19 Sep 10 Are you ready for a Global Democracy? Yes, but not the one on offer.
I was clicking through the YouTubes tonight when I came across this little gem proffering the seeds of a Global Democracy.Titled “World Vote Now” the video tries to inspire the viewer to see the current Democracy “deficit” and embrace the idea of one person, one vote for the entire world. I’m pretty sure this is all part of promoting a documentary, that promotes this idea and sees it as a viable, and desirable long term goal.From the website www.worldvotenow.com (Shouldn’t it be .org? Nevermind…)
We´re told democracy creates stability and raises living standards. So why not introduce it on a worldwide scale?
What would it take to apply the principle of “one person – one vote” to everyone on the planet? We have held 26 international field tests in every region of the planet to answer this question.
This investigation involved close collaboration with Electoral Commissions, Government Ministries, Educational Institutions and Civil Society Organizations and we would like to thank them all for their invaluable contributions.
I’m a big democracy supporter, and a big believer in big ideas. So much so, that I’ve given the global democracy problem a lot of thought.
The problem with what is contained on the World Vote Now pages, and promotional material (besides it being impossible to find much relevant information or comment) is that there is not any indication of the proposal for how the voting or the democracy would work, or what power the legislative body would have. The whole concept just doesn’t seem to be rationally thought out at all any further than “lets see if we could get electronic voting machines to everybody”.
Considering the the booming mobile phone growth in the third world is doing a pretty good job of getting “electronic voting machines” to everybody, I’m not even sure it is worth considering the current edge cases of people with no connectivity to the Internet. If the power of one vote actually became a significant agent of change, and they drastically wanted that change, then I think their priorities may shift to try and reach a point where connectivity was possible, long enough for them to vote. There is significant evidence to show that the economic choices that people in the 2/3rds world make puts mobile connectivity quite high on their short list of essentials including food and shelter.
Most of this information is moot without first considering;
- What are people voting for?
- Who are people voting for?
- What authority would the body have?
- What responsibility would that body have?
- What is the organisational structure of the body?
- What is the mechanism of change of the body?
- What power would the body have, and where would this power come from?
- Is the current mechanism of democratic delegation (currently used anywhere in the world - the US is a horrendous example) the most appropriate for global governance?
- How is the system audited, funded, and maintained?
- How do you manage unique identification of 1 person per vote to prevent gaming?
From looking at the website, not a single one of these questions is answered, but surely one could hope for more from the documentary.In any case, I think I’ve come up with a relatively good solution that I’m going to hand over to the web, or some wealthy venture capitalist, in the hope for a better world.Proposed SolutionOne person, one vote sounds good in theory, but how about one person, 6 billion votes (or the amount of the entire world population) - voting is optional, and voting lines are open all day everyday.The great benefit of this is that it makes the distribution of power far more liquid and more frictionless than it is currently. You might think that 6 billion votes is preposterous, but it would mean that the more people that one person votes for, the more diluted his power becomes. If you think about 1 person who voted for a 6 billion of the worlds population then everybody would tie with 1 vote and nobody would win the race, hence there would be vote dilution.The same applies when this is scaled to 6 billion.The benefit of having voting available at all times mean that you get a direct reflection of the consensus of the Governed at all times. If they don’t like the John Howard sending our military to fight a war on flimsy evidence of WMD’s then unvoting is a very simple proposition to deprive elected leaders of the necessary political capital required to wage a war and maintain consent of the Governed.This gives a great fluidity to Government, which some may argue would reduce stability. I disagree with this assessment, it would just mean that for stability you would require a clear lead to maintain stability - which, given the nature of the Internet I believe would be easily achievable by successful leaders.Another benefit of using this methodology is that you are no longer relegated to laborious processes of even participating in the race to represent. All people would be eligible to leader, all people could attain votes - thereby leaving the job of governing not only to politicians, but to all citizens. Not just for people with political ambition, but with sincere civic desires. It is also able to be audited by the user by watching vote counts move up and down in real time as a result of their actions.Granted, the financial rewards in this type of system maybe less, but the value of the social capital would be considerable.Implementation initially may be a little difficult - reaching critical mass, managing authentication etc, however, it may be that we are almost there. A vote/unvote mechanism is almost available via Facebook, which currently has a very well authenticated user base of 500 million (1/12 of the global population). The main drawback is that their like/unlike API doesn’t currently support a callback on the “unvote” - but it will come soon.Given this, and the slew of Twitter/ Facebook/ Email addresses and social pages, a large group of people would already be able to use this voting system immediately.The question remains, what power would this body of elected people have?Well, this is yet to be determined, but it could be agreed that all of the people that opt into the system of voting, work behind the goals of those who garner enough democratic power above a certain threshold. This would have immediate impact of current political arrangements. More ambitiously, with enough people opting in, the elected leaders would have a moral authority to discuss with media and international leaders about solutions and problems that currently does not exist. Also, since they would command no standing army, and be globally distributed, they would not pose any threat in violent terms to the status quo, increasing their legitimacy, and potentially posing a threat in political terms to the status quo in many nations.After some growth via Facebook, other mechanisms for more solid verification and more easily distributed controls and transparency would be instituted.I’d love to hear feedback on this fairly raw blog post about an idea that has been percolating for a very very long time.Cheers,Dame
