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"Connected Age gives power to people" View the document (pdf) October 8, 2006 It's the home stretch of another dreary election season. For months, candidates have treated voters as little more than ATMs. On Nov. 7, we will limp to the finish line, bemoan the low turnout and berate young people for not being more involved. And then we'll do it all again in two years. Poke around in any city or county in the country and you will find a byzantine tangle of voter-registration rules, wandering polling places and confused, or worse yet, intentionally disenfranchised voters. Ballyhooed changes, such as electronic voting machines, will only bring more of the same. Even if we could all vote at our kitchen tables or on our laptops at the beach, we'd still have only Tweedledee or Tweedledum to vote for. Gerrymandering, the contorting of districts to keep them under the same party control and the overwhelming ability of incumbents to raise gobs of campaign money, have such a chokehold on the system that 98 percent and 85 percent of the highest-spending candidates won their House and Senate races respectively in 2002. As if the lack of real, honest, contested elections weren't bad enough, the entire responsibility for navigating the system, registering to make oneself eligible, locating a polling place and trying to find accurate information about candidates rests solely with us voters. Somehow, voting in America went from being a fundamental right to a privilege. But it doesn't have to stay this way. We could create a better system, not just tinker with the current one. Consider two all-American inventions. A Model T Ford had a combustion engine that ran on gasoline, four wheels, a chassis, a steering wheel and a horn. A 2007 Ford Mustang is geometrically faster and quieter, and has thousands of computer chips that make it comfortable, safe and snazzy. But essentially, in its design and function, today's car is the same as yesterday's. But an iPod isn't the same as your old turntable, cassette or CD player. It's an entirely new and different experience. An iPod allows a user to store thousands of songs in a bite-size gizmo. What's more, anyone can create, catalog, share, download and manage content -- in this case songs -- any which way they'd like, immediately and inexpensively. Welcome to the Connected Age, where our interactions happen faster, cheaper -- and better. Already, the Connected Age has spurred millions of us to participate politically online every day. Gloriously untrained, we write our own online diaries, in essence producing our own daily op-ed columns. In the past several years, more than a million people have chosen to meet with perfect strangers about their passions through Meetup.com. It's time to turn this serendipity into a voting system that could deliver on the promise of this new century. Certainly Internet voting is the way of the future. But just voting online isn't enough to engage more people in our democracy in more meaningful ways. What could a system that did that look like, say, by 2020? The new voting system could begin on or any time after your 18th birthday. At that time, you'd become eligible to vote by simply logging onto your state's voter Web site. Here, you would activate your voting status by using your Social Security number, inputting your permanent address and creating a personal identification number. This information would be quickly verified by federal government databases, such as the Postal Service, motor vehicle offices, Internal Revenue Service or Medicaid offices, as negotiated by your state. This process assumes that everyone has signed up for Social Security at birth or when they are naturalized. Nearly all Americans now do so voluntarily. This will add one more incentive to do so early. And that's it. Your right to vote has been activated. I appreciate that this system may raise some concerns about privacy. But whether we like it or not, whether we knew it was happening or approved of it, the fact is that our personal information is already being stored, cataloged, analyzed, shared and used by many government agencies. We would have to decide if democratic participation is as important a use for it as searching for terrorists. Activating your voting rights is just a beginning. After turning on your voting status, an icon, say an American flag, would appear on the screen of your desktop computer, cell phone, laptop or personal digital assistant. Click on the flag and your personal voting portal would open. On your screen would be links to the voting histories for the elected officials who represent you or whom you're interested in tracking. There would also be links to sites like the Sunlight Foundation, with its Congresspedia and databases tracking who your representatives are meeting with, which corporate and lobbying firms are funding them, and how this ties into the legislation they are backing or blocking. You could set alerts and filters to bring you news articles on these officials, bills or issues you are passionate about, any time you want them. For instance, you could get news articles and alerts about when your state Senate would be debating new redistricting plans. You would then e-mail your friends to join you at the hearings. You could talk to other voters about the redistricting effort on blogs and in chat rooms. You could sign up for local meet-ups, perhaps facilitated by Leagues of Women Voters, where strangers could come together informally at a local library or coffee shop to discuss an issue, a candidate or just their dreams for their towns or country. Voter portals would be two-way streets. Candidates would use Internet TV channels, blogs, even video blogs to reach out to voters and debate the issues -- for free. So long, campaign-finance reform! Candidates would become so adept at having filter-free conversations with voters that scripted, focus-grouped clones would become very easy to spot -- and to defeat. Voting was never intended to be our sole civic activity. But it has become so for millions of us. In this scenario, though, we would move from pushing a button once every two or four years to vote for candidates about whom we know very little to becoming fully engaged in our democracy. More people would be able to run for office by connecting with potential voters online and at local meet-ups. And ultimately, hopefully, more good policies that reflect the interests and concerns of citizens, not lobbyists, would be enacted. The Connected Age moves the power that institutions used to have, for informing, organizing, mobilizing and fundraising millions of people into the hands of individuals. Institutions don't change systems, particularly those that elected officials are very invested in keeping as is. We, the people, do that. We have the power to do so today like never before. All we need now is the political will. |