Woody Cavenaugh

Over the years our representitive democratic government has been frought with scandle, politicians bought, votes bought and sold, votes stolen, elections stolen, presidents that dare not to hold to a higher ideal. Thanks to the power of the internet, these events are being uncovered more and more because more people with equal voice (like bloggers) are watching. I have heard folks say that the corruption in our government was some new thing brought on by a lack of "Moral Values". Nobody can agree on what those values are by the way. "Moral Values" seems to be defiinded as "How I want you to behave."

I remember back in High School history class where the winners were always right because they wrote the history. In this class there was never any corruption worth mentioning because the winners always stomped it out. In this class we were taught that in ancient Greece all citizens had one vote and they all participated in government. It worked because the population wasn't all that great, they all lived in a city state, and women, slaves and foreigners were not citizens. (Slaves and foreigners could buy freedom and citizenship however.) This system stopped working when there were too many citizens too far apart geographically to really effectively govern themselves. Throw in a couple of invasions, and the sytem eventually evolved into something like we are using today.

I contend that the very technologies we use to keep a fire lit under those people who claim to represent us could be used to create a system whereby we could bring back the true democracy. There are more than enough smart people in internet land to make that happen. The power of many over the power of few and all.

Off the cuff we would need a system where by each eligable American voter can authenticate into a system and be allowed to cast a vote on issues that concern them. True majority rule. We can even use some of that freedom were giving up anyway to make it where we have to use a fingerprint or retina scan to prove who we were and each of us would have a complete record of ever vote we cast. Why not, we're all spewing our opinions online everyday and more and more people are comming to realize that nothing is truly anonomious.

In the bright side of my little dream, beurocracy would shrink. No more electing a guy to represent you only to have him get bought out by some corporation through a well paid lobbiest firm. Now those corporations have to pay lobbiest to buy YOU out.

True, Exxon would surely monitor the voting practices of its employees and frown upon those who "vote against the best interest of the share holders" but good news folks, there are other corporations who probably like the way you think and you could work for them and safely vote your consious.

Could it be fudged DiBold style? I am sure it could, but with each person getting to see their vote in action and so many of us looking for bugs, it would quickly evolve into a ironclad bug free system.

Would it require each eligable voter to keep abreast of current events. Yes. (That's a good thing.)
Would some people still not vote? Yes. Either they don't know the issue well enough to make a educated vote, or they choose not to participate. How is that different from today? I mean other than the fact that there could be an obstain button for folks to use when they didn't know how to vote.

Is it a perfect plan? No, I only starting writing this entry a half hour ago, but you have to ask yourself, would it be any worse than what we have now? And you lobbiest can just obstain from that question, I wasn't talking to you.

There is a phenomonom called various things like "collective wisdom", "crowd intelligence" and "Wisdom of Crowds". It works like this. Fill a jar with marbles and ask everyone you know to guess how many marbles are in the jar. Write down all their answers. You will find that the answers range widely and infact no one may guess it correctly. Now average all the guesses. Whatever that answer is is proabably frightenly close to the actual answer. This method is so accurate that it is pretty standard practice in Project Management to use it in determinining timelines for work you've never done before. It is powerful, and it could be leveraged in a true democracy.

Think it over. Shoot all the holes in it you want. Holes can be filled.