By

Nancy Bordier and Joseph M. Firestone

As the Occupy Wall Street movement grows, OWS members are weighing their options for obtaining redress of their grievances.

Holding and expanding the ground they occupy is an obvious priority. It draws worldwide attention to their grievances and increasing numbers. It gives them a place to meet, build relationships, discuss and debate their issues, and plan.

Foiling violent action on the part of the police and anarchists is a constant distraction, but it helps the movement develop rules of engagement for everybody. Civil disobedience and voluntary arrests is another avenue, as is direct action, like preventing the seizure of illegally foreclosed homes.

Seeking redress through the political process is even more problematic. Many OWS members believe it would be a futile exercise to try to get lawmakers who have been corrupted by special interests to pass laws in their favor. Using the ballot box to replace their elected representatives is difficult, if not impossible, now that the U.S. Supreme court has given corporations a green light to spend unlimited amounts of corporate funds to influence elections.

The nation’s two major parties, the Democrats and Republicans, are a major stumbling block to non-party candidates trying to win electoral victories over party-backed candidates. The parties’ grip on the nation’s electoral machinery, and their ability to raise huge amounts of money for their candidates from special interests, gives them decisive advantages over their adversaries at the ballot box.

Efforts to pass laws reforming this corrupt system appear equally futile. Few lawmakers would vote to overturn the laws (governing campaign finance, gerrymandering and elections) that get them elected and enable them to hold on to office.

Despite these obstacles, we think there is a way OWS members can use the political process to redress their grievances. It is by taking advantage of the Internet and a new web-based organizing platform to build winning voting blocs and electoral coalitions that OWS members control.

The platform has agenda-setting tools that enable bloc and coalition members to collaboratively translate their grievances into legislative agendas. It also has consensus-building tools the blocs and coalitions can use to screen, nominate and run candidates for office at all levels of government who will enact their agendas.

While this platform and the website being built around it, reinventdemocracy.net, are still in development, it is possible that they will be available in time for OWS members to elect enough of their own representatives to shift control of Congress away from the 1% in 2012.

The Internet has already played a pivotal role in empowering the OWS movement to spread its tentacles — and tents, throughout the country and the world. It has enabled the movement to broadcast a global rallying cry that hurls the fury of the masses against the “1%” and their political bedfellows who have plunged the remaining “99%” into dire economic and financial straits.

Here in the U.S., unemployed college graduates are joining hands with trade unionists, war veterans, senior citizens, community organizers, dispossessed homeowners, the chronically homeless, and growing numbers of the 100 million Americans living in poverty, or in the category just above it. In early November, OWS demonstrators in Oakland, California, carried out a general strike that shut down its port, the fifth largest in the nation, and brought the city to a standstill.

We believe this movement is unstoppable. We also believe that it has the potential to shift the balance of power from the 1% to the 99% if its members join forces to combine the large scale collective action power of the Internet and the platform we describe below.

By so doing, they can collaboratively translate their grievances into legislative agendas, forestall efforts to embroil the movement in violent confrontations, and build winning voting blocs and coalitions to elect lawmakers who will enact their agendas into the law of the land.

Fixing the System

Currently, there are three major contenders for electoral victories in 2012. The Democratic and Republican parties, and a third party in formation, Americans Elect (AE).

The election prospects of the major party candidates are dimmed by the low regard in which a majority of voters hold the two parties and their elected representatives. A substantial majority of voters say they would consider voting for a third party candidate. That’s where AE comes in.

The unpopularity of the two major parties may give AE candidates the chance to be the exception to the rule that third party candidates usually lose. AE candidates could actually beat major party candidates if they attract the votes of two groups of voters.

The first is the 40% of the electorate that is not registered in either major party. The second are disaffected registered Democrats and Republicans who polls show would vote for a competitive third party candidate if he or she were running on a separate ballot line from either major party.

We view AE’s electoral prospects with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it would be highly desirable for a third party to run competitive candidates against major party candidates — provided it makes the parties and candidates more responsive to voters because they fear they might lose elections to the third party.

On the other hand, it would be undesirable for a third party run by a privately-run corporation like AE, whose board of directors writes the rules, to get into the process if it does not honor the will of the voters any more than the major parties.

[Note: Since AE declares itself a political party in documents addressed to state election authorities, we consider it a party even though it also defines itself as a "social welfare" organization.]

It would be even more undesirable if such a third party uses undemocratic means to nominate candidates, undermine other political parties and the political party system, and elect lawmakers unresponsive to their constituents’ demands that they address the inequality issues raised by the wealth and income gap between the 1% and the 99%.

