TL;DR – A proposed system to get 300 million Americans to practice "complete democracy" together in a fast, efficient, and meaningful way without relying on representatives.
I don’t believe that my idea is original. This post is a summary of a simple idea for using crypto as a voting system in the USA where all citizens write and vote directly on the laws passed. Citizens become their own civil servants through educating each other with taking and making classes, writing, amending, and voting bills into law. Also with a proposed and generalized road-map towards it’s implementation.
The Hope:
I believe that the philosophy of the system of democracy is: majority makes right. I’m not going to challenge the ‘correctness’ of democracy at this time. However our current system caters to the wealthy minority because of systemic problems in our government/laws. Another assumption I've made that I'm not going to challenge at this time. So far it has been impossible to ask the government to police itself and magically become a better government for the people. So I am hoping that if we (the people) can setup a system of passing laws ourselves so that it could come to replace the United States Congress.
Highly unlikely? Absolutely. Technically possible? I think so.
The System:
I discuss this later, but it’s important to know that I see this starting as a social experiment with open source software (etc, etc, etc...) and only progressing to more serious if the experiment works and actually garners wide-spread support.
When a US Citizen signs up to participate in this system, they would have a crypto-ID generated for them that would contain no personally identifiable information. It would publicly keep track of some of their Congress activities such as laws proposed, past votes and active/inactive status. But not things that would ruin anonymity like comments and video speeches. This allows for public voting and anonymity at the same time. This would make the sign-up process tricky and not something I've fully fleshed out yet.
Once signed up individuals would be able to exercise a small subset of possible actions restricted by the free classes they've taken through the app. Think an RPG game’s leveling up and unlocking new skills. I can already hear people getting upset because “class X is too Y or not enough Z”. So here’s my proposed solution: The same class taught from a range of perspectives the user can pick from. The voting individual would be able to choose if they prefer a left leaning perspective or right or socialist, libertarian, etc, etc, etc... and take the class they prefer. Some classes won’t have this option, for example a class that teaches how to write a law or the process of voting and editing, because those are functional processes. I have written much more on these classes, but will stop here for brevity.
With so many people able to write laws there would need to be mechanisms to filter the good from the bad and slow down the number of laws written and voted on. I propose multiple barriers to entry to reduce the number of laws written. First by requiring classes and tests taken on the subject matter of the law in question, the area of that’s affected by the law, and some legalese-type classes on writing good laws. As for filtering good and bad laws, I propose a system of peer-review where people exchange laws with strangers for review and feedback. I would have to review X number of randomly selected proposed laws in order to move mine forward. This process could be required N number of times before proceeding to the next phase. The next phase would be review at the community level. This would (hopefully) mean being reviewed and discussed by people you know in real life and around the area you live. If it’s a local law it would have a few rounds there of review and proposed changes before being voted on. If it was a federal law, it would go through those same rounds while expanding on wider groups of people up to the national level.
Voters would have to be able to filter the information to find bills that matter to them in order to keep them passionate about participating. I propose at least the following filters and settings the users would be able to adjust:
- Only receiving notifications of bills from ‘my Subscriptions’ that I’m also able to vote on.
- Exclude notifications for federal bills
- Exclude notifications for state bills
- Exclude notifications for county bills
- Exclude notifications for amendments
- Exclude notifications for federal amendments
- Exclude notifications for state amendments
- Exclude notifications for county amendments
- Always/Never receive notifications of bill on the following topics
- Always/Never receive notifications of amendments on the following topics
- Subscribe to notifications of bills that include the following topics
- Subscribe to notifications of amendments that include the following topics
- Subscribe to XYZ public service announcements
- Subscribe to XYZ public servant’s personal announcements
- Subscribe to a randomized bill every N days
- Subscribe to a randomized federal bill every N days
- Subscribe to a randomized state bill every N days
- Subscribe to a randomized county bill every N days
While no incentives could be given for participation in the social experiment phase of this project. I think it’s possible, with the right laws, that this system could be constructed with many incentives for participation. Everything from providing wages to participants who meet certain production and quality requirements to providing extra tax deductions for voting and taking classes. There's also the obvious benefit of being able to directly influence the laws governing your daily life.
I have written much about how to handle laziness and trolls I'm not going to include here, as it would make this giant post even longer.
Perfect in the form I’ve described above? Not a chance. Will some people help with criticisms and ideas? I hope so.
The Road-Map:
“… you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” - James Madison, The Federalist No. 51 (1788)
I believe that we’ve met the first requirement but failed the second. I believe that the system of government in place now does not control itself, but is itself controlled (who or what isn't relevant). So in order to oblige the government to control itself, I propose we start chipping away at it’s authority over the daily lives of it’s citizens by putting power and autonomy into the hands of the people.
I see this project starting out as an open source “social experiment”. There will need to be some technical work done up front making a specialized crypto-currency and partner app for people to use. I think we start with just a phone number for sign-ups such as the signal or telegram apps. This app would likely be “reset” several times during development. So start with a small number of laws and a small number of users.
Once the app becomes stable enough for the social experiment to begin. Then the app gets loaded with some number of current US laws as it’s starting point. People would get to write and vote on new and existing laws for N period of time. Once that time has expired a paper would published detailing it’s successes and failures. Some of these would include before and after laws on hot-button issues, how trolls were handled, how it handled abuses and threats, how many users participated vs signed up, etc… A period of app development and changes to address the issued from the paper would laid out. After which the cycle would begin again.
What I hope comes of these rounds of changes and development are effective tools to write and vote on laws, challenge the inevitable trolls, and empower people. With trying to encompass so many people, laws, and special situations, there’s many times where fringe cases will have to be discovered through practice and the process of iterating over the idea during the social experiment phase of the project.