The Liquid Blog

Introducing Liquid US and Support for All 50 States and Local Legislatures

Tue, 02 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Today we’re excited to announce that United.vote is now Liquid US (liquid.us), the next iteration of our vision for healthier democracy.

Liquid US empowers subject matter experts to weigh in on upcoming legislative votes from City Council to Congress. The broader community can use Liquid to learn about local-to-national legislation and endorse positions that resonate. Liquid scorecards grade public officials on how well they represent the will of their constituents.

We’ve seen increased interest in digital democracy nationwide, with 17 candidates pledging to use online voting platforms to guide their votes in office. Collectively these candidates have earned over 63,000 ballot box votes of support.

On top of this, nearly 2000 people in 45 states have used our Liquid platform to send over 30,000 digital votes weighing in on national items to our elected representatives.

We’ve also made a number of improvements to the platform. You can now:

Build support or opposition for existing legislation in your state or city. Here’s how.
Introduce and build support for your own policy proposals.
Sign up & verify in 30 seconds with only your phone & address (cc no longer required). You can also text “LIQUID” to 474747.

Join us at liquid.us to get started.

Liquid Democracy is Inevitable

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In the future, a liquid majority will seek consensus among the greatest number of people, on every issue.

We’re still early, but how much longer can we expect a single person to best represent 700,000 of us?

Viral growth

Each of us is incentivized to recruit new people.

For example:

Goto liquid.us/david and Proxy to me

This increases my voting power & influence.

You can do it too.

We all can.

How can any individual politician hope to compete?

Liquid democracy is mathematically inevitable.

Healthier democracy here we come.

How Legislation Will Be Written in the Future

Thu, 31 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Facilitating more thoughtful policy is one of our fundamental goals for Liquid.

We have an opportunity to transform our legislative process from one-bill-at-time, among a tiny set of legislators, to asynchronous online debate.

Currently, the party with majority control strictly limits the items brought to the floor.

And too often, they treat proposals they do support with an attitude of “This is our only chance. Stuff everything in there! Rush rush rush!”

By transitioning to a digital democracy, our legislative process can begin to look more like the open-source world’s Pull Request system.

Many more proposals can be offered and debated simultaneously, each in their own independent thread.

There will be strong incentives for new law to be much more tightly scoped, instead of monolithic pieces of legislation.

And debate can last as long as necessary, until real consensus is reached.

Here’s a fantastic short video from NYU Professor Clay Shirky elaborating some of this vision:

Liquid democracy proxying makes this practical at scale. Trusted leaders will be able to more faithfully represent large communities, all in real-time.

Star Power in Liquid Democracy

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Excerpt from Peter Schurman’s Let’s Include Everyone, exploring future possibilities for global governance in a liquid democracy world:

One final form of power that may be abused is often called “star power”: the ability of famous individuals to command attention. Consider a scenario in which a celebrity exploits their fame to call for liquid democracy proxies, then uses those proxies to vote in ways that undermine the public interest.

We have plenty of recourse in this situation. First, proxies can be revoked and reassigned instantly, as voters see the celebrity voting against their interests. As noted above, depending on a design choice, voters may also be able to directly reverse votes cast by the celebrity proxy.

Most importantly, the entire citizenry is highly empowered, through liquid democracy, to participate directly in formulating and approving policy. Nobody is shut out. This will help counterbalance the power of celebrities.

Unlocking the Long Tail of Politics: More Options for Better Representation

Mon, 18 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Political capital, the “trust, goodwill, and influence a politician has with the public and other political figures”, is most likely distributed along a power law.

Power distributions show up all over the social world, especially in competitive markets like product sales, play counts of songs on the radio, or populations of cities.

Here’s a model of what it looks like:

Massive winners on the top, called the Head, and then many more participants with less percentages of the whole, called the Long Tail.

Compare this to the distribution of votes for US President for the last 40 years:

See how each of those individual elections resemble the head of a power distribution?

Our current electoral process cuts off the Long Tail.

Power distributions found in nature will often have more than half of their total distribution in the Long Tail.

But the chart of presidential votes shows how our elections create a duopoly, with two outwardly competitive actors having near complete control of the market. By awarding 100% of the political power for winning only 51% of the votes, two frontrunners gain a massive handicap.

