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Why the time for change has come – The Economist 12/21/96

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A Survey of democracy: Happy 21st century, voters! (part 7 of 8)

“In an equal and electronic world, the unequal old steam-engine won’t work”

BRIAN BEEDHAM

THE argument for direct democracy is not just a matter of beating off the mostly unconvincing objections its opponents throw at it. The bigger part of the argument consists of pointing out that the world has changed hugely since the other version of democracy, the representative sort, first came into widespread use in the 19th century. These changes make the vote-every-few-years brand look increasingly unworkable, and strengthen the claim to workability of the emerging alternative.

The idea that government by the people really meant no more than letting the people from time to time elect a legislature and perhaps a president who between elections would take all the real decisions may have had a certain plausibility in the 19th century and the first part of the present century. Even then, the Swiss were unpersuaded: they got their referendum system going 130 years ago, and it worked fine. But for most people in those days it seemed important that only a small part of the population had a decent education, plenty of money, ready access to information about public affairs, and enough leisure to put that information to responsible use. Let this minority therefore provide the political class which would do most of the serious work, while the poor and relatively ignorant majority contented itself with the occasional broad choice between This Lot and That Lot.

That was the reasoning behind the idea of representative democracy. It was an over-simplification even in the 19th century, in the judgment of men as different as a conservative novelist like Anthony Trollope and Keir Hardie, the founder of Britain’s Independent Labour Party. By the end of the 20th century, it has become untenable.

The table on this page illustrates the economic and social upheaval the richer part of the world has gone through in the past 100 years. A century ago, the average Briton and American produced an annual GDP of only $ 4,200 and $ 4,500 respectively at today’s prices; today, the Briton’s great-grandchild produces more than four times that much and the American’s almost six times (and the growth in many other countries, such as Italy, has been even faster). A century ago, few people got a proper education: only one child in France, for instance, went to a secondary school compared with every 60 who do so now, and only one went on to college or university for every 50 who do now; and the spread of learning has been even more spectacular in, for instance, Japan.

These things have enabled the average citizen of the rich world to save much more money than he could even 60 years ago, and thus to expand his ownership of shares, housing, cars or whatever. Meanwhile the amount of time he has to spend at work has considerably diminished, leaving him more time to take an intelligent interest, if he wishes, in the way his country is governed. To do that he has at his disposal not only the enormous expansion of newspaper circulation that began a century ago but also the 20th-century innovations of mass radio and television and, the latest arrival, a 34,000% increase in the number of networks linked to the Internet in the United States and a 27,000% increase elsewhere in the world in the past eight years alone.

This is a revolution, and it would be extraordinary if such a revolution did not rattle the foundations of a political system based on pre-revolutionary assumptions. The rattling of representative democracy would presumably have started years ago if it had not been delayed by the cold war. The self-discipline required by the struggle against communism made the democracies reluctant to think of changing their own political arrangements; so the half-way-house sort of democracy erected in the 19th century lasted longer than it would otherwise have done. But once the cold war had loosened its grip, things were bound to start changing.

As good as you are

One sign of the change is already clear. By the late 1990s, many people have come to realise that they are as well (or as badly) equipped to make most political decisions as the men and women they elect to represent them. They have as much education, nearly as much access to the needed information, and as big a stake in getting the judgments right; if they give a question their attention, they can usually offer a sensible answer. The longer the past half-century’s economic expansion can be prolonged, and the wider the information revolution extends its embrace, the larger the proportion of the population of which all that will be true.

The ordinary man no longer feels, as his grandfather felt, that his representative is a genuinely superior fellow. Indeed, the huge new flow of information that has become available to ordinary people by grace of electronics in the second half of the 20th century has made it painfully clear that those representatives are not at all superior. They are as capable of laziness, stupidity and dishonesty as the ordinary man. That may have been true a century ago, too. The difference is that then it was not generally realised; now it is.

Even a dozen years ago, it was hard to imagine that Italy’s whole parliamentary edifice was about to be brought crashing to the ground because its corruption had become public knowledge and Italians were horrified by what they had discovered. At the end of 1996, Belgians are wondering whether something almost as bad may have happened in their country in the past few years. These are extreme cases. But in many other countries the voters no longer extend to the politicians as much trust and respect as they once did. Opinion polls in America, Britain, France and elsewhere all make the same point: people nowadays look on their representatives with a disillusioned eye. That is the result of the past century’s economic and social equalisation, and of the fact that a richer and better-educated electorate can now keep a pretty constant eye on most of its politicians’ activities.

The end of the cold war has brought another change, and this one too suggests that democracy needs modernising. The disappearance of communism has greatly reduced the ideological content of politics. The shaping power of ideas has not entirely vanished, of course. A recognisable post-cold-war frontier is starting to emerge between a new left and a new right in the debate about the competing claims of efficiency and compassion, the proper functions of government, the best economic way to pay for sickness and old age, and so on. But these are nuances compared with the thunderous old battles between socialism and individualism, between the command economy and the free market. This dilution of ideology has two consequences.

One is that the agenda of politics, the list of decisions to be taken, has grown much more prosaic. The choice at voting time is no longer even in theory a choice between two radically different bodies of ideas. It is a series of selections among relatively small differences of opinion about the details of economic management and fairly minor disagreements over the amount and direction of public spending. This is not the sort of thing that is best presented to the voters once every few years in the parliamentary-election programmes of competing parties. That is like being told to do your supermarket shopping in one half-hour trip every half-decade. The modern agenda of politics is much better handled by the regular routine of visits to the voting centre that is offered by direct democracy.

