhealthy lives. Portugal took three steps to effectively solve most of its drug problems. It decriminalized drug use. It eliminated its drug war and used that money to help addicts reconnect into society and lead healthy lives. They began 15 years ago. It worked.

To rephrase what they did- by helping addicts reconnect into society, they no longer needed drugs. Most addicts aren’t addicted to drugs, per se, they, like most of us, are addicted to connection, and when that’s lost, drugs help them cope.

Taking this back to the influence of money in politics, the problem isn’t the supply of money, the problem is that political campaigns need money. But money isn’t what they want! What they want is connection to voters. Money provides that poorly, just like drugs are a poor substitute for human connections, but it’s something.

Campaigns need money because it’s hard to communicate with people. Campaigns spend most of their money on ads and postcards, plus on staff to manage all the outreach. Plus they spend money on local polling, to know what people want.

The solution, then, is to provide a low-cost way for politicians to connect with people.

The solution: Provide a low-cost way for politicians to connect with people.

This is exactly the solution that PeopleCount is building.

First, people vote on issues and say which issues they want reports on. This involves them in the issues and discovers the areas where they’ll listen. Plus by seeing the results, citizens can set their expectations about what they want and what’s possible. So are solution primes citizens to engage in communication with their politicians.

Second, politicians see the demand for reports, and they report. They communicate with each citizen on the issues that are important to him or her. Plus, the citizen grades the issue. They grade the report on how well the politician is doing his/her job on that issue.

Let’s try both

Campaign finance reform and tax rebates for politics are fine with me. But these require using out dysfunctional, money-controlled system to fix itself. We’ve tried these for years.

So let’s try a new solution. Try PeopleCount.org.

Note that many people want the status quo solutions. On PeopleCount.org, you’ll see that you can vote for those! In fact, I’ll bet that if enough people vote for these on PeopleCount.org, we can enact some of this legislation even before the coming 2016 election.

Let’s give it a try. Add your name to our mailing list, or vote on issues on the prototype site.

In Joshua Tauberer mentions GovTrack.us in his article in medium about how democracy can’t be fixed, and asks if it was a good idea. Let’s analyze it.

Before we analyze, let’s make some categories. Note that I’m inventing this- there’s probably a field of study of this that has better, and standard, definitions.

1. Idea – a bunch of thoughts that seem significant
2. Coherent Idea – the logic of the idea is complete
3. Sound Idea – A complete idea whose logic is sound, meaning it’s all true.
4. Solution – a product design that implements a sound idea in a way that is rewarding and valuable to the users.
5. Viable solution – a solution that can be cost-effectively marketed
6. Business – a viable solution that will bring in revenues greater than costs.

Let’s look at what he says:

I thought I was building an accountability tool. If only the American public had more information they could head-off failures in government by voting more effectively in elections.

The Logic

Let’s look at the logic first by listing the assertions:

1.0 With more information voters could vote more effectively
2.0 A site that gave voters information would be an accountability tool.
3.0 Voting more effectively would decrease failures in government.

The Complete Idea

This is an idea. Let’s make it a complete idea, by revealing hidden assumptions.

0.1 Voters would use a site that gave them useful information
0.2 Voters would find a site that gave them useful information
0.3 How representatives vote and information about legislation is useful for voters
1.0 With more (useful) information voters could vote more effectively
1.1 Voting provides accountability
2.0 A site that gave voters information would be an accountability tool.
3.0 Voting more effectively would decrease failures in government.

Is the Idea Sound?

Logic is sound basically if it’s true. Now I’ll mark up the statements with my opinion of soundness.

0.1 Voters would use a site that gave them useful information – Some would
0.2 Voters would find a site that gave them useful information – Few would
0.3 How reps vote and information about legislation is useful for voters – Mostly False
– Legislation is complex and one doesn’t know why a rep voted a certain way.
1.0 With more (useful) information voters could vote more effectively – Mostly False
– There’s so little choice in elections, more information often makes no difference
– The site tells nothing about challengers.
1.1 Voting provides accountability – False, it provides a little bit of accountability
2.0 A site that gave voters information would be an accountability tool – False
– It wouldn’t be a significant increase in accountability
   3.0 Voting more effectively would decrease failures in government. – Moot
– Given that the site wouldn’t help people vote effectively, the truth of this
doesn’t really matter.

