Tag: Emerging Authoritarianism

The Global Social Network for Voters: Transforming Minority Rule into Majority Rule

Overview

Voters worldwide are losing control of their governments, political parties and elected party representatives.  Research findings indicate voters distrust their governments and the electoral and legislative institutions and processes that lawmakers use to get into office and keep getting re-elected despite voters’ disapproval of their actions. 

Key reasons for these findings include the following:

  • The growing gap between voters’ needs and priorities and the legislative priorities and actions of elected lawmakers.
  • Voters lack of control over political parties’ operations and actions that determine who gets on party ballots in primary and general elections.
  • Voters lack of systematic mechanisms for articulating their legislative priorities across the board and influencing the priorities included in party and candidate legislative agendas.
  • In general elections, voters often must choose among unrepresentative party candidates who win primary elections with the organizational and financial support of special interests, elections in which a small minority of voters participate.
  • In the U.S., dissatisfied voters face barriers erected by the two major parties to prevent the creation of new parties that can win elections.
  • Voters’ votes have scant overall impact on the composition of legislative bodies because they reside in election districts whose boundaries have been changed (gerrymandered) by political parties to remove voters likely to vote against their candidates and scatter their votes among losing districts.
  • Many eligible voters are prevented from actually voting, and the votes cast by many voters are not counted, due to election laws, regulations, hackable voting technology, as well as legal and illegal practices, which skew the results of elections so that candidates can be elected with a minority of votes cast — which represent an even smaller minority of the total of all eligible voters.
  • Voters’ needs and priorities are subordinated by elected party representatives to those of special interests that finance party and candidate electoral campaigns, in exchange for party representatives’ votes on legislative issues.
  • Voters’ electoral and legislative disempowerment by political parties leads to the passage of tax and minimum wage policies that exacerbate inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth — which in turn prevents large segments of the population from obtaining basic necessities, long-term financial security, educational opportunities, etc.
  • Voters are unable to influence legislative bodies that are paralyzed by political conflicts and stalemates contrived by political parties, party candidates, party legislative representatives, and special interest campaign contributors — particularly those aimed at sparking “culture wars” to win elections.
  • Voters are alarmed by lawmakers’ failure to devise workable solutions and laws to overcome life-threatening crises such as climate disruption and political violence.

Even after the 2018 mid-term elections, the voter-lawmaker disconnect persists. Post-election polls show most U.S. voters do not think Congress represents. Nor do they think Congress is doing a good job or headed in the right direction. Half of registered voters do not think Congress represents their political views, including Democrats, Independents and Republicans. (See: “Most Americans Don’t Feel Well-Represented By Congress [2018].”)

What is particularly striking about this voter-lawmaker disconnect is that elected representatives routinely claim they speak for their constituents, even though they do not really know what their constituents need or want across the board because party-controlled electoral processes do not give voters systematic mechanisms for articulating them. Nor do voters have systematic mechanisms for influencing the priorities of the parties and their candidates and their legislative agendas, or party decision-making processes that determine them. 

The disconnect is the result of a persistent, incremental, multi-pronged push to disempower voters, which is a long-standing trend in American politics, as well as in many countries around the world that claim to have democratic forms of government. Many prerogatives once enjoyed by citizens have been watered down and washed away, even powers bestowed on them by the U.S. Constitution. For instance, not only do voters exercise limited autonomy in deciding who gets elected but also when they leave office, as the result of laws and regulations enacted at the behest of parties, such as those prohibit voters from removing elected representatives during their term of office (except for malfeasance), which in the case of the U.S. Senate lasts for 6 years. 

It is noteworthy that one likely consequence of voter disempowerment is the fact that only about half of all voting age adults turn out to vote in the U.S. While this phenomenon is undoubtedly caused by many factors in addition to disempowerment, the chronically low rate of voter turnout in U.S. elections puts the U.S. at the bottom of the ladder compared to its peers among highly-developed, reputedly democratic states. (Pew Research [2018] “U.S. trails most developed countries in voter turnout”). 