Unfortunately, in our opinion, AE presents risks on all these fronts. Based on what we have learned about AE, we think it may turn out to be no more responsive to the wishes of the electorate than the two major parties. We also think its modus operandi might well erode fundamental democratic processes and the political party system itself.

With respect to redressing the grievances of OWS members, AE’s well-documented agenda appears to us more likely to favor the 1% than the 99%. The founders of AE and AE’s predecessor, Unity08, have frequently labeled their platform as a “centrist” platform, presumably situated in the middle of a political spectrum they appear to assume comprises a “left”, i.e. a Democratic platform, and a “right”, i.e. a Republican platform.

According to one AE spokesperson, AE’s “centrist” platform is apparently a fiscally conservative one:

“We need a fiscal plan developed that puts us on a path to reducing our debt and deficit while encouraging entitlement reform and cuts in defense and discretionary spending.”

If we are correctly reading between the lines of this statement, AE favors many of the same policies favored by the two major parties that have led to the wealth and income gap between the 1% and the 99%.

Needless to say, AE is within its rights to pursue whatever agenda it wishes. However, it is important to note that terms like “left”, “right” and “center” are widely viewed as having lost their authenticity as accurate descriptors of the electorate’s legislative preferences.

As linguist George Lakoff pointed out years ago, the claim that a “center” and “centrists” exist is empirically and statistically unfounded.

Pew Research Center corroborates Lakoff with research showing that the views of the electorate, and supposed “centrists”, diverge too widely to be categorized as “left”, “right” or “center”, according to a recent survey, Beyond Red and Blue.

The solution we advocate does not use these obsolete labels. It enables the electorate to build winning voting blocs and electoral coalitions around collectively-set legislative agendas that defy categorization as “left”, “right” or “center”.

These blocs and coalitions can work with political parties of their choice, but they will remain autonomous and independent of parties because they will be controlled by voters, and the needs and wants expressed in their legislative agendas will be defined by the voters that control the blocs and coalitions.

Below we describe how this solution works. In particular, we show how it compares with Americans Elect, with which it shares a number of common goals but diverges in far more important respects regarding form, substance and likely impact.

A Comparative Analysis

The system-changing solution we advocate is a web-based “bottom up” political organizing platform, the Interactive Voter Choice System (IVCS), invented by political activist and co-author Nancy Bordier. OWS members can use the platform to join with voters of all persuasions to build self-organizing online voting blocs and electoral coalitions.

They can manage and structure their blocs and coalitions as they wish, and organize themselves in ways that prevent the emergence of organizational hierarchies that concentrate power at the top, as political parties tend to do.

They can collaboratively set transpartisan legislative agendas, which transcend the partisan ideological orientations of the major political parties, by using the IVCS agenda-setting, political organizing and consensus-building tools that will be available on reinventdemocracy.net.

They can screen, nominate and run candidates on the ballot lines of political parties of their choice, and build broad-based transpartisan electoral bases that have the voting strength needed to put their candidates in office.

This system contrasts with AmericansElect.org (AE), which we view as a “top down” solution since it is controlled by the board of directors of a single corporation. It is led by veteran Wall Street investor Peter Ackerman.

AE’s current objective is to conduct an online nominating convention to nominate a “balanced” presidential ticket for the 2012 election outside the two major parties. Based on publicly available AE documents and statements, we interpret “balanced” to mean “centrist”.

As mentioned earlier, AE appears to be targeting the 40% of voters who are not registered in the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as disaffected members of the two parties who will vote for a competitive alternative to their party’s ticket if he or she were running on a separate ballot line from either major party.

What the two solutions have in common are their goals of

– Loosening the Democratic and Republican parties’ grip on U.S. electoral processes;

– Empowering the U.S. electorate to play a much larger role in elections than the Democratic and Republican parties have previously allowed them to play;

– Enabling voters to express their political views online, compare their respective views, and screen candidates to compare candidates’ views to their own;

– Empowering voters to nominate and elect candidates who will represent the will of their constituents more closely than major party candidates have represented the will of their constituents in recent years.

The two solutions differ in just as many respects as they converge.

The IVCS solution enables voters to define any legislative agendas they wish, form as many online voting blocs and electoral coalitions as they wish, run as many candidates as they wish, for any office, and place them on the ballot line of any party they wish.

In contrast, the AE solution is attempting to draw voters into a single party, platform and nominating convention to produce a single presidential ticket, which AE plans to simultaneously place on the ballot lines in all 50 states that it states it is in the process of obtaining.

Whereas IVCS-enabled voting blocs and coalitions can make their own rules and create non-hierarchical voting blocs and coalitions, AE’s corporate parent makes the rules and has created what appears to be a pyramid-shaped organizational hierarchy in which authority is concentrated at the top, apparently in the hands of the chairman of the board.

