SUPERDEMOCRACY
by Tim Stryker
From: Telecomputing Mag.Nov. 1990
Online technology offers the promise of a fundamentally new form of government: a government truly of the people, by the people, for the people.
The form of government under which we now live is technically known as a representative democracy. This means that we the people do not directly act as the government... we democratically elect representatives who act on our behalf to create laws, enforce them, and resolve disputes. These three functions correspond to the hallowed “separation of powers” everyone knows from grade school: the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government.
The shortcomings of this system are many. It is generally acknowledged that although it is the best system yet developed for government on a large scale (and I for one agree), it fails in several key respects, among them:
1. Vulnerability to special interests. Any economic group, such as real estate developers or tobacco companies, has a much higher stake in the passage of legislation favorable to the group than the average citizen has in its defeat. The proposal to re-zone a property outside a five-mile radius from your house, for example, is something that you personally can only get incensed about in the abstract, whereas the real estate agents, lawyers, and developers involved stand to make or lose millions of dollars on the outcome. Therefore they have an enormously higher incentive than you do to put pressure on the city or county commisioners making the decision.
2. Domination by busybodies. Politics tends to take into account to a disproportionate extent the opinions of those with nothing better to do, and single-issue constituencies. The mechanisms for candidate identification, conducting public hearings, jury selection and so forth are all so cumbersome and time-consuming that the average citizen has little motivation to participate. The result is often that the outputs of these processes suffer from the Milquetoast Effect. In particular, the only candidates presented to the general public for voting are those that have not been winnowed out by offending a single one of a host of highly vocal sub-minorities.
3. Getting involved is too much work for the average person. You are unusual if you even know the names of your representatives to the U.S. Congress, much less the names of your state congresspersons, much much less the qualifications of each of the hordes of local judges you may be asked to vote on every few years. The reason is that, although you know exactly how you feel about each specific issue, it would take vast research for you to find out how each candidate feels or has voted on each of the issues important to you, and to form, for each post, a weighted probability of the likelihood that each candidate will perform as you wish them to. (On top of this, if you register to vote, you are penalized with jury duty!) The result is widespread voter “apathy”, especially at the state and local levels. This isn’t really a lack of caring, it’s just a sense among the populace that voting as it stands is too indirect and requires research on each individual’s part far out of proportion to the benefit that they will individually derive from it.
4. Corruption. This is just a more extreme form of vulnerability to special interests. The incentive to influence legislation or enforcement is often high enough that a lobby will succeed in “stocking” elective posts with its own hirelings. The amount of money needed for a campaign, especially lately, is huge, and it can only be expected that a successful candidate will look more favorably on the concerns of his or her big contributors. There is a continuum of possibilities between this state of affairs and outright payoffs for votes or favors. All of this flies in the face of the ideal that elected officials and representatives are supposed to act in the best interests of the community that elected them, as a whole.
5. Capriciousness of justice. This concern applies mainly to the judicial branch of government. The fact that diverse individuals are elected or appointed to positions of coequal power means that a case may be decided very differently, depending on which particular judge you happen to get. The use of juries for the more serious cases is an attempt in the right direction, but an awful lot still depends on the particular jury, judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney you happen to wind up with.
6. Horse trading and smoke-filled rooms. So much of the actual mechanics of government takes place outside public knowledge or control that a lot of the decisions made have nothing to do with what is best for the community at large, but only what is best for the personal agendas of the participants. The fact that the participants are subject to removal from office at the next election keeps them from getting too outrageously flagrant, but the continuous on-going exchange of favors among lawmakers in service of their personal ambitions does not exactly constitute government of the people, by the people, for the people.
There Must Be A Better Way
Suppose that society could decide every issue by simple majority vote. This tends to work well on a small scale. For example, in the city-states of ancient Greece, the entire populace got together from time to time and enacted the “will of the people” into law, with no man’s voice given any more authority than any other. Another example would be the “town meetings” of early New England, at which the townspeople got together and formulated the laws by which they regulated themselves. Today, small non-governmental organizations such as professional societies often decide policy by direct vote of the members.
The reason this works well (on a small scale) is that it eliminates the role of the “representative”. You no longer have a fallible human being, with his or her own agenda, ambitions, and preconceptions acting on behalf of the group. The group votes directly on the issues before it, not on a personality or a suit.
