What amount of effort is needed for your political stand to count?

There are about 330 million people in the US, about 250 million adults.  If this were a country of, by and for the people, or even just for the people, then each of us has about 4 billionths of a say in the direction of America.  Only about half vote, so those of us who vote each has about 8 billionths of a say.

When you take a stand, or want to express a political opinion, how much effort should be required, how much time and expense should be required for you to express it?

Currently, the effort is large.  Say you want to end whaling.  Perhaps composing an email to your senator or representative takes about 4 minutes (for many of us, it takes much longer.)  Find their website and mailing it takes a couple of minutes.  If you bookmark these in your browser, it might take just a minute each.  So in 7 minutes, you could send 3 emails.  Or, you could take 9-12 minutes and call each office, if you can take time off work during the day and have a cell phone with their numbers in your contact list, and supposedly phone calls rank higher than emails.  But let’s say that’s 7 minutes per opinion.

But wait, how long does that opinion last?  How long does your representative keep this week’s stats?  Do you have to call every week?  Do you have to wait till this issue comes up for a vote (which could be forever)?  When I try to contact a congressperson in a committee, if I’m not in their district often their website prevents me from sending…

So maybe I need to spend that 7 (or more) minutes every 2 weeks, 26 times a year, so it takes about 3 hours…  Or maybe 2 hours if I’m organized and don’t have to compose the message each time…  On 50 issues, that’s two and a half work-weeks a year.

That’s why I want us to have a simple place to register our opinions, a vote that counts every day.  A vote that I can change at any time, so my votes always represent what I want.  And our votes represent what we want.  It’ll take 10-15 minutes a week to be expressed on all the issues you care about.

Sure, I could give $10 to Greenpeace.  But our government and other governments discount Greenpeace because, though it has 3-5 million members, if at least half of those members are US, that’s only 1-4% of our population.  I don’t want to even try to do the math to figure out how much you have to give them so the strength of their voice influences our government at addition 8 billionths…  Plus Greenpeace says a lot of things, so only a fraction of your money will go to ending whaling.

Before I took a hard look at what’s possible in politics, I wasn’t involved because my participation didn’t seem to make a difference.  After taking a hard look, I conclude my participation makes little difference and whatever difference it makes can’t be known. There’s no accountability in politics and our opinions can’t be reliably expressed.

Please support us building an accountability system.