While IVCS blocs and coalitions can nominate any candidates they wish, AE’s bylaws and rules appear to limit voters’ nominations to those acceptable to a committee appointed by its board of directors, whose members serve at its pleasure.

Voters must nominate what AE variously defines as a “coalition ticket” and a “balanced ticket”. Article 1 of AE bylaws specify the goal of the nomination process to be that of nominating a
“coalition ticket responsive to the vast majority of citizens while remaining independent of special interests and the partisan interests of either major political party.”

According to its Pre-Convention Rules, the corporation’s “Candidate Certification Committee” determines “whether any proposed ticket is balanced” and which candidates meet meet this criterion:

[A] “ticket with two persons consisting of a Democrat and a Republican shall be deemed to be balanced. A ticket with two persons of the same political party shall be deemed to be imbalanced.” (See Section 8.0 of the bylaws.)

We see here a discrepancy. On the one hand, AE claims that the convention is the “first nonpartisan presidential nomination”. On the other hand, AE requires voters to choose candidates from the nation’s two major political parties, which are clearly partisan.

If the convention were truly “nonpartisan”, the ticket would comprise candidates that belonged to no party, since political parties are “partisan”, according to most common definitions, as are their candidates.

The bias toward a coalition Democrat and Republican presidential ticket also appears to violate AE’s core call to action, which is to “Pick a President, Not a Party”, according to a recent AE press release.

This throwback to the two major parties whose candidates AE is seeking to defeat, when combined with AE’s insistence on a “balanced ticket” comprised of a member of each party that AE is seeking to defeat, reveal what AE’s real goal might be.

We believe it is not merely to defeat major party candidates, but to replace both unpopular parties by migrating their supporters over to the Americans Elect party via a ticket comprised of at least one Democrat and one Republican.

From this perspective, AE’s underlying objective could very well be that of realigning U.S. politics around a single “centrist” party that supplants the two major parties, whose chronic electoral posturing have created a stalemate in Congress and paralyzed the federal government.

To attain this objective, AE’s spokespersons continually castigate the two major parties for being “partisan”. They claim that AE is “nonpartisan” even though its founders are on record as long-time advocates of a “centrist” agenda, and the instrument AE uses to gauge voters’ political views is biased, in our opinion, to skew results in a “centrist” direction, which is a “partisan” direction.

And even though AE says it is allowing voters to formulate the party’s platform and nominate its candidates, by expressing their views in response to an instrument containing an online survey of their views, and voting on nominees, AE’s board of directors has appointed committees to decide what the platform actually is and which candidates can be nominated.

We believe that if AE were genuinely committed to allowing voters to determine the platform, it could simply tally their responses and formulate questions corresponding to the tallies. If it were genuinely committed to allowing voters to nominate the candidates they choose, it would allow them to do so without the oversight of committees controlled by the corporation.

This potential for deviating from authenticity raises questions about the risks inherent in a political party being owned and operated by a private corporation. While AE’s corporate bylaws do give voters it qualifies the possibility of overturning AE decisions by a 2/3 vote, these allowances are virtually meaningless since few bodies ever attain a 2/3 majority. Accordingly, we find it unlikely that AE, a privately run corporation, can be held accountable by any constituency other than its board of directors.

Given this potential lack of accountability, we think it vitally important to consider the risks inherent in AE’s emergence as a political party capable of bringing about the collapse of the two major parties.

These risks are particularly relevant to the “99%” because AE’s founders, leaders and contributors appear to favor a partisan “centrist” agenda that supports the “1%” and, we suspect, are likely to do what they can to obtain from their nominating convention an agenda and candidates who will legislate in the interests of the 1% if elected.

In this light, it is well to bear in mind that the favored candidate of the founders of AE’s predecessor, Unity08, is reported to have been New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and that rumors continue to circulate that he is a prospective candidate for AE’s 2012 presidential ticket.

We list below further steps AE is taking that, in our view, may well be intended to produce a platform and ticket reflective of AE’s preferences.

While they show considerable legal ingenuity in skirting around the electoral laws that have traditionally given the two major parties unfair advantages over third party candidates, they also show a disturbing willingness to undercut traditional democratic processes.

It appears to us that they may undermine the political primary process as a whole, and pose a systemic risk of further weakening the responsiveness of the political party system to the will of the people.

Here are several examples:

1. State laws allow eligible voters to register to vote in any political party they wish, and parties do not have the power to expel any voter or prevent them from voting in a party primary.

In contrast, AE bylaws specify that any person can be “terminated from Americans Elect without prior notice by the Board”. (See sections 2.4 and 5.4 of the bylaws.)