In a country of over 300 million, this leaves most of us out of the conversation.

And we can all too easily observe that not voting — “None of these options are worth my time” — is almost always the most popular choice in our elections.

Sometimes drastically so.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Amazon unlocked the Long Tail of consumer goods, by creating an online store with infinite shelf space. They never have to say “no room” for any product, even if it’s individually not very popular.

One employee famously said, “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.” In other words, people wanted more niche books combined than popular books combined. This gives them a huge advantage over brick and mortar stores.

YouTube unlocks the Long Tail of video creators, by giving anyone who signs up a stage and a way to reach their audience.

And consumers sure seem to like it: YouTube is on track to surpass all of TV’s combined viewership hours.

By replacing electoral representation with personal representation, liquid democracy can unlock the Long Tail for our legislatures.

Voters can choose among anyone to represent them, rather than being limited to a small number of predetermined candidates. Community leaders can make a meaningful impact, without first needing 51% of the voters.

Many more people can participate in our political processes, and we can all have more options for better representation.

Liquid US makes this possible today.

Join us.

Give Your Rep an F: Introducing Liquid Scorecards

Fri, 08 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Our trouble is that we do not demand enough of the people who represent us. We are responsible for their activities… we must spur them to more imagination and enterprise in making a push into the unknown; we must make clear that we intend to have responsible and courageous leadership.

— First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, 1963

Right now, Americans concerned about something happening in Washington are often instructed to “Call Your Representatives”.

Although it’s well intended, there are some problems with this tactic.

Often, we’re sent to voicemail, and it’s unclear if the message ever gets through. Sometimes we might get a generic form letter months later.

There’s very little transparency about how many people reach out and where the district as a whole stands on the issues.

The total numbers aren’t officially published. Sometimes a rep’s office chooses to share them, but this isn’t required.

And they have little incentive to, especially if they’re not listening to their constituents, since it would only make them look bad.

We can bring this transparency

Liquid US lets each American vote on every item in Congress.

We can make it easier to contact our representatives.

And since we verify our members’ identities and locations, we can now automatically score legislators for listening to or ignoring their constituents, on each legislative item.

Here’s an example:

In this case, the elected rep voted nay on HR1 - Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, matching 22 of 25 of their verified constituents on Liquid US.

This can bring much needed transparency and accountability to our legislative process.

Can we create an overall score?

We want to make it easy for everyone to know how well their elected legislators are representing their constituents.

Per bill counts is a good start, but we want something even easier for the typical busy American.

So we’ll combine all the bills together into a single score for each legislator.

For example: “This legislator votes with their constituents 74% of the time.”

We’re adding up all the legislators’ votes with & against their district, across all bills.

Bills that get more votes from constituents are automatically weighted greater than those that attract less attention.

Selection bias

There’s still a big issue: these scores only represent the people already signed up and verified on Liquid.

We still have a long way to go before everyone’s joined. Until then, our earliest adopters won’t necessarily be a representative sample of the electorate at large.

If Liquid is dominated by one group, it would be too easy for people to dismiss these scores.

But liquid democracy is too big an idea to let that deter us.

So we’re going one step farther.

Grading on a curve

We want to encourage our legislators to listen to their constituents.

So we’ll take their all-time score, and grade legislators against each other, on a curve.

Those who most listen to their constituents will get an A+. Those who most ignore their constituents will get an F.

See the chart to the right for the specific breakdowns by percentile.

And we can do this for each party independently. Republicans separate from Democrats. This means that any red vs blue bias on Liquid gets cancelled out.

We’ll update these grades in real-time, creating a permanent accountability record.

Divide and Conquer

Too often the message from politicians sounds like:

“The other side are all crooks and liars. Vote us into office, or the consequences will be apocalyptic.”

But this same story is being told on both sides. Good vs evil; us vs them.

Even if they sincerely start out with the best of intentions, our politicians are incentivized to divide us, to gain more power. Although they never admit it, the Republicans need the Democrats, and the Democrats need the Republicans.

Demonizing the other side is the #1 motivating tactic. It’s a vicious cycle we’re stuck in.

But now, the story can change.