The reasons this hasn’t worked before on a larger scale are mostly practical. The entire populace cannot physically gather in continuous session, deciding every detail of policy and law... nothing else in the world would get done!
What you *could* have, though, is a continuous networked hierarchy of online referenda, open to all. The idea would be to create an environment in which any citizen is free to propose new laws, amend old ones, and to vote or contribute to ongoing discussions on proposals or amendments introduced by others at any time. I call this “Superdemocracy”.
Superdemocracy would be continuous in the sense that anyone could tap into the system any time, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It would be networked in the sense that anything posted about any issue, anywhere in the system, would be accessible to anyone else. It would be a hierarchy in the sense that each citizen could access his or her own local, county, statewide, or national referenda through a single mechanism: a “tree” of nodes able to collate discussion and voting at all appropriate levels.
The sorts of things that people could vote on includes everything currently decided by our legislative and judicial branches, city councils, policy-forming bodies in the executive branch, and so on. The implementational portion of each of these branches would be retained, and all aspects of national life requiring instant decisions would continue to operate under the control of executive branch personnel. The military would retain full autonomy under civilian oversight, just as it does now, and there would still be a President, a Cabinet, police forces, an FBI and a CIA, and so on. But the broad, strategic decision-making power would be vested in the people directly: the making of new laws, resolutions, and policies, the amendment or repeal of old ones, the selection of the necessary executive personnel, and the resolution of conflicts and disagreements. Let’s call these things, in general, “measures”. Some key provisions of Superdemocracy would be:
1. Constitutional priority. All measures passed would still be subject to a consistency test against a statement of underlying principles. The statement of underlying principles would require much broader levels of support to modify or overturn. This would help to keep us from wildly gyrating about the legal landscape as current events shape public opinion.
2. Instant delegation and revocation of proxy powers. Each citizen would have the option to delegate his or her voting powers to other people (their “representatives”, if you will) in various ways, and to override or revoke these powers at any time. This would provide for a healthy proportion of the public’s voting power to be present in even the smallest decisions of government, without paralyzing the country in an orgy of continuous individual voting. The flexibility of these proxy powers would give each citizen the ability to say to a representative, “I trust your judgement, overall, on matters within a given area that I personally don’t have enough interest in to bother with the details; however I reserve the right to change my mind about you at any time or to override your judgement on occasions when my opinion happens to differ from yours.”
3. Minimum quorum requirements on every measure. By requiring a minimum proportion of the overall voting power available to be active in each vote, we help ensure that happenstantial distortion of the people’s will, due to low participation in a low-profile issue, will not occur. If quorum requirements are not met in a given vote, it means that not enough people (or their proxies) feel strongly enough about it one way or the other to be worth their time.
4. Minimum debate-time requirements on every measure. After a measure reaches quorum, there needs to be sufficient time, around 30 days or so, for everyone to talk it over and think about it before finalizing the vote. Each person could continue to update his or her vote status throughout this period, and only the tally of votes at the end of this period would be decisive.
5. Minimum hold-time requirements on every measure. Further protection against wild gyrations about the legal landscape can be provided by establishing a minimum time period, after a measure is passed, before it can take effect. This would be on the order of 30 days. During this time, opponents of the measure could try to repeal it or amend it, which, if successful, would yield another 30-day period for the population to be really sure that *this* is what it wants, and so on. Any oscillations would quickly die down, and the true “will of the people” would then take effect.
Several practical considerations arise. Everyone would have to have access to a communications link and the knowledge of how to use it, just as now everyone must have eyes, hands, and a basic ability to read and punch holes in order to vote (special provisions for the handicapped would of course apply). Airtight protection against fraud and invasion of privacy would have to be developed. And, the cost of creating and maintaining this colossal network of computers would be high.
Historic Trends
Technology, strangely enough, has always driven the development of democracy. Think about it. Democracy has only existed when the overall level of affluence in a population permitted a significant number of people to take nose from grindstone long enough to consider the larger issues. During the Dark Ages, there were no large-scale democracies, representative or otherwise, because travel over distances of more than a few tens of miles was too arduous to make practical the congregation of representatives from widely separated regions for purposes of timely decision-making. Also, before Gutenberg, communications technology was so poorly developed that the knowledgeability of the average villager about anything outside a ten-mile radius from home was effectively zero.