2. AE’s online nominating convention circumvents the state-by-state primaries conducted by the two major parties without replacing them with an equally responsive alternative as far as voter-candidate interaction is concerned.

Specifically, AE asserts in its bylaws that the “secure Internet connection” that it provides voters participating in its convention is a substitute for a “physical presence” in a state. (See sections 8. and 8.1. of Americans Elect bylaws.)

Whether AE’s “Internet connection” is a desirable replacement for face-to-face caucuses and primary campaigns at the state level is a doubtful and arguable proposition.

3. Unlike government-sponsored party primaries conducted at state level in which government officials are responsible for ensuring the accurate tallying of the ballots cast, it appears that AE, a private corporation, intends to have the votes cast in its online nominating convention tallied by its own corporate employees on its own in-house computers.

If AE had instead conferred this task on a third party without ties to the organization, the accuracy of the results could have been externally verified.

4. AE’s bylaws contain a provision stipulating that its online nominating convention does not require a quorum. (See section 8.3.)

Presumably, this also means that there is no minimum number of votes that must be cast by voters in a particular state before AE can legally place its presidential ticket on its ballot lines in that state.

Whether an online nominating convention that has no quorum is a desirable and legal replacement for state-level primaries is also an arguable proposition. For it might well lead to a presidential ticket nominated by an extremely small fraction of the electorate being placed automatically and simultaneously on AE ballot lines in all 50 states.

Quite possibly AE is unconcerned by the prospect that its nominating convention and ticket are not representative or responsive to the “vast majority of citizens”, for the reason that its overriding goal may be just to place on its ballot lines the ticket its committees have teased out of its online nominating process.

Once it does so, we think it likely that large amounts of campaign financing from the 1% will be expended to make the ticket appear responsive to the “vast majority of citizens” infuriated by the conduct of the two major parties, drive AE’s newly forged electoral base to the polls to vote for AE’s ticket, and quite possibly catapult the nascent Americans Elect party and its candidates into the winner’s circle on election day.”

5. At the same time AE is loudly protesting the two major parties’ their grip on the nation’s electoral machinery, and their use of it to prevent third party candidates from winning elections, AE’s bylaws appear designed to similarly restrict competition, by preventing unwelcome external challengers who do not participate in AE’s online nominating process from challenging the process, the nominees, or the outcome.

Section 8.6 of AE bylaws state that the “exclusive means” for any candidate to get on its ballot lines is through its “internet convention”. If state laws allow a “presidential primary election vote”, these votes shall be “advisory only”.

It remains to be seen whether AE’s assertion of these unusual prerogatives will be met with legal challenges at state level when it attempts to place a ticket on its ballot lines.

What is most concerning is that these short-cuts and end-runs around democratic processes may be only the initial phase of AE’s grand realignment strategy, whose overarching goal, we suspect, is to collapse the two major parties into a single major uni-party, the Americans Elect party.

Once the corporation obtains a presidential ticket from its self-styled convention process, and places it on the ballot in all 50 states simultaneously, we expect to see unprecedented sums of special interest money expended to elect its ticket. AE candidates will join the ranks of the Democratic and Republican candidates in holding their hands out to the same special interest contributors pushing the same special interest agendas.

If AE’s ticket draws enough votes away from the two major party tickets, it could actually elect a president and vice president nominated outside the two parties. The next best outcome for AE would be that its ticket draws enough votes away from the major party candidates to prevent the election of either of them, and thereby throws the determination of the outcome of the election into the U.S. House of Representatives.

While that outcome is unpredictable, it would seriously weaken the two major parties even though it favored the fortunes of future “centrist” AE candidates whose policies might well be no different from theirs.

Going forward, we suspect that if AE’s ticket receives 5% of the vote in a respectable number of states, thereby entitling it to remain on the ballot for 2014 and 2016, it will work out the inconsistencies in its legal status and function as a full-fledged “centrist” political party running candidates for all offices at all levels of government, and not merely the presidency.

If so, based on what we have learned about AE’s past history and current trajectory, we think these candidates are likely to favor policies that benefit the 1% rather than the 99%. If such a scenario is in the offing, the IVCS solution takes on special importance, particularly to the members of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

For we think the IVCS solution, and it alone, has the potential to empower not only the OWS movement but the entire U.S. electorate to forestall a possible AE takeover of U.S. electoral and legislative processes, assuming, as we do, that such a power play and realignment around a single party may well be in the offing.

Here’s why we place such confidence in IVCS’s potential:

1. OWS members can mobilize far greater numbers of voters than AE can bring into its fold, by using IVCS tools to bring together U.S. voters of all persuasions into consensus-building processes to translate their grievances into legislative agendas.Voters using the IVCS solution have the potential to exert a far greater political impact than AE nationally and locally because AE supporters can only sit at their computers, answer AE’s questions and sit back passively while AE committees run the show. That’s because IVCS users will get more deeply involved in starting their own ongoing dialogues and debates about their own self-defined issues, setting their legislative agendas, and building and managing voting blocs and coalitions to elect their own representatives to enact their agendas.