Grading our elected legislators is the first step in turning the tables around.

And by grading on a curve, elected legislators can become more motivated to one-up each other, even within their own party.

They ought to do their best to represent their constituents as a whole, the way we actually want to be represented.

Join us.

Liquid US lets you vote directly on legislation, just like you’re a Member of Congress.

Since few of us can vote on every bill, Liquid also lets you select personal proxies for when you don’t vote directly. Empower the people you trust to help represent your voice.

Every vote cast and proxy chosen gets us one step closer to a truly representative Congress.

So join us. Sign up today, if you haven’t already.

Net Neutrality Is a Freedom of Speech Issue

Wed, 06 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Net Neutrality is vital to access online services that challenge existing power structures, including Liquid.

But some critics misunderstand Net Neutrality, arguing that repealing these protections could lead to greater market competition.

One example is Jeffrey A. Tucker, from the Foundation for Economic Education, who recently wrote an article against Net Neutrality.

Here’s an excerpt of his argument:

Let’s grasp the position of the large content providers. Here we see the obvious special interests at work. Netflix, Amazon, and the rest don’t want ISPs to charge either them or their consumers for their high-bandwidth content. They would rather the ISPs themselves absorb the higher costs of such provision. It’s very clear how getting the government to make price discrimination illegal is in their interest. It means no threats to their business model.

By analogy, let’s imagine that a retailer furniture company were in a position to offload all their shipping costs to the trucking industry. By government decree, the truckers were not permitted to charge any more or less whether they were shipping one chair or a whole houseful of furniture. Would the furniture sellers favor such a deal? Absolutely. They could call this “furniture neutrality” and fob it off on the public as preventing control of furniture by the shipping industry.

These two paragraphs demonstrate a lack of understanding of what Net Neutrality actually means.

Net Neutrality is not about cost, in exactly the same way murder and freedom are not about cost.

All discussions of “cost” lead to rabbit holes and confusion.

Net Neutrality, like freedom, like apple pie, is just a principle, and a damned important one.

Just as it is the government’s job to uphold fundamental laws (like “thou shalt not steal”, “thou shalt not murder”, and “thou shalt have freedom of speech”), it is the government’s job to uphold the principle of Net Neutrality, a simple principle that just says: on any given Internet connection, your ISP shall not discriminate between the packets you request.

Net Neutrality is born directly out of Freedom of Speech. It is a freedom of speech issue.

It’s not about the “costs of shipping furniture/packets” any more than freedom of speech is about the costs of shipping books.

“Cost” is a red herring.

It’s about you having equal access to speech.

It’s about you being able to purchase the books and material you want.

Whether Netflix/Amazon/whoever ship “housefuls of furniture” is completely irrelevant to Net Neutrality.

Given 1000 units of “bandwidth” that you purchased, you can use those 1000 units of bandwidth for whatever you want, whether it’s Netflix, Amazon, or Liquid.

That is all Net Neutrality is, and anyone who supports Freedom of Speech supports Net Neutrality.

If you are against Net Neutrality, you are against Freedom of Speech. Period. End of story.

Fight back against disinfo by sharing this post with the hashtag #NetNeutralityIsFreedomOfSpeech.

Congressional Apportionment: The Original 1st Amendment

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In 1787, when our Constitution was created, one of the many important debates was about the number of legislators we ought to have in Congress.

Originally, there was a different 1st Amendment, that came before the one we think of now as our First Amendment (freedom of religion, speech, the press, assembly).

That was known as the Congressional Apportionment Amendment.

The Amendment

It’s text said that we ought to have one representative per 30,000 citizens for our first 100 Members of Congress, then one rep per 40,000 citizens up to 200 Members, and then one rep per 50,000 citizens after that.

The Debate

Melancton Smith, a New York delegate to the Continental Congress, worried about unchecked power in the newly proposed Constitution.

Among other things, he and other Anti-Federalists (the champions of our Bill of Rights) were concerned that too small a Congress could become unresponsive to the average citizen, as the nation’s population grew.

We certainly ought to fix, in the Constitution, those things which are essential to liberty. If anything falls under this description, it is the number of the legislature.

— Delegate Melancton Smith, 1788

And it wasn’t just the Anti-Federalists who worried about this.

