CitizenSovereignty.org

Repair California with deliberative democracy

Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker endorses an innovative deliberative democracy idea, which a group called Repair California calls a citizens' constitutional convention, that aims to fix the broken state.

"The genius of Repair California's approach is twofold.  First, it steers clear of "social issues"....Second, the [constitutional convention] delegates would be chosen randomly from the adult population....To have faith in such a process requires a faith in the good sense and sincerity of ordinary people -- a faith that just about everybody professes.  The beauty part is that no one can know what the delegates would come up with -- which is why the idea has won such broad support."

The method is otherwise known as a citizens' assembly, which lately has been tried twice, unsuccessfully, by two Canadian provinces seeking to reform their electoral processes.  The key features of a citizens' assembly of this kind are that, by design, it cannot be captured by interest groups, since none of any variety receive representation, and it is truly representative of the population, since its membership is large and randomly chosen.

Would it work?  The experience of Ontario and British Columbia is that voters will not rubber stamp what the convention puts before them for a vote; the groups who are perceived winners and losers will not fail to campaign strenuously to influence their fate.  But Californians are accustomed to having their hands on the steering wheel of power, via the initiative process. A process that disenfranchises narrow interests in favor of those taking the broadest view may resonate.  California is a state whose formerly progressive and now much-amended constitution has come to rival its freeways as a symbol of gridlock.

-- Bill Corbett

Two types of WMD: One bad, one good

Jim Fishkin writes, over at the San Francisco Chronicle's City Brights blog, that weapons of mass distraction are a serious problem.

Our political system is struggling under the threat of WMD, by which I mean weapons of mass distraction. Killer sound bites of misinformation circulate in the blogosphere and are carried via talk radio and cable news. They are spread by intense partisans, particularly eager to disseminate through self selected events like town halls and internet quick votes.

Jim goes in even-handed fashion on to cite examples of this kind of WMD, deployed on the political left and right, to support this claim. 

All of which highlights the relevance of his latest work, When the People Speak.  Among other things, I'm looking forward to the book's round-up of Jim's latest work in creating Deliberative Polls, which might also be characterized as WMDs.  In this instance the D stands for Democracy.

-- Bill Corbett

Repairing the town hall

Lately, interest groups and the alienated have turned town halls on health care reform into made-for-mass-media shouting matches.  Jim Fishkin writes in the New York Times about a scientific method that ensures more people are heard.

"The Congressional town-hall-style meeting, which developed as a cost-effective way for time-pressed members to hear from constituents, also rests on an illusion: that a district of 650,000 potential voters can be represented by the unscientifically self-selected who decide to show up. Instead, these amorphous, unpredictable meetings have become open invitations for interest groups and grass roots campaigns to capture the public dialogue.

"But there is a way of organizing town halls that would offer lawmakers representative and informed feedback about their constituents’ major concerns: a deliberative poll. Whereas ordinary polls represent the public’s surface impression of sound bites and headlines, deliberative polls bring together a scientifically selected microcosm of a lawmaker’s constituents under conditions conducive to thinking about issues. In effect, an entire Congressional district really can be put in one room."

Deliberative Polls are town hall meetings in which more than the shouting is heard.  To learn more about Deliberative Polls, how they work, and how they have been used, use the links on this page and visit the Center for Deliberative Democracy homepage at Stanford University.

-- Bill Corbett

Preferring Patriot dollars to donuts

With retirement comes reflection. Stepping forward today in favor of campaign finance reform are Pamela Finmark and William Chalmers. Now that their political consulting and "donut" fundraising days now firmly behind them, they write in the Los Angeles Times that

"...the great Internet myth circulating today says...that online donors are democratizing the campaign finance system. They aren't. They are just putting a little more money into the system. The major donors are still the key to candidate survival....