Our current model of representative democracy derives from conditions in the 1700’s. At that time, the technology of physical transport had reached the point at which it was practical for representatives from communities across the nation to commute to and from a central meeting place. The entire communities themselves couldn’t travel, of course, but at least their elected representatives could. Similarly, the entire community couldn’t sit in on every 2-bit larceny trial, but they could elect a judge to oversee the process for them (or, they could elect a governor who would appoint a judge, etc.).
As technology has improved, so has the demand for wider and more direct participation in the democratic process. As created by our Founding Fathers, it was not possible to vote in most states in the late 1700’s unless you were white, free, male, *and* owned a certain amount of property. The property requirement fell away in the early 1800’s, as technological advancement brought the affluence of the average freeman — and thus his perceived awareness and ability to be informed about political issues — above a certain threshold. The race requirement was theoretically eliminated in 1870 with the Fifteenth Amendment, once the pre-technological abomination of slavery was forever buried... but further technological advancements in communications and education were necessary before the poll tax, which had been used to prevent many blacks from voting, was banned by the Twenty-Fourth Amendment in 1964. Meanwhile, women gained the vote in 1920, after great agitation and improvements in technology sufficient to emancipate them from the continuous servitude of housework.
The particulars of *what* we have been able to vote about has evolved, too. Originally, the public (as restrictively as the term was defined!) was not considered competent to elect the President of the United States directly. It was not even entitled to elect the electors directly! The public elected the members of the State legislatures, among whose duties it was to elect the members of the “Electoral College”, which elected the President.
In this century, a growing tide of “direct democracy” has been sweeping the nation. This movement, an outgrowth of the Populist and Progressive movements around the turn of the century, has empowered citizens in most states with the tools of the “initiative”, the “referendum”, and the “recall”. An “initiative” is a citizen-sponsored piece of legislation; a “referendum” refers a proposed or existing law to voters for their approval or rejection; a “recall” vote is an attempt to remove an elected official from office prematurely.
All developments up to this point, though, have centered around the same cumbersome, bureaucratic methods of vote-gathering that were used in the 1700’s. Voters must first register, months in advance. Then, on the appointed day, tens of thousands of polling places open in every village and city neighborhood. Voters then walk or drive, typically several miles, to their particular polling place, and wait in line while dedicated public servants pore through mountains of paper, checking off names and handing out ballots which are voted upon and then reverently placed in the sacred Ballot Box. It is actually a wonderful thing, and vastly preferable to the despotic and corrupt systems it replaced.
An Example of Operation
Wouldn’t it be incredible, though, if the people’s participation in government were to operate something like this:
You come home from the office after a hard day’s work, kick your shoes off, and, flipping on the tube, decide to take a quick glance at the city’s pending resolutions. You notice that today is the last day to vote on the street-repair proposal, the referendum on funding low-income housing on the north side of town, and the decision whether or not to permit someone named John Hosiger to operate a liquor store downtown. The display shows you the votes that your proxy, Sharon Imeld, will cast for you if you don’t do anything. Sharon’s already fine on the street-repair thing, but she’s way off base on the low-income housing issue, so you override her there. You never heard of John Hosiger so you figure Sharon probably looked into his background for you and you leave that one alone.
You flip over to the “coming-up” screen and find that the next week contains votes on school bus purchases, giving the “Key to the City” to a certain Mark Havrelman, a proposal to re-zone a tract of farmland nearby to commercial, the firemen’s annual contract renewal, and scores of other items. Cosby’s on in 5 minutes, but you feel intrigued by the school bus thing, so you select that for a moment. Up on your screen comes a listing of messages on this topic from neighbors, school administrators, and bus manufacturers. Selecting one of the latter, you are drawn into a discussion of the impact of different transaxle designs on fuel economy. You read several messages containing claims and rebuttals, and you leave a sharply-worded message of your own to one of the bus companies, contesting one of their statements.
Next, you pop out to the statewide level and glance through the issues there: a debate on introducing a new form of Lottery, a proposal to reduce state sales tax, another proposal to increase it, a new regulation on offshore oil platforms, and many more. You’ve already registered your votes on most of these, and your statewide proxy, Irwin Marsh, seems to have the others under control.