Among the most persuasive arguments supporting allegations that Americans are saddled with minority rule rather than majority rule is the fact the two major parties that dominate American government can call the shots legislatively even though their enrolled members combined barely comprise half of all registered voters — the other half refusing to enroll in either. Yet the candidates of the party that wins the most votes in Congressional elections control the body to which they are elected — the House or the Senate — even though they may have received less than a majority of votes cast, represent gerrymandered districts, and typically represent only one quarter of all eligible U.S. voters. Once a party takes over the House or Senate, even if it is only backed by a minority of voters, the elected party representatives take over all positions that ultimately determine what legislation can be considered, amended, and voted upon, unless their own members defect and refuse to vote for party-backed legislation, or the opposing party can find one or another of the few loopholes that exist. 

Transforming Minority Rule into Majority Rule 

In the U.S., the deeply entrenched underpinnings of voters’ loss of control of government, and the incremental inception of ever greater minority rule, are embedded in a multitude of federal, state, and local laws, court decisions, regulations and practices — legal and illegal, as per research and analyses that conclude the U.S. is governed by minority rule that may continue for the foreseeable future. Yale University professors Markovits and Ayres summarize these findings in the article “The U.S. is in a state of perpetual minority rule” published in late 2018 in the Washington Post .

These findings are supported by prior research published in 2010 by Hacker and Pierson, and Gilens and Page in 2014, who concluded that “that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence”.

A case in point of their findings, in terms of legislation critical to the health and well-being of Americans, is the chronic refusal of both major parties in Congress to enact legislation providing universal, single payer, government-sponsored health care. This type of health care has long been favored by a majority of the American people, a preference ignored by both major parties’ representatives, many of whom had received campaign contributions from corporate members of the pharmaceutical and healthcare provider industries. The fact that most post-industrial Western societies do provide universal health care indicates the U.S. is likely to be in a class by itself when it comes to deeply-entrenched minority rule that knowingly and willingly flouts the popular will even when it exerts a clearly adverse impact on the population’s health and welfare. 

Given the necessary and indispensable role that democratic forms of government play in fostering progress on virtually all fronts, it is vital that disempowered citizens around the world who do not control their governments be empowered to control them as soon as possible and move them from legislative bodies characterized by minority rule to majority rule. The significant advances that have been made in societies throughout the world with respect to the increasing capabilities of their members to engage in cooperative, collective problem-solving should be furthered by their governments — not hindered by them and self-serving political parties that control elections and legislation. 

Research has identified important evolutionary transformations that have been steadily occurring throughout human history — especially with regard to furthering social progress towards greater egalitarianism, cooperation, consensus-building, and “bottom-up” power-sharing. From infancy through adulthood, it has been found that self-determining individuals and groups tend to cooperate, build consensus, share power and reduce inequities — rather than compete, spawn divisive factions, concentrate power and exacerbate inequities as seems to be the modus operandi typical of political parties. (See Keltner, PhD, “The Power Paradox: The Promise and Peril of 21st Century Power” [2017] and “Survival of the Kindest” [2015].)

In the realm of politics, these egalitarian norms will have the tendency to foster compromise and tolerance unless they are counteracted by the norms of political parties and elitist groups that tend to foster intolerance, divisive conflicts and inequities in their quest for various forms of power and influence. Undemocratic political parties tend to abuse this power unless countervailing individuals and groups prevent them from doing so.

To counteract these tendencies, voter-created and democratically controlled and managed political parties hosted on the Global Social Network for Voters can use the network’s agenda- setting, consensus-building and political organizing tools to engage in continuous “bottom-up” consensus building and compromise with voters across the ideological and political spectrum. By so doing, they can act as countervailing political organizations that neutralize and work around undemocratic political parties and party lawmakers that deliberately spark conflicts in order to gain electoral advantages.