2. The IVCS solution enables voters to counteract AE’s potential weakening of voter participation at the state level, by using IVCS tools to democratize and re-invigorate the electoral process at the grassroots.

Voting blocs and coalitions formed with IVCS tools will be able to inject a new dynamism and give-and-take into electoral politics. They will foster a healthy competition among all players, — blocs, coalitions and parties — to develop legislative agendas, negotiate common agendas with prospective candidates, and nominate and run slates of candidates that have broad popular appeal.

3. The IVCS solution will involve voters of all persuasions in developing a dynamic mix of interconnected blocs that will be constantly merging into ever larger coalitions, all seeking to develop and update common legislative agendas and forge electoral bases large enough to get their candidates elected.

4. Voters of all persuasions will use IVCS agenda-setting tools to set “transpartisan” legislative agendas that cross party lines and attract broad cross-sections of voters to their blocs and coalitions. As their numbers grow, they will be able to use IVCS consensus-building tools like the voting utility to help them make decisions.

These blocs and coalitions will spontaneously merge into a decentralized nationwide network of interconnected, interacting blocs and coalitions that supplant political parties as the driving forces of U.S. politics, even while creating alliances with democratized political parties of their choice.

5. To get their candidates on the ballot, blocs and coalitions can put them on the lines of any political party by registering sufficient numbers of their members in the party, collecting enough signatures from party members to get their candidates on the ballot, and getting out enough qualified voters to elect the candidates.

6. The IVCS solution has the potential to encourage greater numbers of candidates to run for office because they will be able to rely on the support and voting strength of IVCS-enabled voting blocs, electoral coalitions and electoral bases.

This positive dynamic will greatly reduce the influence of special interest campaign contributions in U.S. elections because these candidates will not need such contributions to get their message out. For their message will already be known to the members of the blocs and coalitions backing them, since many of them will have participated in setting the agendas and nominating the candidates in the first place.

7. Voters, and especially members of the Occupy Wall Street movement, can use the IVCS solution to usher in a “transpartisan” voter-driven era in U.S. politics that will be neither “left”, “right” nor “center”.

While there will always be “partisan” issues favored by certain “parties” of voters, IVCS provides voters unique problem-solving and consensus-building tools for reconciling differences regarding legislative priorities and collectively-setting legislative agendas.
Voters will be able to convert partisan differences into common agendas, including the partisan preferences of any political party, AE included.

IVCS consensus-building tools will enable them to build large electoral bases that permit them to outflank and outmaneuver political parties with whom they are not aligned.

Yet they can use these same tools to build winning electoral bases and coalitions with any political parties with which they wish to align around shared legislative agendas and common slates of candidates.

8. Finally, one of the most significant contributions of IVCS tools, especially the agenda-setting and political organizing tools, is that they enable voting blocs and coalitions to use their agendas as legislative mandates for which their members can hold their elected representatives accountable at the ballot box when they seek re-election.

If incumbents cannot provide tangible evidence and concrete track records showing they have exerted their best efforts to enact voters’ written legislative agendas, the voting blocs and coalitions that got them elected will defeat them when they seek re-election.

Voters will at last be able to prevent politicians from saying one thing on the campaign trail and then doing another when they are in office.

Conclusion

The members of the Occupy Wall Street movement have demonstrated an understandable reluctance to establish hierarchical structures and decision-making rules. They prefer unanimous consent over other formulas.

What we hope is that the members of the movement will recognize that the IVCS platform enables them to build non-hierarchical political organizations like the self-organizing voting blocs and coalitions described above, and use them to obtain redress of their grievances through the political process.

Their blocs and coalitions will maintain their responsiveness to their members and their fluidity because their members will be controlling them and making all the rules.

If any members disagree with the way things are going, and encounter insurmountable obstacles in their efforts to redirect the things they object to, they can exit the blocs and coalitions and start their own. They can use the same IVCS tools available to all blocs and coalitions for attracting new members.

We believe the IVCS platform is uniquely designed to empower movement members and the 99% to join forces to translate their grievances into convergent legislative agendas in the near term.

We are confident they will be able to elect enough of their own representatives to shift control of Congress away from the 1% in 2012, enact their agendas, and at the same time empower the electorate to obtain permanent control of the nation’s electoral and legislative processes and outcomes.

(Cross-posted from Correntewire.com)

[Ed. note: This series has been re-posted by Joe Firestone (a.k.a. letsgetitdone) on behalf of author Nancy Bordier with her express permission.]