Verdict- Is the Idea Good? No

GovTrack.us is a wonderful resource. But for the problem of Congress not being accountable to the public, it’s neither a good idea nor a solution.

I trust that Joshua put better thinking into GovTrack’s design than he listed in that paragraph. But with his long list of failed projects, perhaps incomplete problem-solving has been one of his problems. And he would still need to figure out how it could be effectively marketed and pay for its operations.

Our political system isn’t injured. It’s been decaying for the last 150 years due to forces that our founders never envisioned. It was never designed to handle political parties.

The founders were against political parties, but again, did nothing to stop them.

America’s Founded on: No Rights, No Parties

George Washington’s fear of political parties is well documented. He was concerned they’d be divisive and lust for power. Yet there was nothing in the Constitution, nothing in the design of the country to handle political parties. There are no checks and balances on them.

In the Federalist Paper Number 10, James Madison wrote about how to guard against factions. His hope was that by making the U.S. a federation of states, it would be able to resist the tendency for small groups to form factions. But it was just a hope.

Parties formed quickly. They dominate American politics

Parties arose quickly and dominated American politics since the early 1790’s. They formed over a few central issues.

In the first 30 years, one side wanted a strong federal government, close ties to Britain, a centralized banking system, and close links to men of wealth. The next 3 decades, one party favored the Presidency and building up industry. The other favored Congress and forming a US bank.

From 1854 to the 1890’s, the Republicans were against slavery and for “national banks, railroads, high tariffs, homesteads and aid to land grant colleges.” During this time, the parties became large voting blocks, aligning Americans with them.

You can read the Wikipedia article above to see the rest of the details. The point is- they formed naturally and quickly, despite being disliked by the founders.

What’s bad about parties

Parties concentrate power and can be corrupted. They are hierarchical institutions, controlled at the top by a few people. Their focus can easily narrow. Being dependent on budgets, they are subject to corruption. They are easily dominated by special interests.

Parties are bad in that they split up important issues. They do this to oppose each other and gain supporters. Rather than allowing a rich conversation in the media showing many sides of issues, the parties make it seem like there are only two sides. Other opinions within the party are silenced and not represented, so the party can focus on “talking points.”

Parties are bad in that they split up America. Republicans could criticize Democrats for wanting socialist health care. Or for involving the government in social security. Instead, they simply call them socialists and equate the party with “tax-and-spend.” Many Democrats simply call Republicans idiots.

There’s more about the parties in the next post.

I read an an article criticizing start-up conferences. It said they are completely dominated by men. There was even an all-male panel talking about women in start-ups!

This article will be about sex bias. We ALL have biases based on sex. I’ll relate it to political biases at the end.

I read an article about how companies led by women do better. Start-ups led by women do better as well. And this article says, “female-led startups, in general, bring in higher revenue and are profitable more quickly.” How can this be?

It might not be that women are better than men. There are so few women in startups that maybe the majority of these high-performing ones are the top of the top. On the other hand, maybe they are on average better. I don’t know…

I do know I’m biased. In my biased view: Men tend to focus in on things. Women tend to be more able to see relationships. I imagine if you’re more conscious about relationships, you’re more apt to see things from others’ points of view, giving you a broader and more balanced perspective. Maybe men, seeing fewer points of view, tend to make more mistakes.

In my biased view, women also have stronger emotional reactions than men. And they’re also aware of them, so they are more experienced at controlling them at work. Men with emotional reactions are more likely to not even realize they’re excited or impatient or defensive, and will more easily let their emotions dominate their behavior and the room. And we’re expecting men not to be emotional, so we listen to men’s emotions like they’re warranted, not just some man being emotional.