The two major U.S political parties are not alone in exhibiting these tendencies, which characterize political parties in many countries. One of the primary reasons for this pattern, according to the work of the noted European sociologist Robert Michels at the opening of the 20th century, is that traditional political party structures, as originally conceived and operationalized, are inherently undemocratic.

While parties’ original function was claimed to be that of empowering voters to convey through their votes the “will of the people”, Michels’s in-depth research showed that most parties evolve into organizations controlled from the “top down’ by party, economic/financial elites, and special interests who use parties to advance their interests rather than voters’ interests. In the process, they usurp voters’ power and influence within the party and thereafter in party-controlled elections and governing institutions, using party rules and activities to increase their own power, influence and wealth. 

The Global Social Network for Voters has been designed to counter the classic undemocratic roles that so many political parties have played in democratic forms of government, and continue to play, coupled with the inefficacy of piecemeal reform efforts to alter their prerogatives and influence. The network’s core premises derive from known facts, such as those cited above, as well as the potential of its consensus-building tools and services that empower voters to join forces to circumvent the multitude of intertwined laws, regulations, court decisions, and legal and illegal practices that prevent voters and the population at large from controlling their governments, political parties and special interests. For example, these tools take advantage of evidence showing that voters, on the whole, are largely in agreement regarding priorities. They are willing to compromise in order to prevent legislative stalemates and hold both major U.S. political parties in low esteem due to their propensity to deliberately spark conflicts and obstinately refuse to compromise to prevent legislative stalemates. (See Fiorina, PhD [2008]; Stern [2017]).

The network makes possible the transition from minority rule to majority rule because of its inherent consensus-building mechanisms. These mechanisms will motivate voters to reconcile divergent political views and resolve political conflicts by building consensus around common transpartisan legislative agendas and reaching out across ideological and partisan lines to build transpartisan voting blocs, political parties, and electoral coalitions that can forge transpartisan electoral bases large enough to win elections by defeating the candidates of highly partisan political parties. By so doing, they will be able to determine who runs for office, who gets elected, and what laws are passed — in effect to control their governments. 

In summary, the network’s power-shifting technology will:

  • Connect voters online across ideological and partisan lines to build consensus and set common transpartisan legislative agendas.
  • Enable voters to create voter-controlled voting blocs, political parties and electoral coalitions that can win elections and pass laws overcoming gerrymandering, vote suppression, and undemocratic minority rule.
  • Empower voters to reform campaign financing de facto by forging transpartisan electoral bases large enough to elect candidates of their choice without special interest campaign financing that sways their votes.
  • Ensure popular control of elected representatives by enabling voters to conduct online petition drives, referendums, initiatives and recall votes to pressure legislators into enacting voters’ agendas.
  • Empower voters to hold legislators accountable at the polls for their legislative actions using the network’s political organizing tools to conduct get-out-the-vote campaigns to defeat and replace incumbents.

International Scope 

There are many life-threatening issues — such as extreme weather, gun control and political violence — that require legislative solutions with domestic and international implications. The Global Social Network for Voters will provide voters and political activists worldwide a single platform for simultaneously — and consensually — devising international and domestic legislative solutions to such issues. They will be able to implement them within and acrossnational borders by means of voter-controlled voting blocs, political parties and electoral coalitions. The network will enable them to:

  • Connect to each other within and across national borders so they can simultaneously resolve international and domestic issues and conflicts.
  • Form voter-controlled voting blocs, political parties, and electoral coalitions that operate internationally and domestically.
  • Build consensus across ideological and partisan lines to set common transpartisan legislative agendas resolving international and domestic issues and conflicts.
  • Implement voters’ international agendas domestically by nominating and electing candidates of their choice in their home countries to enact the agendas.
  • Oversee, guide and direct the legislative actions of elected representatives in their home countries to enact international as well as domestic agendas.
  • Propose specific legislation for enacting international as well as domestic agendas by conducting online petition drives, referendums, and initiatives, and directing their elected representatives to pass this legislation.
  • Conduct recall votes to warn elected representatives when their legislative actions risk their defeat in upcoming elections.
  • Hold elected representatives accountable at the ballot box for their legislative actions in implementing international as well as domestic legislation, by using voter-created and voter-controlled online voting blocs, political parties, and electoral coalitions to conduct winning get-out-the-vote campaigns.

