NOW can we get money-out-of-politics? It’s time for real-time Vote Pledging.
I hope one big takeaway from 2016 is that money-in-politics should be a negative in campaigns, regardless of party. Make every Wall Street dollar put into a puppet candidate a dollar of free advertising for the progressive.
The money only goes to the media, anyway, right? Then those networks, radio stations, newspapers and websites generate domestic propaganda which misinforms the voter.
Candidates have to work more to get the money for these ads than doing the business of the people who vote. Why, in the age of modern technology, are voters trapped in this golden triangle of rich manipulators buying news and candidates?
Instead a low-cost, crowd sourced solution can show taxpayers how to curtail the influence of the pundits, party bosses and the oligarchs that are literally poisoning the skies. Votes should matter, not ads or large donations, but somehow, the rich have “acquired” both the major media and the political class to control who runs and then control the daily flow of information voters hear.
We still rely on media, even though mistrust is at all-time highs, and we rely on pollsters after they not only failed to predict the last election, they created complacency that may have cost it.
Think about how effective Citizens United has been since the January 2010 ruling to make money more influential than ever — the House went Republican that same November, the Senate went red in 2014 and now they have all three branches.
WHY MUST ELECTIONS BE SURPRISES? The antidote is vote-pledging, a large, open public registry where people indicate who they support, but can change their support any time. This was piloted by a San Francisco startup, whose Brigade app tracked 200,000 registered, verified voters. They were one of the few polls to correctly foresee the 2016 outcome and just how many Democrats openly planned to jump on the Trump train.
Ironically, the Brigade developers thought the trend they were seeing couldn’t be right and their whole venture was failing, up until election results showed that vote-pledging is more much more accurate than traditional polling because it aggregates large voter numbers, like 200,000 instead of representative sampling of about 1,000.
Real-time vote-pledging can make traditional polls pointless (weren’t they anyway in 2016?) as it lessens the influence of the corporate gatekeeper. People would have to sacrifice their right to anonymity in order to be America’s next “Nielsen families” but an inordinately large sample size makes data far more reliable, and trackable on a minute-to-minute basis, for example after debates or breaking news.
Vote-pledging data could carry with it qualitative info, like “digital bumper stickers” to show which issues matter most, “digital yard signs” to show geographic terrain and links to blogs, social media accounts or affiliated organizations where users have unlimited space to expound or pontificate on their views. Along with virtual votes, the system could allow users to report donations, or pledge “conditional donations” of money or volunteerism.
There is a dire need for fact-checking, for example allowing campaigns to see when users base their votes on debunked facts, or if they are connected with particular influencers.
SAVE TREES: In the real world, this could mean less printed mailers, less placards and less media ads that enrich the media gatekeepers. But it mainly saves campaigns from the high cost of fundraising which distracts the candidate from the work of government problem-solving. And let’s face it, the candidates today aren’t raising the money, the money is raising the candidates.
Democrats play the game but lose — competing with Republicans in a race for money makes it a battle for the 1%. On one hand the Kochs and Mercers, on the other George Soros and Tom Steyer types. But in reality the investments of the big donors overlap and entangle to ensure they win either way, like any good hedgefunder would.
The donor class prevails whether it’s Hillary or Trump, Obama or Romney, McCain or Bush. So the answer is Jiu-jitsu, making big donations work against the candidate, as the dark money becomes negative press.
The Bernie movement which challenged the entrenched Democrat establishment saw many victories, including the ouster of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and DNC brass. But the most important was showing that over $230 million could be raised by small donations. This speaks to the Independents, Republicans and new voters who placed trust in Trump because they felt he “couldn’t be bought”.
AN ARMY OF SMALL-DONORS: A vote-pledging registry could also track metrics like donations, or a token “willingness to donate” currency to assure candidates that they could win financial backing provided they do A, B or C (see also the conditional crowdfunding at CrowdPAC.com). Volunteerism, advocacy or even citizen journalism is yet another aspect beyond vote-pledging that candidates may need and seek out.
It should be a big plus that information is not filtered by corporate media and fake news. Both left and right now look askance at the media, with ugly leaks showing exactly how a primary can be rigged, how “news” reporters trade access for favors, or how the same media’s owners fund campaigns.
FRAUD PREVENTION: With a vote-pledging registry showing how people are voting or leaning, in massive numbers, geographically searchable and sortable sortable, candidates could recognize a new way to communicate to voters, outside of corporate media. It could also expose or deter fraud in the way exit polls do, except the information would be available all the time and dynamically changing every second based on each user’s input.
RESTORING POWER: Finally, this idea could give back to the voter serious leverage to affect their governance, especially when done in significant numbers. A voter could withdraw a pledge if a candidate changes a position, or she could simply threaten to, just the way big donors today fund or threaten to defund candidates. There are innumerable ways such a vote-pledging system could be used today to give voice back to the actual voter, but there can be no doubt something has to be done to counter the current broken system of campaign finance and legal bribery.