"So what can we do? The best solution we have heard of is called the "patriot dollars" plan, put forth by Yale law professors Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres. Basically, it eliminates all hard contributions to candidates. Period. Instead, each voter is given a $50 ATM card so that he or she can literally vote with their dollars and contribute their $50, in part or in whole, to their choice of federal candidates. Simple enough. Let's do the math. We spend about $5 billion to $6 billion collectively on all federal elections. If the approximately 131 million who voted in November also had voted with $50 worth of patriot bucks, the donations would have equaled -- surprise -- $6.5 billion! That money would cover presidential, Senate and congressional races."

Participation in online campaign donations doubles from 2004

From the Pew Internet and American Life Project:  [As of June 15, 2008,] "At this point in the campaign, 8% of internet users (representing 6% of all adults) have donated money to a candidate online. This is a notable increase from the 3% of internet users (representing 2% of all adults) who had donated money online the first time we asked this question in our fall 2006 survey."

Update: The Obama campaign's success came on all fronts, not just from small donors, per this debunking report from Michael Malbin of the Campaign Finance Institute.  

"Although an unusually high percentage (49%) of Obama's funds came in discrete contributions of $200 or less , only 26% of his money through August 31 (and 24% of his funds through October 15, according to the most recent FEC reports) came from donors whose total contributions aggregated to $200 or less. Obama's 26% compares to 25% for George W. Bush in 2004, 20% for John Kerry in 2004, 21% for John McCain in 2008, 13% for Hillary Clinton in 2008, and 38% for Howard Dean in 2004.... The fact is that Obama's financial juggernaut broke records at all contribution levels. The reality does not match the myth, but the reality itself was impressive."

Not to be left out of the discussion is Bob Bauer, counsel to the Obama campaign and the leading election law attorney for the Democratic Party.  He argues that CFI's parsing of small donor categories is skewed to favor its vision for reform.  "Even if one curiously believes that every donation above $200 is a large donation, or that someone giving repeatedly in small amounts totaling more than $200 in the aggregate is a large donor, the fact remains that Obama could not have raised the funds he did without this unprecedented pool of voters donating in the aggregate less than $1,000 (the maximum allowable donation per election is $2300).  And in the category of contributions of $1,000 or more—the category of donors that CFI describes as "large"—Obama’s total by CFI’s calculation was merely 33% of the whole, to be compared to McCain’s 53% or Kerry’s 44% or Bush’s 57%."

-- Bill Corbett

Election '08: Last of a kind?

Over 130 million voters cast ballots on November 4.  The turnout of the voting-eligible population reached 61%, its highest since 1968, when the military draft touched lives in every community.  This year's democratic resurgence holds modest promise for involving more people, more of the time, in political life. 

In an interview on the election, Jim Fishkin explained on Radio OpenSource how successful innovations in voter mobilization evidence the capacity for innovation in voter deliberation. 

One possible, immediate step in this direction is the well-framed proposal of a number of leaders in the field of deliberative democracy for a White House Office on Civic Engagement.

The election drove home, as well, the reality that the financing political campaigns will continue to change, perhaps in unexpected ways.  A Gallup poll on popular attitudes towards public financing of the presidential campaigns revealed a reversal of partisans' usual views.  Newfound support for taxpayer-funded elections among Republicans, as well as surprising opposition among Democrats, reflected shifting views of partisan advantage, and belied attachment to any organizing principle for campaign finance.

As Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres have written in the American Prospect, Barack Obama's success shows that ordinary Americans want a system that places them at the very center of campaign finance.

Small donor democracy did not displace fat-cat fundraising in 2008, on either side.  But as the head of the leading business lobby for campaign finance reform, Charles Kolb, said after Election Day, In a joint statement with the campaign finance reform advocate Fred Wertheimber, "Small donations raised on the Internet and magnified by public matching funds can and should be the wave of the future for presidential campaigns and ultimately for all of our elections."

Bill Corbett

Wild and Wonderful West Virginia

The New York Times and Slate report on the possibility that the Supreme Court of the United States will accept any or all of three cases from West Virginia that involve millions of dollars of campaign donations to state supreme court justices from litigants.

