A user told me:

The How it Works page was a long block of almost solid text;  It’s doubtful that many people read it.

Making a video (or animation) is on my to-do list.  Care to help?  (Note: It was rewritten in October, 2015)

It’s pretty simple, though, if you look at the real problems in politics:

• We can’t effectively say what we want, politically, so we’re locked out of politics, frustrated and resigned.
• We don’t know what we, collectively want, so we don’t know what our officials are accountable for.
• Our officials don’t know, so they can’t confidently deliver solutions- they hide behind parties, argue philosophy. Stuck in gridlock, they pander to wealthy interests.
• They can’t report to us, so they can’t BE accountable.
• We have little choice in elections because they’re so expensive, so few people can run, so we have little choice.  Few choices means we can’t choose someone a bit better, we can’t hold our representatives accountable.

The solution is for us to vote on issues, so we and our officials can know what we want. They’ll even be able to mine the data for great compromises.

They will file simple, issue-targeted reports and summaries. You’ll be able to log into your account and see what new reports have been filed. You can scan them, or drill down.  Or maybe you’ll look for them once a year and just scan the summaries.

And challengers can use the same system to also report to us, both about what they would do, as well as about the incumbent’s performance.  Third parties will even come out with score cards and grades.  Knowing what we want, it’ll be easier to see how good a job our officials are doing.

That’s it, at a high level. Of course there are a LOT more details to cover, but that’s how it’ll work.

When I have conversations with people, most people launch into their own complex analysis of “what the real problems are.”  I’m happy to have those conversations, but they don’t make for a short answer.

Later, I added more about how PeopleCount works in four follow-on articles