a unified, recursive voting platform. [~aug 2016]

[Edit: I stumbled across this draft today. I wrote it a year ago, but never published it. Oh my, how times have changed.]

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Starting from the bottom up, let’s recreate our democracy by giving every person a voice.

Democracy is muddled by mediators and still suffers from inefficiencies and issues that have long since been solved by technology.

For a presidential election, what do we need? What’s the difference between a poll and a vote? Reach, and authority.

The internet is the silver bullet that democracy has been waiting 3 thousand years for.

Paper ballots are good because there can be no question. We have the physical piece of paper with your name on it. But in today’s era, the paper ballot has lost it’s authority. I can’t check my ballot to see if my vote was received.

Currently, there is no verification or involvement aside from casting a vote, which feels dubious at best.

The world runs on trust. Society runs on trust. The market runs on trust. The government runs on trust. Rule of law depends on trust. Community relations depend on the assumption of mutual goodwill.

The US government is a brand, and it’s currently a weak one, because the UX is awful. If you think about every touch point between the government and the average citizen, is it any surprise that almost no one wants to have anything to do with it? How would things be different if the federal government was a Google, rather than a Comcast, or an AT&T?

People have lost trust in the government looking out for their best interests, even a little bit, and they’ve lost faith that the government cares about their voice and opinions.

The lack of transparency is an issue not just with any one administration, but the whole system. I want to confirm that I will be able to vote, I can’t. I want to confirm that my vote was counted, but I can’t. I can’t verify that I’ve had any civil participation, or that I have influenced the situation at all.

This doesn’t need to be this difficult. All the government needs to collect from me is my opinion — this candidate or this one? This policy — yea or nay? Most of the government is state and local, the federal government is just the tip of the iceberg, but the actual mechanism of civic engagement between the government and the people is the same — discover the will of the people.

Regardless if you think election fraud is systemic or non-existent, wouldn’t it be nice to take it off the table completely?

I propose a new system — an open-source, cloud-based, fully-transparent, scalable, adaptable, identify-verification and vote-collection platform.

Here is my vision — we create a single identity portal that can be used for all government interactions — (part 2: as well as marketing and advertising info — rather than trying to snoop on people and discern their interests using complicated technology — why not just ask? let people put in as much or as little information about themselves as they would like.)

This Public Persona — can be created by anyone, and verification documents can be added afterwards, and only if and when necessary. For example, you can cast your vote, but the message might pop up “please add a driver’s license, passport, or social-security number to your profile to verify your identity.”

Hey guess what else we have now? Iphones. The feds already have your fingerprint on file? Cool, just scan your thumb and you’re verified. Snap a pic of your driver’s license and upload it. We already have all your shit from the healthcare marketplace? Nice, you’re good then.

Every person must create their own account, and quality for certain elections based on the info they put in. Uploaded a water bill? Oh look, you are eligible to vote in these local elections coming up soon! Check out the candidates or cast your vote now. (Keep in mind you can change your vote any time prior to the deadline.)

Here’s the beauty of this system — it’s all public. You can go to the public website, and see all the names of those who have voted. Public ballots. The papertrail is visible, permanent, and open for all to peruse.

Internet access is a new human right — it is the connection of each member of the human race to every other human. It is, in a sense, the global society. To restrict internet access is to restrict access to our shared knowledge, thoughts, perspectives, realities. Connection is a human need as basic and primal as food and shelter, indeed, we even die if we don’t get it. The internet is connection to each other. Now we just need to harness the internet to learn what everyone else thinks.