Next, you pop over to Trials and note with satisfaction that the 3-time murderer and child molester, Ted Goondy, has been voted into the electric chair. Up for decision statewide today are Blanche Newald, accused of grand larceny, and Abe Newman, 2nd-degree manslaughter. You select Abe’s case and begin poring through the state’s evidence and the defense’s counterpoints. It’s a complex issue, and you decide after a few minutes’ review to make a snap decision. Whoops, the box reminds you, in capital cases a review of at least 3 hours of the evidence is required in order to vote. Cosby’s already started and you don’t have the time, so you figure that wiser minds will prevail on Abe’s case and you pop out to National for a quick look. Under debate are sanctions against Irate, confirmation of the new ambassador to France, funding for fusion research, and a proposal to eliminate the penny, among other things. You happen to feel strongly about fusion research, so you select it and jump into the ongoing discussion.
And ongoing it is! At the national level, with new messages coming in at a rate of thousands every second, it is nothing like your relatively tranquil school bus debate! You select a keyword search on “pellet”, which responds saying that 7,455 messages are on file with that word. You specify an additional keyword of “comparison”, which cuts the number down to 104. Scrolling through these quickly, you see a number of diagrams flash by which you recognize as comparing the pellet-implosion method to the magnetic containment method. Examining one of these closely, you realize that one of your previous assumptions about fusion technology is untrue! You begin a series of hypertext jumps through the database, winding up at last in the quaintly named Library of Congress CD-ROM archives, gleaning more information with which to make your decision.
Finally, sated with information and power, you indicate your vote on the tally-screen and head for bed. You’ve missed Cosby but you’ve gained something immeasurably greater: a sense of control over your own destiny. Maybe tomorrow you’ll write up that proposal for a new school gym you’ve been thinking about, and send it up on the local node... who knows, maybe others have been thinking about it too, and you’ll hit quorum!
Objections
A proposal like this is sure to stir up a hornet’s nest of resistance, if seriously considered. Some of the more likely objections are:
1. The “tyranny of the majority”: the contention that minority rights will be trampled in the mad lust of majority rule. This objection has been applied to democracies throughout history, and is no more valid now than it was before. If anything, the wider the empowerment, the less likely the elite are to be able to force their effete and/or status-quo-oriented ideas upon the rest of us. The lesson of small-scale democracies, and the trend of history, is that the more a given decision can partake of the joint common sense of everyday people, as opposed to their charismatic or power-crazed leaders, the fairer and more equitable the decision is likely to be. 2. Incompetence and/or apathy of the public. This is another hold-over from bygone eras in which the aristocracy had an innate distrust of the “lower classes”. Another way this objection might be stated is that Superdemocracy violates the Principle of Representation. This is a fancy way of saying that people are better at deciding who should decide things for them, than they are at deciding things themselves. This is false, because the decision to elect a given politician can only be based on an imperfect projection of the probabilities that the politician will act in accordance with one’s future desires. As for “apathy”, the apathy that currently exists is directly engendered by our hidebound mechanisms for participation in government on the part of the populace.
3. Greater bamboozlement by special interests. Columnist George Will recently denounced a proposal to allow nationwide “initiatives” to be voted by the public directly into law: “Any national initiative would be dominated by an intense, unelected minority using direct mail, television commercials, and other techniques of mass persuasion.” This is of course exactly how modern-day election campaigns work, except that what is being voted upon is not a policy or law, but a fallible human being who, once elected, personally becomes the focus of a whole procession of “intense, unelected minorities”, behind closed doors, for the duration of his or her term in office. 4. Fragility of high-tech underpinnings. It might be argued that the country could be thrown into permanent confusion by a single well-placed bomb or computer virus, if it has no other means of governing itself than this consensual one. The solution is of course a manual “backup” government, voted into being in the standard way, which would take over in the event of a catastrophe.
5. Fickleness of public sentiment. Episodes of McCarthyism and the recent “flag-burning amendment” furor make us wonder if the laws under Superdemocracy would not change chaotically. I think that the dual measures of adherence to a Constitution and the “30-day rules” would damp out any wild oscillations. Those it doesn’t can be regarded as the natural consequence of a body governing itself, correcting imbalances as feedback is obtained. They would at least not be due to a small minority of its leading citizens behaving erratically, as is often the case now.
6. Greater divisiveness. This is a criticism more aptly aimed at the proponents of “direct democracy”, not Superdemocracy. By bringing complex issues down to a simple yes/no vote, existing methods of initiative and referendum can polarize communities, whereas due legislative process encourages discussion, moderation, compromise, and consensus. Superdemocracy would preserve and enhance this moderating, consensus-building aspect of the legislative process by extending it to all the people. Topical message bases are only one possible tool for doing this — to be sure, a much higher level of overall political awareness and discussion would exist under Superdemocracy, and new tools and techniques would inevitably spring into being. In the future, bidirectional recorded video or other more exotic technologies could come into play.