In Federalist No. 55, James Madison acknowledged that having too few legislators would make it difficult to have a close enough relationship with the people they were meant to represent.

George Washington himself was said to have weighed in on this question.

In fact, this was said to be the only issue he spoke up about during the Constitutional Convention.

When it was proposed that each legislators ought to represent no more than 40,000 constituents, the first President suggested lowering it to 30,000.

Today, each congressional district has an average of 711,000 constituents.

The Amendment’s History

In 1789, the Congressional Apportionment Amendment was passed by Congress as part of our original Bill of Rights.

It then went to the states to be ratified. It was passed by:

New Jersey: November 20, 1789
Maryland: December 19, 1789
North Carolina: December 22, 1789
South Carolina: January 19, 1790
New Hampshire: January 25, 1790
New York: February 24, 1790
Rhode Island: June 7, 1790
Pennsylvania: September 21, 1791
Vermont: November 3, 1791
Virginia: November 3, 1791

But this was just one shy of the 3/4th needed among the 14 states at that time.

Interestingly, the proposal for this Amendment technically still remains “open”, two hundred years later, although more than two dozen states would need to ratify to pass the new 3/4th threshold.

The Lost Record

Even more interestingly, former attorney Eugene LaVergne claims to have found evidence buried in public records that the state of Connecticut did in fact originally ratify the Congressional Apportionment Amendment, which should have made it officially part of the Constitution, but this never reached the national government.

Independent researchers claim to have corroborated these records.

LaVergne took his claim to court, but his case was dismissed. He appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court to no avail.

What if it had passed?

If we were to follow the limit of at least 1 rep per 50,000 constituents, we’d now need over 6,000 Members of Congress for our population of 300,000,000.

It’s rather difficult to imagine squeezing all of them into one room together in the Capitol.

Nonetheless, it’s important to realize how far we’ve strayed from the founders’ original vision of a democratic republic.

Looking Forward

It’s unlikely the Amendment will ever be passed.

It’s not clear that would even be a good thing, in its current form, or if it would only create unmanageable chaos.

But liquid democracy can help us restore the Founders’ original democratic vision.

It can allow us to have a much more representative government, with much stronger accountability, and scaled for our modern age.

And best of all, we can do it in a grassroots way, one step at a time, without needing to pass any new laws.

Thanks to Liquid US, we can start to make a difference today. Join us.

Moore, Menendez Show Why Elections Aren’t Enough

Wed, 15 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

While the accusations against Senate candidate Roy Moore (R, AL) and Senator Bob Menendez (D, NJ) couldn’t be more different, the fallout from both present clear examples of our election system failing democracy.

With Moore, voters going into the ballot box next month may be forced to vote for an apparent pedophile or a Democrat they strongly disagree with on many substantive policy issues.

With Menendez, a possibly corrupt politician may be unseated and replaced by an appointee chosen by an unpopular Republican governor. This appointee would also likely disagree with voters on many issues.

Most voters agree that the crimes both men have been accused of, if true, should disqualify them from public office. At the same time, both men also more closely represent their constituents’ positions than the current alternative.

Given how close the Senate is, whoever holds these seats for the next few years will be a deciding vote on key issues affecting hundreds of millions of people.

And the majority of voters in AL or NJ seem to have no real say in who those Senators will be.

While these are extreme examples, it is hardly uncommon for Americans to feel like they have no good choice in politicians. This stems from how few potential candidates have a real chance at winning elections, which only gets worse as our population grows.

But there’s now a better way to choose our representatives.

Liquid US, using liquid democracy, allows voters to choose anyone they trust as one of several personal representatives in Congress. Contrast that with our current system where we choose from a narrow pool of candidates to find one person to represent millions on every single bill.

This is possible today, without passing a single constitutional amendment or law.

With liquid, every voter can vote directly on any bill. Whenever a voter chooses not to vote, one of their representatives casts the vote on their behalf. Since voters can override their representative’s vote, this allows voters to defer to experts to handle the day-to-day process of legislating while still retaining final say.

Best of all, this happens without polarizing elections pitting Americans against Americans over flawed candidates.

We’re building a democracy where every voter has representation they trust. Join us.