 

Fake News, Fake Politicians, and Fake Elections?

As the worldwide gap between voters’ priorities and those of elected officials widens, as measured by their legislative actions, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to argue that supposedly democratic governments are really democracies. The U.S. may be the best case in point, but it is not alone. However, the pre-eminent position the U.S. once held as a beacon of democracy worldwide makes the current erosion of its democratic processes and institutions a cause of great concern, to me at least.

Judging by the 2016 presidential election in the U.S. and its aftermath, this widening gap between the needs and demands of Americans and the priorities of elected officials is having devastating consequences on multiple fronts. Laws are being passed by Congress, and executive actions are being undertaken by the president, that in no way correspond to the priorities of mainstream Americans.

In fact, the large majority of these laws and actions appear to be supported by only a minority of Americans. They are being undertaken by lawmakers controlling Congress who are in thrall to special interests and whose priorities are far outside the mainstream. These representatives represent a minority of eligible U.S. voters, but the peculiarities of U.S. electoral processes and the federal legislative and executive branches allow them to make laws in the name of all Americans.

Even more alarming is the fact that Congressional lawmakers, the president and key agencies in the executive branch, as well as judges in the judicial branch, formulate policies and make decisions that lie not only outside the mainstream but violate existing laws. All too often, they are based on misrepresentation and denial of proven scientific facts, such as the human causes of climate change, and even outright lies.  Reliable sources report that president Trump  has lied more than 3000 times since his election — often to the resounding cheers of his grassroots supporters and Republican lawmakers whom one would have thought were capable of distinguishing between fact and fiction.

All of this leads me to fear that the bedrock ideal of democratic government “of, by, and for the people” has been jettisoned by a devastating combination of “fake news” and “fake politicians” that are now creating a “fake democracy” run by grossly undemocratic institutions and processes.

This wayward form of government displays the formal trappings of a democratic form of government, such as elections. But it is making it possible for “fake politicians” to get elected by re-inventing their past history and making phony promises on the campaign trail that they do not intend to keep once they are elected.

As we move through the second year after the 2016 election, the agendas and actions of these “fake politicians” appear to be blatantly unresponsive to the needs and demands of mainstream Americans, and to be causing the escalation of hardships across the board. Given widespread hacking of U.S. elections in 2016 by what are reported to be foreign and domestic hackers, it might well turn out that voters cannot hold these lawmakers electorally unaccountable in the 2018 mid-term elections.

I want to share with you below a brief description of the primary factors that have led to my disheartening fears about the present and future.  The description is followed by proposals for what I think we can achieve technologically in the near term to empower voters to institute genuine democracy in the U.S. and around the world so they can freely and fully exercise their political sovereignty.

First and foremost, it is my view that fake news and fake politicians interact with each other to produce fake democracies — amidst myriad other factors, of course. They have been intertwined since time immemorial, albeit under other names.

Several centuries ago, the historical roots of what we now call “fake news” in the 21st century took the form of self-serving claims imposed on ordinary people by more powerful people, such as monarchs.  One example is the assertion of the “divine right of kings” to rule over their so-called “subjects” who had no inherent rights.

But over the centuries, this belief has been resoundingly rejected and replaced by the universal conviction that everyone is created equal and all people have certain inalienable civil, political and human rights. These include the right to form their own governments through which they can govern themselves by electing representatives to pass laws protecting their well-being and meeting their needs and demands.

Unfortunately, even after these universal rights were formally embedded in constitutions and laws in countries throughout the world, certain out-of-step self-serving people and groups working against the tide of history have attempted to curtail voters’ exercise of their political sovereignty.  They have manipulated democratic processes and institutions by inserting legal and illegal mechanisms that prevent people from using elections and legislative processes to elect lawmakers of their choice and ensure the laws they enact and implement serve their needs and the public interest.