7. Proxy battles: the fight for control of large delegated blocs of votes, granted by proxy, may loom ominously large in some people’s eyes. This is a laudable objection, because it demonstrates a perceptiveness and an ability to extrapolate into uncharted territory. Certainly, there will be proxy battles, and individuals will seek to enhance their social status by garnering “authority” over large numbers of votes. But the saving grace here is the instant revocability of proxy powers, and their entirely voluntary nature. It would be vital to have laws in place prohibiting abuse of the proxy relationship, such as the sale of powers, or the commitment of one’s votes to another for a fixed time period, etc. If each voter is free to change his or her mind about the attractiveness of a given proxy at any time for any reason, then proxy abuse cannot occur.
8. Difficulty of reaching quorum. This is another excellent objection, since it demonstrates insight into the process. The contention is that many important or urgent measures will languish below quorum indefinitely, due to insufficient voter interest or energy, thus clogging up the wheels of government. The reason this would not be a problem is that large proxy-holders would naturally tend to spend more time than the average voter in the sub-quorum “pool”, since their influence may be decisive there (this pool, by the way, is expected to be *huge*). By definition, truly important issues could not help but be significant to large numbers of voters, so if the proxies were not doing their jobs, the public would take charge directly. Both within the message databases and outside, in the public media, commentary and exchange of opinions could not help but bring all genuinely important measures into widespread play, with exactly the speed and to exactly the extent that each in some sense “deserves”.
9. Dominance by technocrats. A valid concern is that the high-tech nature of the process will scare away computerphobes, or create barriers for the less technically adept, which would lead to disproportionately high representation of the technocracy in the voting tallies. It is an absolute requirement that the designers of the system eliminate this concern by making it as easy to use as a bank auto-teller. Also, a network of human “facilitators” and manual-interaction “pavilions” should be established nationwide to service the needs of those for whom the proficiency barrier is insuperable. No system of voting can ever be perfect in this regard (the current system requires at least a modicum of intelligence and initiative), but Superdemocracy can and should be made as simple to deal with as a banking machine, or simpler. Touch screens, voice recognition, and progressively more advanced AI technologies can be harnessed for this purpose as time goes by.
10. High cost. Certainly, to install and maintain all of the computers and networks we are talking about would be expensive. There would also be a need to provide communications link equipment (presumably terminals and modems at first) to those unable to afford them, or perhaps to everybody. The high cost is beyond dispute. But we need to weigh this against the not insignificant costs of the current system, with its state and national capitol buildings, representative’s salaries and perks, staffers, and colossal infrastructure. Some of those smoke-filled rooms are pretty big! And computer and communications costs are dropping day by day, with no end in sight.
Conclusions
Superdemocracy is defined as a continuous networked hierarchy of online referenda, open to all.
Special interests would be able to sway the decisions of a group run this way only by catering to the interests of a majority of the group — in which case they would no longer, by definition, be special interests.
Busybodies would be able to sway the decisions of a group run this way only by making themselves the “proxies” of large blocs of people. Even so, they would merely be performing a public service by voting on those people’s behalf exactly as those people would, themselves, have voted anyhow — or the busybody would find him- or herself quickly out of votes.
Citizen participation and morale would be dramatically improved because each citizen would be voting on the issues that are important to that citizen, directly. The guessing game of figuring out what somebody else is going to do over a multi-year period, on the basis of schmoozy campaign ads and zoot suits, is eliminated.
Corruption would be limited to the tactical, implementational end of government. Never again would we have to worry about corruption on the grand scale of Teapot Dome or the S&L scandal.
Justice would be less capricious because the same group of human beings would review evidence and deliver a verdict in each case. This group, instead of being just 12 people who could all happen to misconstrue a fact the same wrong way, would be thousands or millions of everyday people, the very people whose welfare depends on the right decisions being made in the courtroom.
And finally, the expense, waste, and mismanagement of smoke-filled rooms and their seedy inhabitants would be laid to rest for once and for all. People would begin to have some reason for optimism about the future, and some sense of control over their own destinies.
I don’t expect any of this to happen anytime soon, but if you know anyone who is thinking of setting up a new country, please show him or her a copy of this article. It’s certainly worth a try.
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