Direct Democracy Now

In the internet age, middlemen of all stripes have found themselves out of a job. But there is one type of middleman that seems immune from disruption: the legislator. Each election cycle, these grifters regale us with fantastical promises. Then, their campaigns victorious, they take their seats and suddenly the promises are forgotten, and nothing seems to change. It happens in both parties: student loan forgiveness languishes in committee; “build the wall” becomes “fix the fence.” It’s inevitable: once you’ve hired a middleman, they serve their own interests, not yours.

Over the course of the past year, we’ve seen so many instances of our legislative middlemen failing us. They neglected to prepare for a pandemic despite warnings from experts, then bungled their response once it arrived. They did nothing to reform the police despite repeated incidents of unnecessary lethal force, setting the stage for weeks of mass protest across the nation. And to cap it all off, they raised specters of election fraud, fomenting partisan anger ever higher until it erupted into riot and forced them to literally flee their chambers as disaffected mobs stormed the Capitol building. In short, these are not the august statesmen we were promised.

The fact that mass movements on both sides of the political spectrum are adopting riot as a go-to tactic shows that our political institutions are failing to channel and resolve our political debates. And the protesters aren’t wrong; many political scientists agree that our government is wholly unresponsive to popular will. Maybe that explains the paradoxical truth that just 2/3 of eligible voters cast ballots in the 2020 general election even though its purpose was putatively to designate someone as the most powerful human being on planet Earth.

We can do better. It’s time to abolish representative legislatures and institute direct democracy.

I know that many readers, even those who agree about the shortcomings of our representatives, will be skeptical of direct democracy. Civics classes have drilled into us that direct democracy leads to tyranny of the majority. Besides, we are told, people don’t have the time nor the energy to spend on lawmaking. And they certainly don’t have the expertise to do it well.

All these concerns are real. But new ideas in political economy and the advent of election technologies like electronic voting machines and online voter registration give us a realistic path to implement it successfully.

Let’s start with tyranny of the majority. The idea: in pure democracies, the majority would win every single vote, wearing their opponents down into a state of total immiseration. This is a concern that goes back to the earliest descriptions of democracy, and it’s a problem that the framers of the Constitution were careful to blunt through safety mechanisms such as the separation of powers, the deliberative senate, and the Electoral College.

But more recent political theory has shown that cleverly designed voting systems can effectively mediate tyranny of the majority. In a 2015 article, law professor Eric Posner and economist Glen Weyl proposed a new model of direct democratic participation they call quadratic voting, which gives voters many more options for expressing their opinions. To understand how it works, imagine a referendum with a set of several ballot questions. Voters receive a budget of “credits” they can use to buy votes. If they want, they can spend one credit for one vote on each ballot question, same as our current one-person-one-vote system. But they can also choose to buy multiple votes on a single ballot question. They can even spend all of their credits on a single ballot question they feel really passionate about.

The only catch is that each additional vote on a given ballot question costs more credits than the one before it. For instance, your first vote on a ballot question might cost one credit, but if you want to cast a second vote on the same question, it will cost four additional credits (two squared). Your third vote will cost nine more credits (three squared), and so on. This is the “quadratic” growth of vote prices that gives the system its name.

Quadratic voting encourages voters to be thoughtful about the relative values of each of the issues on the ballot. A single-issue voter could spend most of their credits buying votes on that one issue, but they would be sacrificing votes on other ballot questions and get less votes in total. Like a shopper deciding how to spend their budget in a supermarket, the voter needs to prioritize the items they need most and skimp on the rest.

This might seem like a mere technical tweak, but the benefits are significant. Unlike in simple majority voting, minorities can win, fending off the policies they strongly oppose. In other words, minority groups can defend themselves against the tyranny of the majority through voting procedures alone, using just the impartial, transparent math built into the quadratic voting formula.

Where do these ballot questions come from? There are a number of workable approaches. For instance, we could allow any voter to propose a ballot initiative, building a large bank of proposals. In each election, voters would have two rounds of quadratic voting: first, they would vote for the ballot issues under current consideration. Next, they would vote in a separate agenda-setting round, spending credits to vote for the ballot questions they would like to see on the next referendum.

But isn’t this asking voters to do a lot of work? Will people really take the time to vote on this massive number of referendums? That is why we give voters another option: they could opt into subscription voting. In subscription voting, voters “subscribe” to one or more political parties, allowing the party to apportion their votes according to its political platform and priorities. Voters could log into the state’s online election portal to manage their subscriptions and view an auto-filled draft of their ballot to make sure they’re comfortable with how the system has distributed their votes. They would be free to tweak and change that draft as they see fit. Subscriptions would be automatically renewed, but the voter may revoke them at any time.

Subscription voters would still enjoy the benefits of quadratic voting; they would just sacrifice a little fine-tuning for some added convenience. And it would be a major convenience: a person subscribed to vote would never miss an election. Their votes would be cast automatically, even if they forget about election day. That would be a big deal for party activists, who currently spend massive amounts of time staging get-out-the-vote campaigns. Under the new system, once a vote has been “got-out” the first time, it will stay that way.

Another benefit of party subscriptions: because voters can subscribe to multiple parties on different issues, it would trigger a radical reimagining of the entire concept of the political party. Forget just adding a third party; we could have hundreds or even thousands of political parties, each one built around a niche issue. Perhaps there’s some maverick voter out there who wants to vote with the “Leftist Liberation” party most of the time, but vote with the “Students for Solvency” party on student loan ballot questions and with the “Build the Wall” party on border security. That voter could indicate on their voter registration form how much they care about one issue compared to the other, allowing a formula to distribute their credits across ballot items as they arise. But why stop there? If they wanted, they could assemble a slate of dozens of party subscriptions that represent her interests on every conceivable policy topic. Suddenly, the possibilities for expressing one’s personal identity through politics become truly endless.

Let’s take stock of the possibilities of this direct democratic future. The nation’s legislature would not be a congress of middlemen, but rather all of us, directly participating in the great political project of American Democracy. When we make our voices heard, it will not be through the blunt instruments of either the Democratic or Republican Parties, but through bespoke coalitions of allies. For the first time, we would be a free people accepting the responsibility of true self-government.

This will not be an easy change, but it’s necessary. Either we continue bumbling along with the current system, allowing disaffection to grow and grow as our government continues ignoring problems it’s structurally incapable of dealing with, or we advocate for a new system that is capable of keeping up with the challenges of modern policymaking. Only by recasting politics in this way, as a grand project in which we creatively and unrelentingly pursue democracy to the greatest extent possible, can we hope to move past our society’s ever-heightening partisanship and political violence.

And what political project could hold more universal appeal than striving for a more perfect democracy? We all agree in principal that government should reflect the will of the people. Ask any American — left, right, neoconservative, socialist; every one of them will instinctively recite the virtues of democracy. But somehow, when we go from celebrating democracy as a platitude to advocating for it in earnest, it feels like we’ve made a radical — even utopian — turn. Why? Are we unconvinced by our own mantras?

I want to live in a Democracy. Who doesn’t?