By Nancy Bordier

See the series introduction here.

Thanks to advances in Internet technologies, the obstacles the major parties and their special interest backers have erected to prevent voters from ousting their incumbents can be circumvented by voters who leverage the large scale collective action power of the Internet via the web application described in this series to get control of U.S. electoral processes. This application, the Interactive Voter Choice System (IVCS), enables dissatisfied voters to self-organize and build voting blocs and electoral coalitions that can run winning candidates in local Congressional elections without special interest funding. The voting blocs and coalitions will be able to run candidates who can defeat special interest-backed candidates, wealthy self-funded candidates, and candidates run by special interest-backed voting blocs, such as the Tea Party, because they will be able to set transpartisan agendas that appeal to a broader-cross section of voters. These voters will decide who they want to run and what their candidates’ agendas will be.

The political context is very favorable for supporting this kind of role for the IVCS. 40% of the electorate has rejected membership in the Democratic and Republican parties. Their membership has shrunk to roughly 33% and 23%, respectively. Not all of them identify strongly with the Parties. In fact, two-thirds of all Americans favor having a third political party that would run candidates for president, Congress and state offices against Republican and Democratic candidates. With more than 80% of the electorate wanting to oust most Congressional representatives, because they favor special interests over their constituents’ interests, typical election districts have more than enough dissatisfied voters to decide who wins and loses in the 2012 Congressional elections.

Because they will be able to mobilize these voters and engage them in collectively setting transpartisan bloc agendas crossing party lines and embracing new ideas, self-organizing voting blocs, whose formation will be facilitated by the application, will be able to create winning electoral bases comprised of disaffected voters across the political spectrum. These electoral bases will be broad and transpartisan. They will be able to outflank and outmaneuver stand-alone political parties and voting blocs running special interest-backed candidates with special interest agendas.

What is unique about the IVCS application is that it empowers voters for the first time in history to set agendas that can serve as written legislative mandates to candidates and incumbents setting forth voters’ policy priorities across the board. The application enables them to use their legislative mandates to drive U.S. electoral and legislative processes every step of the way. Voters can choose their policy priorities from a database of 104 options, annotate the options, and add their own options to the database. They can then contact voters who have chosen similar priorities, and join forces with them to build voting blocs in their local Congressional election districts around shared policy agendas, using communication and collaboration tools and services provided on the website built around the application.

The application is also unique in that it enables voters to play a pro-active rather than a re-active role in U.S. elections. Voters can use their voting blocs and legislative mandates to set the terms and conditions for supporting Congressional candidates. They can use them to identify, nominate, run and elect Congressional candidates whose agendas converge with their own. When their candidates take office, they will have written legislative mandates from the constituents they represent. Voters can use them to oversee their representatives’ legislative initiatives, guide them through legislative decision-making processes, and help them decide what compromises to make in order to build support for their initiatives. Voters can also use their legislative mandates to evaluate their representatives’ track records and hold them accountable when they come up for re-election.

By enabling voters to run candidates with specific legislative mandates and use the mandates to hold them accountable, the application enables voters to close the glaring gap that has arisen in U.S. politics between voters’ policy priorities and their Congressional representatives’ priorities, and the laws voters want to see enacted and those that are actually enacted. Lawmakers will no longer feel free to cavalierly disregard the promises they make on the campaign trail once they are in office. If elected representatives cannot demonstrate that they have exerted their best efforts to implement the written legislative mandates their constituents gave them when they ran for office, the voters will be able to defeat them when they come up for re-election, even in the face of special interest funding and support.

The application also will greatly reduce or even negate the influence of special interest money in elections, and eventually may cause direct special interest contributions to dry up due to their increasing ineffectiveness. Since voters will put their own candidates on the ballot running on legislative agendas that converge with their own, the candidates will not have to solicit special interest campaign contributions to get their message out, since voters will already know what it is. Neither the blocs nor the candidates will have to pay for expensive political advertisements, since voting blocs will be able to count on their own members as the mainstay of their voting strength, as well as on their ability to reach out to the invisible, but very real and powerful foundation of American political dynamics, their own local influence networks of friends, family, neighbors and co-workers to get out a winning vote on election day.

In addition, by enabling voters to set their policy agendas across the board, the application also enables voters to mobilize a broader electoral base around a larger repertory of priorities than existing political parties or special interest-funded voting blocs, like the Tea Party. Moreover, as described below, the application, especially its Voting Utility, allows voting blocs to easily and pragmatically modify their agendas to enlarge their electoral base quickly, increasing their chances of defeating opponents whose agendas are constrained by fixed, special interest ideologies.

