Can Technology save Democracy? (part 3)
“The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.”
I must admit that this blog post has proven far more difficult to write than I had imagined.
As I’ve spoken to friends and colleagues about the concept of using a smartphone app to vote on legislation, I’ve been struck by the responses ranging from polite skepticism to abject terror. It seems that, despite how we talk about the importance of people power and democratic governance, most of us are fundamentally fearful of the decision making ability of our neighbors. I received feedback such as, “The Founding Fathers feared the rule of the mob just as much as the rule of dictators, which is why we don’t allow direct democracy” and, “Are you crazy? Why on Earth would we want [Trump/Hillary] supporters to pass laws with the click of a button?”
For all of our history with the ever-expanding voting franchise, it seems that many people are still queasy at the amount of trust that is required in a democracy. We must keep in mind that the Founding Fathers were nowhere near perfect. Many of them saw no issue with the enslavement of 4 million people, despite signing on to the premise that, “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It should also be noted that women, Asians, and anyone without property had to fight hard for the right to vote. In fact, as our very first post points out, there is still no explicit guarantee of voting rights, which is why it is so easy for our government to strip those rights through various suppression laws. In 2017, a mentally ill person has a Constitutional right to own a handgun, but 6 million Americans have no equivalent right to vote.
There is so much hero worship surrounding our Founding Fathers that I’ve been struck by how easy it is to invoke their likeness in an effort to kill debate. Take the 2016 election, for instance, with its disenfranchisement of millions of voters through the Electoral College system. As we’ve pointed out before, this is an extremely outdated, fundamentally unfair, and completely random method for assigning the winner of a Presidential election. Yet, whenever the system proves itself unfit for modern society, such as it has twice in the last 5 elections, the common refrain is that, “The Founding Fathers made it that way for a reason.” Nobody seems to know what that reason is, but it’s still strong enough to warrant a shoulder shrug and a polite nod to the next subject.
When discussing DemocracyOS with a Democrat friend, he postulated that the most important progressive wins in the last 100-odd years came from the skillful, enlightened leadership of key elected officials, and that this couldn’t have happened in a direct democracy due to an abundance of racism, sexism, or homophobia. Although I can understand how this is a compelling argument on its surface, I think the argument falls short once we consider the merits. If such luminaries as Lyndon Johnson were alone responsible for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, then how did they get there? Didn’t it take millions of voters to consistently support progressive politicians in the Northeastern, Midwestern, and Western States, in order to finally build a coalition large enough to take on Jim Crow at the Federal level? LBJ, for all of his talents and arm-twisting, did not waive a magic wand to make this happen. The American public was clamoring for the government to finally treat all citizens equally, regardless of skin color, and the levee finally broke in 1965.
In fact, one could argue that inherently undemocratic Congressional rules, such as the filibuster, were used incessantly to forestall expansive civil rights legislation. Hence, Jim Crow may have died sooner, women’s suffrage may have happened faster, and gay marriage may have been granted quicker under a truly direct democracy than it did under our current system of government.
In his exceptional book, The Wisdom of Crowds, (a must read for anyone who wants to have his worldview flipped upside down) James Surowiecki describes an anecdote about the space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. It seems that, despite not having any inside information, financial speculators on Wall Street successfully predicted that Morton Thiokol, the firm that built the doomed solid rocket booster, would ultimately be judged responsible for the explosion. By the end of the trading day after that fateful mission, Morton Thiokol stock was trading down 12%, while the stock prices of the other shuttle contractor companies, Lockheed, Martin Marietta, and Rockwell International, had fallen by only 3%. The consensus of a naïve crowd of investors made the correct decision months before the experts at NASA were able to determine that the cause of the catastrophe was a failed O-ring on Thiokol's solid stage booster.
In example after example Surowiecki shows that betting markets, voting systems, and crowd surveys will successfully outperform experts with greater accuracy and lower variability. Far from being the “rule of the mob” that was so feared by our Founding Fathers, it seems that the “enlightened masses” can be trusted to produce the right answer more often even than those who’ve made a career out of a particular specialty. Aggregating the combined experience of a large group, through a system of independent voting or betting markets, is far superior to expecting your Congressman to do the right thing. There are too many pressures on a given elected representative, such as party leadership, special interest groups, and key donors, that prevent him from voting with his constituents. How else can we explain why the American Health Care Act passed the House of Representatives despite only having the approval of 21% of Americans?
Prior to the Enlightenment Period, most humans believed that an expert monarch or benevolent dictator was the only person who could make decisions in a system as intricate and complicated as foreign or domestic governance. In 1776, we decided that we are collectively superior as a group of voters than as a society under monarchical rule. We could then combine our vastly different experiences to settle on a solution that benefit the widest audience, rather than the narrow desires of an imperial court. We have spent 241 years expanding the type of individuals that we are willing to include in our decision-making group, through increased access to the ballot box. Yet, when the opportunity comes to take a giant leap forward, by using technology to skip our elected “experts” and rely directly on people power, we start to feel squeamish.
It should be noted that the use of DemocracyOS, blockchain, and other smart voting technologies doesn't preclude the need to protect the rights of the minority. In the type of implementation that we're envisioning, voters can pass laws by telling their Congressmen (or State Legislators) which lever to pull on a particular piece of legislation. However, that legislation will still undergo the normal system of checks and balances, such as a review of constitutionality by our Judicial branch. This would still prevent voters from passing a law to ban Muslims from entering the country (protected by the Establishment Clause), taking away gun rights (2nd Amendment), or punishing those who express a minority opinion (1st Amendment). In other words, we can still rely on the same Constitutional protections under a direct democracy that have so often prevented excesses under a representative government.
The advent of smart voting technologies will represent the most important challenge to the fundamental pillars upon which our government is currently built. But, given the deepening partisanship and widespread belief that our government is no longer serving its citizens, perhaps those pillars have already started showing cracks. Our system of political parties, special interests, big money elections, and career politicians are all built on the premise that a selected group of elite representatives can govern better than the masses that they represent. Once that premise no longer exists, the remaining structure will topple like a house of cards. All that's left will be the wisdom of the crowd, and that will be a significant upgrade.