In the U.S., such manipulations and mechanisms include:

a) Gerrymandering of election district boundaries by political parties to exclude voters likely to vote against party candidates.

b) Passage of campaign finance laws enabling wealthy individuals and groups to buy the votes of candidates and elected officials with campaign contributions.

c) Overt and covert suppression of votes.

In the large majority of Congressional districts in the U.S., these mechanisms have been extremely effective in keeping voters from deciding who runs for office, who gets elected, and what laws are passed. Political party officials put candidates on the primary and general election ballots according to their own rules, and compel voters to choose among party-backed candidates. They run on platforms over which voters have virtually no influence or control.

Once these politicians are in office, voters are largely unable to influence their legislative actions because they are electorally unaccountable to them. Parties and politicians have passed laws that prohibit voters from electorally ousting or recalling in mid-term unsatisfactory elected officials that use underhanded and unfair tactics to stay in office term after term, and even decade after decade.

Unfortunately, the people and groups that have been continuously working to undermine democracy since I can remember have recently invented even more powerful interferences to obstruct voters’ exercise of their political sovereignty. These interferences were implemented in full force during the 2016 presidential election to attain what I perceive to be two related goals.

The first goal was to insert highly divisive issues — politically, socially and culturally — into political discourse surrounding the election aimed at putting different groups of Americans at loggerheads with each other, so as to “gin up” electoral bases large enough to elect “fake politicians” spreading “fake news.” The second goal was to use surreptitious and persuasive psycho-social techniques to prevent as many Americans as possible from making up their own minds about major issues and freely deciding which candidates they would choose to vote for.

I think it fair to say that these interferences spawned far more vitriolic, divisive, and uncompromising political views than most of us can remember. But these views were due not to inherent political divides or growing dissensions within the American people or the electorate. They were manufactured by unscrupulous “fake politicians” using underhanded electioneering tactics to get themselves elected even at the cost of undermining American democracy.

I make this assertion on the basis of scientific and academic research proving that the views of the large majority of mainstream Americans are quite convergent and amenable to compromise.  In fact, it has been shown that most voters’ legislative priorities cross ideological and partisan lines. (Stern, 2017; Pew Research Center, 2014; Fiorina (2014.)

But “fake politicians” trying to get elected in 2016 used “fake news” and a variety of underhanded tactics to mobilize a host of artificially created, uncompromising fringe groups. From what I observed, they made it a practice to unfairly and often cruelly attack other groups and use flamboyant rhetoric to inflame the passions of their supporters so they would adopt extremist views,  climb onto their bandwagons, and vote for them on election day.

What makes this undermining of democracy possible? A key enabler is what is called “Big Data” and the techniques that people and groups using the data employ to gather information about millions of people at a time, using social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This data and these techniques enable politicians to hire vote-rigging companies to gather, analyze, package, distort, falsify, and transmit slanted political information to selected groups of people to change their perceptions of what is actually happening, what is true or false, what are agendas of electoral candidates, and what they are likely to do in office if they are elected.

From what I have read, experts are convinced that this merging of social media platforms and data analytics by “fake politicians” to fabricate “fake news” disseminated to millions of voters actually swayed the outcomes of electoral races and quite possibly even the election of the U.S. president himself in 2016, whose margin of victory of 80,000 votes in three states put him over the top in the Electoral College vote.

How exactly did this merger and “Big Data” analytics make this possible? The key players were able to gather enough quantitative information online about social media users’ personalities, preferences, friends, “mental vulnerabilities” and information channels to enable them to slant the information they subsequently sent to these users, through a host of media channels, in such convincing ways as to cause them to change their views on political issues and espouse different priorities than they might otherwise have espoused. They were induced to believe that certain candidates would act in specified ways on major issues and enact specific priorities once they were in office — even though the recipients were provided no evidence these candidates would act in these ways, and there was convincing evidence they would not.