This article says: “…male and female leaders are liked equally when behaving participatively… But when acting authoritatively, women leaders are disliked much more than men.” It’s point is that we expect men to be authoritative, so we put up with it. It’s normal to us. But when women do it, it’s weird, so we tend to react negatively. Being authoritative is something leaders do. Our cultural habituation makes us disapprove of women when they act like leaders. We’re just sexist.

Another part of my bias is that women seem to have more empathy. They seem to pick up more on what’s going on with others. I wonder if this could mean that when dealing with men and women, they tend to hear the person more loudly, as opposed to the cultural messages from their gender. Maybe women tend to be a bit less biased.

When I remember about my biases, I usually stop and look for them. I often find sexist thoughts that have creeped in to color my world. That’s good, either enabling me to let them go, or at least discount them.

It’s similar to how PeopleCount intends to handle political bias. Admit it, look for it, and then compensate for it. We can ask people with a wide variety of viewpoints for feedback. Admitting it, we can be accountable for it. Maybe we can even do a weekly report on biases we found and how we addressed or corrected them.

No one’s perfect, even us. But our bread and butter is accountability. So we’ll start with being accountable for handling our bias.

I’ve been a problem solver for a long time. Often, it’s hard work. I have had to think things I’ve never thought before, explore territory that seems unfamiliar and for which there’s no map, and sift through myriad contexts, looking for new clues and insights.

A VC recently told me, in an email, that I was falling into a common pattern of startup founders, assuming others were stupid, thinking they hadn’t tried what I was proposing. So I talked again to the founder he had invested in. He hadn’t done the work that needed to be done, real marketing.

And then I emailed the VC again. Instead of thinking about what I said, he stuck to his principles and justified the founder’s actions, “he’s doing what he can afford to do.”

The VC was also falling into a common pattern, assuming the thinking he had done and the choosing of his principles was enough.

Success is great. But in our efforts to transform our government, we don’t have real success. Various people have won a few battles, and they let that lull them into a false sense that winning is possible. Winning IS possible, but it’s not going to deliver the results we want. It’ll just move us a little further down the path of winning.

What we need is a level of thinking beyond trying to tweak the system. And in my view, that’s going to take a level of thinking beyond how we invest in startups as well. The hands-off approach doesn’t work in the political space. Letting a few tiny teams tackle these huge problems is not sufficient.

It also doesn’t pay to throw money a random solution and hope it works, like AmericansElect did in 2012, and then give up. We need a solution and resources to come together with a team committed to really solve the problem, not just try something new.

Our democracy is broken because we limit ourselves to old patterns of thinking, rather than building a system with true political accountability.

Let’s do what it takes. Start by supporting us. But it’s just a start. We need you to actually take responsibility for what we’re doing as well. Engage with these blogs. Invite your friends to read them and get on our mailing list.

Perhaps when we get to the next stage and have a working system, we can continue to explore, at a crowd-sourcing level, how to improve PeopleCount.org. Perhaps the solution is not just America participating in true political accountability for Congress and the Presidency. Perhaps the real solution is America participating in true accountability for PeopleCount.org. Either way, please support us.

This is the last article in our series on polling. Polls have become a quintessential example of “inside the box” thinking. We know how to do them, so we depend on them instead of inventing something better.

If we didn’t have polling, reporters would have to actually ask many people what they think about an issue. In the article criticizing their questions, we saw that the way simple questions on nuclear power were asked, the government thinks they know what people want. But people were never polled about safer kinds of nuclear plants. Nor were people asked about reactors that can consume the dangerous radioactive waste from today’s light water reactors.

Due to their poor design and widespread use, polls actually prevent society from being better informed and making good decisions.

If reporters had to actually ask people instead of consulting polls, they would ask a wider variety of questions. They’d certainly run into some people who knew about alternatives.

