This day opens with the crowning achievement of Dr. King, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, laying as a paper crown, shot through with holes, on the steps of the Supreme Court. The Court's rulings and the many circumstances of voting and party rule have signaled the need for changes in our mindsets for many years. Now we can look at the Partisan mindset and see that is truly is misguiding the American institutions of democracy.
With the ruling on Louisiana v. Callais, Democrats and other candidates in red states need to give up their view that Partisan tactics of the past and of normal campaigning will win elections or properly serve their constituents. I offer a substitute in the form of Individualized Direct-Action Service to winning over the votes and the loyalty of voters, discarding the notion that cobbling together different demographic groups will work in winning elections and winning law writing campaigns. We have plenty of examples of technologies that can be used to deliver direct-action service to each individual in every district. Making use of such technology and a new mindset of how to serve voters will change politics and enliven democracy!
Today's medical patient has a new way to strengthen a relationship with one's doctor's office, the medical portal. Through the portal, the individual can find out about drug interactions and anticipated side effects, review lab results, keep a journal of blood pressure readings, changes to weight, to mood, to eating habits, etc. and see timely suggestions from the medical staff on days when not visiting the office. The medical staff can take information provided by the patient and offer individualized suggestions and ask the patient to take action to keep up their healthy regiments and therapies. Public servants could learn to use similar technology and change the course of service to constituents, discarding any notions of demographics.
Case workers record the results of visits with several families into software that records complex datasets for each family's record. Based on the actions taken by members of a family, the case worker and others who support that professional can determine which practices are helpful and successful, and which advice needs to be de-emphasized. Candidates and public servants might keep similar records of their interactions with individual voters and citizens, to better understand how they can heighten the community building efforts of those individuals.
The grocery store my family visits most often offers us "at the moment" incentives to purchase one item over another item on the shelves of the store. There are discounts available when a member of our family uses our customer id number or when we clip online coupons with the grocery's app. Additionally, the grocery can reward us with gasoline discounts built up over several visits. Additionally, the grocery will send coupons for the brands we use most often, or that we might like to experiment in trying. All of our buying patterns accumulate to feed analysis of how the grocery can win our loyalty and keep attracting us to act in our own best interest. This is intended actually to increase the profits of the grocery chain. Public servants ought to be not as interested in financial profits, but they could center upon the loyalty that grows when voters see opportunities to act and improve their own interests. If public servants rule out the idea that cobbling together different demographics will win them elections, they can instead center upon gathering the opinions and passions of voters to better understand how to represent those constituents. Rather that looking at faulty polling analysis from biased questions (two dimensional, and often partisan), the public servant referring to the "buying pattern" records could review the actual thoughts of people, their innovative thinking, and with qualitative analysis come into better ways of representing them, instead of hoping to manipulate their words to fit some national platform or a candidate's limited views on top issues. Too often candidates try to lead on issues and topics that the public is not engaging.
Social media is also seeking profits as their main goal. They will find out what each person's many interests are, and then individually feed more of those interests to each user, playing up the addictive nature of screen relationships, all in the hopes of selling advertising time and messages. The shame is that social media companies never ask users how they would like to grow based upon those interests, and social media does not benefit from getting users away from their screens and out into their communities. Public servants have the incentive to get people involved in their communities, and finding personal growth and real-world outlets, and in expressing their innovative ideas on how to improve the lives around them.
If public servants combined the features of the preceding technologies (along with other technologies) with a true wish to serve the public, throwing away the broken idea that a political party or a national platform is their guidance, then alternatives to Republican and Democrat choices could really be offered on the ballots at election time!!
How To Stop the Manipulation of Citizen's and their Opinions
A huge danger in this technology peeks out from the Partisan mindset. Our history is rank and disgusting with politicians who wish to manipulate the public, rather than serve and respectfully represent them. By gathering all this data about all the voters in a district, the Partisan inclination would be to define how to use the information to further the politician's best interests and what the politician sees as Liberal wins versus Conservative wins (or often spitefully Liberal losses versus Conservative losses). Voters should have a method to "pull the plug" on any such manipulation, and politicians need to adopt a new ethic to prevent themselves from dictating to the public which way the nation will go.