What is key here in helping us thread our way through these complicated processes is that while many and probably most people were not swayed by the distorted information they received, experts argue that enough voters were swayed to change their votes to enable certain declared “winners” to get elected.

Here’s an interesting bird’s eye view of the underlying dynamics of what happened, according to American academician, Professor Juan Cole, in his article entitled,

“Cambridge Analytica as the Matrix: Information Dominance and the Next Level of Fake News”

Here’s what Cole wrote about Cambridge Analytica’s role in the 2016 election:

“The firm used techniques like a Facebook app (invented by a Russian scientist) that offered psychologically to profile you and which scooped up all your friends’ information as well, creating a database of 50 million individuals.”

“That data told CA whether a person was a liberal or a conservative, an extravert or an introvert, and allowed a relatively thick profile to be created.”

“The firm then used the characteristics of the Internet, according to the AP, where one click leads to another click, to surround individuals with a false reality.”

“AP notes that Chris Wylie, a Cambridge Analytica co-founder, told NBC, ‘This is based on an idea called ‘informational dominance,’ which is the idea that if you can capture every channel of information around a person and then inject content around them, you can change their perception of what’s actually happening.’ He called it ‘fake news to the next level.'”

The AP article cited by Cole further explains the process of creating and disseminating “fake news” in a manner calculated to help  politicians win elections:

“Wylie said Cambridge Analytica aimed to ‘explore mental vulnerabilities of people.’ He said the firm ‘works on creating a web of disinformation online so people start going down the rabbit hole of clicking on blogs, websites etc. that make them think things are happening that may not be.’”

“Wylie told ‘Today’ that while political ads are also targeted at specific voters, the Cambridge effort aimed to make sure people wouldn’t know they were getting messages aimed at influencing their views.”

While it will probably take years for us to understand and pin down the overall impact, if any, of the vote-altering machinations and mechanisms that are alleged to have been used to sway elections in 2016, experts are already hard at work trying to get to the bottom line. Here are the observations reported in an article by one such expert, an opinion writer for the Washington Post, citing information provided by social media giant Facebook:

“Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is preparing to face a bipartisan inquisition into the social media platform’s handling of user data, and its role in facilitating (unwittingly, it seems) Russia’s interference with our election.”

‘We also learned about a disinformation campaign run by the [Russia-based] Internet Research Agency (IRA) . . . We found about 470 accounts and pages linked to the IRA, which generated around 80,000 Facebook posts over about a two-year period. Our best estimate is that approximately 126 million people may have been served content from a Facebook Page associated with the IRA at some point during that period. On Instagram, where our data on reach is not as complete, we found about 120,000 pieces of content, and estimate that an additional 20 million people were likely served it. Over the same period, the IRA also spent approximately $100,000 on more than 3,000 ads on Facebook and Instagram, which were seen by an estimated 11 million people in the United States. We shut down these IRA accounts in August 2017.’ [Emphasis added.]’

“Trump’s refusal for months to identify Russia as the culprit in a scheme to manipulate our election, and to acknowledge the effort was aimed at hurting Hillary Clinton’s campaign likely will be seen by more and more Americans as deliberate deception aimed to discredit the investigation into Russian interference.”

“Moreover, the enormous number of estimated users receiving Russian propaganda — a number Facebook has revised upwards again and again — will bolster the impression that, yes, Russian interference could very well have influenced enough voters to make a difference in the race. It would be interesting to learn how many of the users were in three key states (Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan) that Trump won by a total of 80,000 votes.”

Frankly, I think it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible at this point in time, to draw definitive conclusions about what actually happened and what causal factors led to specific electoral outcomes. But based on my observations, electoral processes that took place in 2016, on the whole, did not enable the American electorate to exert a significant influence over the decisions that are now being made and implemented by elected and appointed officials in the three branches of government at the federal level in the U.S.

In fact, many of these decisions appear to me to contradict the promises that were made by “fake politicians” using “fake news”, vote-swaying social media platforms, and “Big Data” analytics to get elected in 2016.