Slate argues for public financing of judicial elections, accompanied by tougher requirements that judges recuse themselves from cases that involve their contributors.

I suggest a different approach: make justice blind, by making campaign contributions anonymous in state judicial elections.

If the Supreme Court accepts some of the WWWV campaign finance cases, the outcomes range in two directions.  One is a pro-reform direction, such as an outcome that sets a standard for campaign contributions that impermissibly infringe on the Constitution's due process guarantee.  A pro-reform outcome might improve the worsening situation in the thirty-nine states that elect some or all of their judges.

The other, more likely direction is anti-reform, such as an outcome that strikes down the Court's precedents which establish that the potential for the appearance of corruption is a constitutionally valid basis for campaign finance regulation.  West Virginia could become even more wild and wonderful, if the Court's conservative majority continues to back away from earlier decisions in favor of campaign finance regulation.

The anti-reform outcome might be the better one for popular involvement in American politics.  By bringing attention to conservative doctrine that equates the uses of wealth in political campaigns with free speech, the activist justices would get more Americans talking.

Update: The Supreme Court of the United States will hear the case. An amici (friends of the court) brief by reform advocates alleges not an appearance of corruption, but a violation of due process.

-- Bill Corbett

Small donor democracy & large television audiences

Lost in the noise of the presidential campaign is some good news: The demise of the public financing system for presidential elections, which was devised after Watergate, and the rise of small donor democracy via the Internet.  Senator Obama's fundraising victory over Senator McCain renews the forty-year old effort to directly involve the public in the financing of presidential campaigns.

From Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff comes an idea for another innovation that financially rewards candidates who generate greatest popular interest, the public financing of presidential campaigns through a share of television advertising proceeds during the national political conventions.

Tapping public control of the airwaves to promote public attention to political speech is not a new idea.  The innovation of Ayres and Nalebuff is to focus their proposal on two of the moments in American political life when the most Americans are paying attention. 

A positive dynamic between popular attention to poltics and popular financing for politics is a new and praiseworthy attribute of the Internet.  Ayres and Nalebuff are on the right track in trying to find a way to bring that dynamic to television.

-- Bill Crobett

Same sex marriage in America - deliberated (not demagogued)

News from PopCity in Pittsburgh:

On Saturday, Sept. 27^th, about 400 participants across the state will participate in the first statewide “Deliberative Poll on the Issue of Marriage in America.” Carnegie Mellon University, which houses the initiative with assistance from the Coro Center for Civic Leadership, is one of four host sites. The Southwestern Pennsylvania Program for Deliberative Democracy (SPPDD) will present the poll.

Click here to read the whole article at PopCity.

An endorsement of Deliberation Day...

No, not from the late Marcel Marceau, no....It's from the iconoclastic British journalist Johann Hari, who writes in the Independent, Do we want a democracy or a pantomime?

But elections do not have to consist of the airless circulation of soundbites, bike-riding photo-ops and ignorance. We can do better than this....

Item One: Deliberation Day. The American political scientists Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin have come up with a simple democracy-deepener. Declare every general election a national holiday, and offer every citizen £150 to take part, there and then, in a day of debate, modelled on jury service. In the morning you watch a televised debate between the main political leaders, and then you divide into groups of 15 who go off for an hour to discuss what you've seen. Together, you figure out a series of questions you want to put to local representatives of the political parties – about any issue on earth. Then, when all the groups come together, the "foreman" of your "jury" puts your questions. After lunch, you reassemble to debate what you've heard. Then you vote, and take your cheque.

The national political debate would then no longer consist of10-second soundbites. Suddenly, politicians would be able to talk in proper nuanced paragraphs – and we could argue back. We could move beyond thought-halting slogans – like "tough on crime" or "war on drugs" – to a more rational discussion of the evidence.