Politicians have incentives and reasons for adopting the forms of technology outlined above, but do members of the public have a reason to trust those politicians? Another change in mindset and possibly a change in laws could be to give control of the data to the users, to the constituents who place their data into such databases.
Who owns your data?? Currently, possession is nine-tenths of the law. Under the Property Rights traditions of English common law, the entity that holds the data owns the data. What if we inserted Human Rights ethics into the operation for these databases?!? What if politicians promised that constituents could individually remove their data, all their data from the politician's portal if that politician disgraced them or broke promises?? Politicians would need to erase all backup data attributed to each disgruntled constituent. That would be costly to the politician over several dimensions. Contact data might be kept so that a politician could make new appeal to individuals, but one's own data of interests, and actions taken, and opinions offered and more could all be erased at the insistence of the voter. That new currency could be taken away from the politician. Human Rights to privacy and to self-determination could be championed and be a solid girder in building trust for the adoption such technologies by politicians.
If such a principle of Human Rights existed on the portals of politicians, then might the same be offered on social media, and grocery databases, and medical portals, etc. Could the rights to privacy and self-determination be strengthened by concentrating on Human Rights in those and many other modern, technological relationships? This is an off-topic idea.
What else politicians would need to adopt when accepting the responsibilities over these types of technologies, would be to publicly declare themselves to be Anti-Partisan, and to adopt (instead of an issues-based focus) a set of ethical principles for how they would be guided in serving the public. Such statements could work as a set of bases for users of those portals to decide if the politician is respecting them before individuals erase their data from the politician's access. Such an Anti-Partisan stance would require disavowing any allegiance to party leadership, and not committing to any national platform. The focus becomes service to the individuals of one's district. Any broad policy stance meant to cover the whole nation is by definition not serving the individualized best interests of the constituents active in the politician's portal and local communities.
To be Anti-Partisan would also declare an intent to stop thinking of public life in any two-dimensional way. When committed to and working to server individual needs and growth, the politician can no longer accept any perspective that rests on Liberal versus Conservative, or Rural versus Urban versus Suburban, or Boomers versus Generation Z, or Evangelical versus LGBTQ+ Communities, or any other reductionist way of thinking about the public limited within demographic groups. Each individual is far more complex than labels possibly based on exterior markers. When the grocery database recorded the buying patterns for each family, none of that examined demographics of race or gender or generation, etc. The politician who wholley adopts this technology should not be examining status markers for the constituents. What serves the constituents better and serves the politician better is to look at the patterns of behavior. Based upon one's behavior and one's stated goals for growth and community involvement, those individualized and complex trends can better illustrate where service to the individual should be concentrated.
Finally, with a nod to winning the confidence of the voters, data from a politician's portal and database can never be for sale, nor never be granted to another entity, nor be carried over from a failed campaign to future political efforts. This gets back to the individualized nature of service that is the top goal of portals for politicians. In essence, a politician is engaged through such a portal in an on-going conversation with each constituent. The user who says one thing to a city council member has a different context and different intent when speaking to a representative in the U.S. Congress. The data is not transferable between the different relationships. A citizen at one point of time will have different ideas and viewpoints than at some other point in time. These are not transferable. This offers us another reason why constituents need to have complete control offer the data they submit and have submitted to the portals of politicians: voters do change their minds and should be at liberty to erase anything they wrote or said in the past while they make their new thinking available to their representatives. If a candidate for office fails in a campaign, then the next time that politician takes up new tactics and layers in some different principles for a new run for office, the previous data from constituents is not transferable to the new individual conversations that the politician is embarking upon.
Three restraints need to be applied and be rock-solid as politicians adopt such technologies in serving individuals, and turn away from demographic notions of the public and turn away from partisan determinants for serving the public. The partisan options are no longer realistic options. With the gerrymandering successes in every state, one party is eliminated from ever winning in districts. Voters need more alternatives to consider beyond the dominate party and the gerrymander-defeated party when they step into the voting booths. Independent candidates can offer that realistic and electable option, offer true choices for the voters who wish to exercise their liberty in determining the nature of their government, rather than being dictated to by the dominant party in their state.
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