By taking a limited method of finding out information and standardizing it, we’ve limited ourselves to what it can provide us. Worse, by touting its solid mathematical foundation, we’ve put it into a category of sacredness that protects us from questioning its limits.

There have been efforts to invent something better, but they’re not widespread. A few companies are analyzing what people post on different types of social media to try to figure out what we want. Others are trying to bring down the cost of polling by popping up questions at the bottom of articles, or letting you tweet an answer.

But as a society, our mythology says surveys tell us valuable information. The problems with polling are not part of popular culture.

We rely on polls to know ourselves as a society. But polls convey little information and they’re often inaccurate. So we try to change society without really knowing the society we’re trying to change. It makes sense that our efforts to change have so little success.

Join PeopleCount’s effort to create a new foundation for political communication. Add your email address to our announcement list.

I’m pretty honest. But today I had an encounter with dishonesty and instant karma.

I give blood as often as I can. Fewer people are donating these days, and often they don’t have enough blood. I used to go to the blood bank a few blocks from my home, but on Mondays the one 3 miles away gives out a free movie ticket, so I went there last time. So today I went again.

I signed the register and the guy behind the desk said he’d be right with me. The woman next to him stood up and went somewhere. A few minutes later, she came back and handed me my movie ticket. Then the guy went over to one of the screens and set it up for me to answer the questions about my health. I answered the questions and then sat quietly and did some work on my computer- there were two people ahead of me.

Pretty soon I was all alone. Then the guy came over to me and handed me something just as my name was called. I took it and stood up to follow a woman into the private room so she could take my temperature, blood pressure, pulse and hemoglobin (iron) count. As I stood, I realized he had given me a second movie ticket! I almost said something, but I just put it in my belly pack with the other one and followed the woman, wondering if I should say anything.

The Stanford Blood Center gives points for donating. I’ve asked them many times to let us buy movie tickets with our points instead of the paraphernalia in their catalog, but to no avail. Finally I started coming to this other office, burning a bit more gas just for the free ticket. Should I say something and give back the extra ticket?

The nurse administered the tests and then left me alone to sign the final form. I signed, left the room and she pointed to an empty blood-drawing chair and instructed me toward it. A guy came over, introduced himself as Chris, and began talking to me and prepping my right arm. He finished and inserted the needle, almost painlessly. I was in good hands. He noticed a clamp (looked like a scissor) was tucked under my wrist, so moved it to the side. As he withdrew his hand, his finger, in the latex glove, brushed the blood tube. Rubber against rubber has a lot of friction. The needle was yanked out of my vein and blood spurted! He quickly grabbed a piece of gauze and pressed it against my vein. A coworker saw the mess and came over to help.

It took about five minutes for the 2 of them to clean everything up and bandage my arm. There was no harm done- and only about a teaspoon of blood had been spilled, but it had spurted about 4 feet and had to be cleaned up. I told Chris not to worry about it, but he did. He said it was all his fault. I suggested he was just working out a bit of karma, but it didn’t assuage his guilt. I said, “Would it help if I scolded you?”  He said, “No. Thanks for offering, but I’m hardest on myself.”  And then my brain thought, “maybe it’s my karma…”

And then it hit me- it could be an instant-karma reaction to keeping the second movie ticket! I don’t believe in karma, but I felt embarrassed. And then my brain thought, “Maybe they gave you two so you could take some responsibility for the mishap and ease his guilt.” I felt the embarrassment rising again.

“Chris,” I said, “would you like to hear an interpretation of it that makes it my karma?” He furrowed his brow, then came over. I told him about the 2 movie tickets. But no, he wouldn’t have it. I was surprised- he was a bit amused, but wasn’t going to share the blame.

Finally the needle was in my other arm and the bag was filling. A short while later, Chris came over and gave me an envelope. I could see a little bit through the envelope- another movie ticket! He knew I already had one too many, and yet he gave me another! So now I was fated to go home with three.

At home, I opened the envelope. I was wrong- there were two inside! Maybe I’ll save the gas next time…