Significantly, the application will shift the locus of political debate from the national to the local level, where voters will be continuously engaged in debating the policy options they want to include in their agendas, updating the legislative mandates they give to their elected representatives as legislation moves through Congress, negotiating common agendas with other blocs and coalition members, selecting their nominees, collecting signatures to put them on the ballot, and getting out the vote to elect their candidates in primary and general elections.

Voters will be able to team up locally with their candidates and elected representatives to devise pragmatic, workable policy solutions to national crises that the stalemated U.S. Congress appears unable to resolve, such as the economic recession, and the failure of the economy to generate the jobs needed by American workers. Voters can use the application to transform their local communities into seed beds of democratic public policy formation that serves the public interest, and prevents special interests from dictating public policy at the federal level.

Moreover, the citizen-managed policy dialogues that grassroots voting blocs engender, will overshadow the mass media disinformation campaigns that dupe undiscerning voters and turn political discourse in the U.S. into verbal slugfests. Since the website built around the application will provide voting bloc members state-of-the-art one-to-one and one-to-many messaging, networking, and collaboration capabilities, voters will be able to communicate with each other instantaneously to share and objectively screen and vet critical information. They will be able to debunk the political disinformation, innuendo and propaganda emanating from the corporate-funded campaign advertisements that will be flooding the country as a result of the Citizens United decision.

In addition to online messaging, voting bloc members working within a Congressional district will be able to hold "town hall" meetings where they can get together, face-to-face and online, with other bloc members and non-bloc voters to express, debate and reconcile their views — by using the application’s Voting Utility to vote on them if necessary. Voting blocs engendered by this application may well be unique in their capacity to institute democratic consensus-building processes at all levels of government by electing representatives who will see to it that such processes replace undemocratic ones like the Senate’s filibuster, and become the norm in all public policy decision-making arenas.

(Cross-posted at All Life Is Problem Solving, Fiscal Sustainability, and Reinventing Democracy)

By

Nancy Bordier

The majority of U.S. voters want to see most elected representatives in Congress defeated because they favor special interests over voters’ interests. But, voters face enormous obstacles in replacing the nation’s lawmakers with representatives untainted by special interest money and influence. These obstacles are the result of the electoral monopoly of the two major political parties, the gerrymandering of electoral districts, unfair federal and state election laws, and special interest-inspired campaign finance laws that favor private over public financing of elections. The recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC exacerbates the influence of these factors.

These obstacles make the large majority of seats in Congress "safe seats". Incumbents and first time candidates running on the Democratic and Republican tickets with special interest financing have virtually insurmountable advantages over candidates running against them without major party support, or special interest financing. Top-down manipulation of elections is the result. Since voter dissatisfaction can’t be expressed through the dominant parties, grievances accumulate over time in feelings of frustration, anger and alienation.

From time-to-time however, these feelings morph into rage, and we see things like the recent surge of militant fringe groups of irate voters who are infuriated by government, both major parties, and their Congressional representatives. Front groups financed by wealthy special interests are co-opting these voters into a new 21st century form of hybrid voting bloc. It contains similar segments of voters as the bloc that enabled the Republican party and its special interest backers to dominate U.S. Politics.

Although these front groups claim to support fringe group agendas, they use their financial leverage to broaden these agendas to include fiscally conservative, pro-business stances. For example, after fringe groups operating under the Tea Party banner began receiving support from special interest-funded front groups, its members’ broadened their initial opposition to federal government bank bailouts, an anti-special interest objective, to include opposition to government spending, taxes and intervention in the economy, all items on the traditional agendas of fiscal conservatives and special interests.

To wean these voters away from government social programs like Social Security and Medicare, which they label "socialist", the front groups encourage fringe groups to embrace "individual freedom and responsibility" as the path to prosperity and security, and to oppose government intervention in the economy to spur economic growth. As social critics point out, this effort is the latest manifestation of the special interest strategy launched in the early 1930s to fight New Deal "socialism" embodied in Social Security and subsequent social programs like Medicare.

In the eighty years that have passed since the strategy was formulated, special interests have used it to dupe a significant portion of the American electorate into turning against the governmental institutions which the founders of the Republic created to protect them against special interests. The strategy of co-opting voters to embrace special interest agendas has allowed these interests to take control of legislative bodies like the U.S Congress and use them to pass legislation favoring private interests at the expense of the public interest. The special interests that have bought the votes of elected representatives with their campaign contributions have disabled the protections of the public that were built into the American system of representative government. In the process, they have turned the electorate against the government itself.