Overall, there appears to be greater inequality of wealth and income. Working Americans are finding it just as difficult to make ends meet, and for many, even more difficult. And the affordability and quality of health care have not increased, with millions of Americans continuing to be uninsured and unable to obtain adequate care. More people are falling through social safety net holes into poverty, ill health, homelessness and despair.

And when it comes to foreign policy, I do not detect the voices and expressed priorities of Americans at the grassroots for non-violent policies making it into the inner sanctums of official decision-making, as the U.S. engages in increasing numbers of intimidating political and military conflicts abroad, and adds to the toll of unnecessary and unjustified injuries and loss of life.

So here’s the bottom line for me: In the aftermath of the 2016 election, I see fake news, fake politicians, and an increasingly fake democracy threatening the quality of life, the sustainability of the environment, and the future of the U.S as never before.

More and more fake news is being spewed into American political discourse and driving governmental policy making at all levels, by politicians and pundits of all stripes. They are enacting legislation that in no way responds to the needs and priorities of the large majority of mainstream Americans at the grassroots, or the public interest.

That said, I think it fair to ask what do I think can be done to restore the political sovereignty of the American electorate, given the inability of ordinary people and voters to use traditional reform levers to change the status quo through U.S. electoral and legislative processes that have been so thoroughly corrupted by special interests, undemocratic political parties and fake politicians?

Below I describe very briefly my plan to build a secure, voter-driven political organizing and consensus-building platform, the Global Social Network for Voters. It is excerpted from the White Paper you can access here: https://reinventdemocracy.ch

The Global Social Network for Voters: A Unique Web-Based Superstructure

In order to circumvent current political party practices that electorally and legislative disempower voters, it is necessary to create a web-based superstructure that enables voters to set their individual legislative agendas autonomously, build consensus with voters across ideological and partisan around common agendas, and organize politically to elect lawmakers to enact their agendas enacted legislatively.

The Global Social Network for Voters creates this unique superstructure around the patented consensus-building Interactive Voter Choice System and its party-building technology. The network and system will create a common ground where voters as well as elected representatives, political parties and electoral candidates can collectively define, share, and reconcile divergent legislative priorities.

The agenda setting, political organizing and consensus-building tools provided by the network and system enable voters to take the lead, individually and collectively, in defining their priorities across ideological and partisan lines.  The tools enable them to organize politically to run and elect representatives of their choice to implement their agendas.

These tools enable voters to bring about two major paradigm shifts in the structure and functioning of political parties.  First, voters can democratically re-organize existing political parties to ensure they meet the needs of the voters they are intended to serve.  Second, voters can also build, control and manage their own online voting blocs, political parties and electoral coalitions that can work with traditional parties — or supplant them electorally.

Voters’ blocs, parties and coalitions hosted on the network will be motivated to build consensus across ideological and partisan lines in order to forge transpartisan electoral bases large enough to win elections.  If they pursue narrow, hyper-partisan, ideologically driven agendas, they are likely to become losing splinter groups that lack the voting strength they need to win elections.  Another advantage to be gained by continuous outreach and transpartisan consensus-building is that this strategy will enable their blocs, parties and coalitions to grow large enough to win elections without needing campaign financing from special interests that would later skew their legislative priorities.

Post-election, voters will be able to pressure lawmakers to enact their agendas by using network tools to conduct online petition drives, referendums, initiatives and straw recall votes. They can publicize the results and share them with their elected representatives to focus their attention on voters’ immediate legislative goals, and demonstrate the depth and breadth of their base of popular support. Decisive straw recall votes will alert recalcitrant lawmakers to electoral risks and vulnerablities they might incur if they ignore voters’ demands.

In anticipation of upcoming elections, bloc, party and coalition members can individually and collectively evaluate lawmakers’ legislative actions to determine how effective they appear to have been in exerting their best efforts to enact bloc, party and coalition agendas. They can use their evaluations to decide whether to support or oppose their re-election, and organize get-out-the-vote campaigns to elect lawmakers of their choice.