How the Kickstarter model could transform UK elections
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Version 0 of 1. If there's one lesson we learned from the 2014 EU and local elections, it's that voters are fed up with politics and politicians. They stay away from the polls in droves, and when they vote for minority parties, it's only when those parties have enjoyed such sustained notoriety – and generous coverage from the national media – that they seem "electable." The referendum on alternative voting was the only positive outcome that I'd hoped for from the coalition - and watching the Tories knife the Lib Dems in the back over it ("alternative voting: totally undemocratic and unfit for purpose, except that we use it to choose our own leaders") was a heartbreak. You could ask for no better example of the arrogance, corruption and complacency that "first past the post" elections breed than the #Drip stitch-up, in which the party leaders decided in a smoke-filled room to create a bunch of sweeping, illegal powers for government, declared a fake emergency, lied to the public about the substance of the legislation, whipped their MPs to vote for it, and predicted – correctly – that MPs in the run-up to an election are unlikely to rebel and risk losing the whip when they're about to start campaigning to keep their jobs. These are the actions of parties who know that so long as they are all equally terrible, none of them will lose votes to the other - and since no one would throw away a vote by balloting for a minority party, there's no risk to any of them from acting in such a manifestly undemocratic fashion. First past the post polling is a horrendous collective-action problem. If the party you really support has no hope of taking office, the "rational" thing to do is to vote for the major party you hate least, to head off the party you hate the most. This is something that every doorbell-ringer for a minority party knows all too well. "I'm Mr Notachance from the Yellow Party, and I'd like to ask for your vote on election day." "Yellow Party! Well, I love what you stand for, but come on, you haven't got a snowball's chance. It's throwing away my vote." "May I ask how you will vote?" "Oh, I used to hold my nose and vote Labour, but honestly, who can bear it anymore? To be honest, I'll probably stay at home and throw up into a bucket." You hear variations on this theme a lot - no one wants to vote for the minority party because everyone knows that no one wants to vote for the minority party. As time goes by, the number of people willing to vote at all declines, so that a smaller and smaller number of ever-more cynical people elect representative that are answerable to fewer and fewer voters, and policy gets more and more corrupt. Now, if there's one thing the internet's good at, it's collective action problems. Reducing the cost of working together is at the center of the Internet's biggest success stories, from Wikipedia to GNU/Linux to Theyworkforyou. It may be that with the right code, we could crudely bodge a kind of AV system into the establishment-friendly, incumbent-favouring first past the post system. Here's how that could work: "Yellow Party! Well, I love what you stand for, but come on, you haven't got a snowball's chance. It's throwing away my vote." "Oh, I'm not asking you to vote for me! Not quite, anyway. All I want you to do is go on record saying that you would vote for me, if 20% of your neighbours made the same promise. Then, on election day, we'll send you a text or and email letting you know how many people there are who've made the same promise, and you get to decide whether it's worth your while. "The current MP, Ms Setforlife, got elected with only 8,000 votes in the last election. If I can show you that 9,000 of your neighbours feel the same way as you do, and if you act on that information – well, we could change everything." This threshold-style action system is at the heart of Kickstarter (pledge whatever you like, but no one has to spend anything unless enough money is raised to see the project to completion) and it's utterly adaptable to elections. In democracies all over the world, voting is in decline. A permanent political class has emerged, and what it has to offer benefits a small elite at the public's wider expense. We hear a lot from tech circles about "disruption" of complacent, arrogant and entrenched industries. Politics is the foremost example of such an industry and it's overdue for disruption. • UK's Drip law: cynical, misleading and an affront to democracy |