Fast forward to the new Millennium, the special interest-driven voting bloc that appeared on the horizon in 2010, appears to be part of a concerted fusion-oriented political strategy aimed at "melding the anti-government, anti-spending, anti-tax fervor of the Tea Party with the faith-based agenda of the religious right" — under the overarching themes of patriotism, support for U.S. Troops, and a dominant role for the military in protecting the U.S. from terrorist attacks. The early success of this special-interest backed political strategy for mobilizing irate and aggrieved voters was on display at Glenn Beck’s August, 2010 rally, which brought nearly 100,000 Tea Party activists to Washington, D.C.

This nascent hybrid voting bloc began to flex its electoral muscles in early 2010 with the decisive role it played in the election of Scott Brown on the Republican ticket in Massachusetts to take over the Senate seat long held by Democrat Ted Kennedy. In preparation for the 2010 Congressional elections, the bloc has elected unknown candidates on the Republican ticket in upset primary elections defeating long-time establishment incumbents. Special interest campaign donors, like the California-based Tea Party Express, which directly fund electoral candidates running under the Tea Party banner, have played a significant role in these victories.

The front group strategy of simultaneously mobilizing angry voters into the special interest fold via the new hybrid voting bloc and running special interest-funded candidates for Congress, while flooding the air waves with corporate-sponsored political advertisements, is proving to be an appealing proposition for primary voters in an era in which a majority of all U.S. voters wants to see most elected representatives defeated. It is also provoking speculation that the Tea Party movement, directed by the front groups, will take over the Republican party before the 2012 elections. This speculation is fueled by primary turnout rates (as of August, 2010) showing that 3 million more votes were cast in Republican Congressional primaries than Democratic, particularly in "anti-establishment" races featuring Tea Party candidates.

The hybrid voting bloc’s sudden appearance as a major contender to assume the reins of the Republican party coincides with the apparent eclipse of the enthusiasm of mainstream voters. who voted for a Democratic majority in Congress in 2006, and put a Democratic president in the White House in 2008. Neither the president nor the Democratic party’s Congressional candidates and their campaign organizations, have been able to come up with policies that address and defuse the voter anger fueling the growth of the special interest-backed hybrid voting bloc — or keep it from being directed against themselves.

On the contrary, polls indicate that a substantial portion of former Democratic Party and Obama supporters are so dispirited with their performance in office, that they do not plan to vote in the 2010 elections, or are planning to vote for third parties. This trend might well lead to a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, alongside substantial gains in the Senate.

Such a shift, however, is unlikely to bring into office the lawmakers untainted by special interest money and influence that the majority of the nation’s voters are seeking. Most of these voters are likely to reject Tea Party candidates in the 2010 elections. But the large majority of the Democrats and Republicans they do elect will, in all probability, continue to implement special interest agendas at the expense of mainstream American voters. Neither party has come up with a job-creating economic strategy to stop the erosion of the nation’s job base, and the continuing erosion of working Americans’ standards of living. Voter impotence to hold Congressional lawmakers accountable at the ballot box is likely to fuel a continuing stream of special interest-inspired legislation at the expense of average Americans.

Incredible as it may seem, by the time the 2012 elections roll around, voters’ choices may well be even more limited than they are now. Special interest funders and front groups now backing the Tea Party movement, and the hybrid voting bloc they are building around it, will undoubtedly use their dollars and message machines to pull Tea Party members sufficiently back from the far right towards the center to enable the bloc’s Congressional candidates to emerge victorious in sufficient numbers to take control of Congress. If their strategy of co-opting infuriated anti-government voters succeeds, and they are able to use the hybrid voting bloc they are building around it to take the reins of the Republican party, they may usher in a prolonged era of special interest control of Congress and possibly the White House.

Although the stymied electorate cannot stop special interests from using Tea Party activists to build a formidable hybrid voting bloc, or compel elected representatives to change the laws they use to get elected and re-elected time after time, the large majority of U.S. voters who want to oust special interest-controlled representatives from Congress can get out of the electoral bind they have been boxed into by the two major parties and their special interest backers. They can leverage the large scale collective action power of the Internet, the web savvy of the 125 million voters who used the Internet in 2008 to influence the elections (who nearly equal the number of voters who voted in the elections) and web-based self-organizing tools and technologies described in this series.

These levers enable grassroots voters to seize control of electoral and legislative processes from special interests in 2012 by building winning transpartisan voting blocs in their local Congressional election districts around shared policy priorities which can elect a majority of untainted representatives. They can operate their blocs within existing political parties, across party lines, or within new parties they or others create. These blocs can use the application’s consensus-building tools to acquire the voting strength they need to win elections by forming electoral coalitions with other voting blocs, political parties and labor unions around negotiated policy agendas and slates of candidates.

See the series introduction here.

(Cross-posted at All Life Is Problem Solving, Fiscal Sustainability, and Reinventing Democracy)