The other effect of the fading of ideology is that political parties are losing their old power. This is important because parties-the things you vote for or against on parliamentary-election day, and the building-blocks of the governments thus created-are keen supporters of representative democracy. Their existence largely depends on it. They therefore oppose direct democracy. In post-cold-war politics, however, the parties can no longer claim to be carrying banners inscribed with the name of a great idea that unites a whole segment of humanity. As the banners are lowered, the loyalties that used to hold the parties together begin to dissolve; people move more readily from one party to another; parties become woollier, weaker things. As they lose their old clout, they can no longer put up so much resistance to the modernisation of democracy. These days, voters do not need a special class of people called politicians to interpret their wishes; they have learned that politicians are a rather unreliable lot; and the trade unions into which the politicians have organised themselves, the political parties, are growing feebler. Between them, those three facts can push open the door to direct democracy.

ALL IS CHANGED

GDP per head, dollars* 1900 1995

Britain 4,200 18,900

Canada 3,000 19,200

Italy 1,400 19,000

United States 4,500 26,700

Educational Enrolments (thousands) 1900 1995

France

Secondary 98 5,822

Higher 30 1,526

Japan

Secondary 121 11,288 (1)

Higher 25 2,139 (1)

United States

Secondary 519 17,117 (2)

Higher 238 14,120 (2)

Savings per head, dollars* 1930 1995

Britain 170 1,500

United States 140 950

Britain 54 43

Canada 57 39

United States 53 42

Internet – number of connected networks** 1988 1996 (2)

United States 301 104,000

Non-US 33 91,000


*1995 prices and exchange rates (1) 1992 (2) Projected
** Separate groups of linked computers that can share information
Sources: The Economist; International Labour Organisation; Internet Society; national statistics; OECD

© 1996 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved

Life at the democratic roots – The Economist 12/21/96

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A Survey of democracy: Happy 21st century, voters! (part 4 of 8)

The places where you realise what a sense of community means

KILCHBERG, a community of 7,000 people, sits n a hillside that slopes sharply down to the southern shore of the lake of Zurich. It would not be fair to call it a typical specimen of the 3,000-odd Gemainden (communes in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, comuni in the Italian part) which are the foundation of the country’s politics. Most of its people are comfortably well-off, many of them refugees from the higher taxes of the next-door community, the city of Zurich; less than a quarter are native citizens of Kilchberg. Only about 100 of the 7,00 are employed. From the graveyard of the Reformed church at the top of the hill the mortal remains of Thomas Mann and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer look out on a summer’s day at the silent snows of the mountains of eastern Switzerland.

Still, Kilchberg is a fair example of how Swiss politics works at the roots. Its 7,000 people hold all power not specifically allocated to the federal or the cantonal government. It raises its own income and property taxes (in all, the comunities dispose of more than a quarter of all Swiss tax money, not all that much less than the federal government).

It runs schooling up to the age of 16, including building the the schools and choosing the committee that appoints the teachers. It distributes up to a monthly SFr3,000 ($2,370) per person to its poor—admittedly not very numerous in Kilchberg—as well as providing help to a handful of foreign refugees, mainly from Sri Lanka. It has its own volunteer fire brigade; two police boats on the lake; a couple of car-born policemen who keep an eye on illegal parking and look after the lost-and-found office; an old people’s home; and a community farm where, if the fruit-seller is out for lunch, you just leave your money on the counter.

The government of this busily innocent little place consists of a seven-person council, elected by the people, which supervises a modest staff of professionals (unlike some Gemeinden, whose part-time workers combine their work for the community with their ordinary jobs). The real power, however, is wielded by the voters who assemble up to four times a year to listen to the council’s recommendations and decide whether it is handling things properly. It is at these meetings that tax levels are fixed, new laws are passed, the community’s accounts are inspected, building regulations are decided (a crowd-drawer, this) and anything else anybody wants to bring up can be discussed.

Voting is by show of hands, but there can be a cross-on-paper vote if a third of those present demand it; they never have, so far. If somebody feels the council’s ideas are inadequate, he or she can be collecting 15 signatures insist on putting a proposed new law to the voters; it has not happened for a decade. A single person can demand some specific other action from the council, with the right, if the council does not agree, to take the matter up to the cantonal and federal levels. Only one such demand has been made in the past ten years, for the community’s farm to use organic farming methods. This smooth record suggests that Karl Kobelt, president of the council for these ten years, is a model politician of the Swiss School.

The cloud on the horizon is the fact that no more than about 400 people generally turn up at these meetings or maybe 700 when something especially exciting is on the menu. As a percentage of Kilchberg’s 4,000 or so qualified voters, that is worryingly smaller even than the quarter of the electorate the canton of Glarus brings out for its annual assembly. Nothing seems to have gone badly wrong as a result; if it had, the protests would have been heard by now. But something odd is happening when a system designed to deploy the power of the people turns out to be actually using only a tenth of that people power.

Dealing with this problem is harder for the little units of Swiss politics, which like to bring their people together for a fact-to-face talk about everything, than it is for the bigger units. The big ones, which call their people to referendums only on selected issues, and usually do the voting by post, can reduce the voting burden fairly easily—fewer mandatory referendums, suffer signature-collecting rules, and so on. That will probably get more people to vote.

To achieve the same result, unless their people rediscover a more general willingness to abandon the television set and assemble for a meeting very few months, the smaller cantons and communities may eventually have to renounce the intimacy of their talk-about-anything get-togethers, and turn to more prosaic methods of selective voting. It will be a sad loss of a vivacious piece of old-fashioned politics. But if that is the price of keeping the 21st century’s people at their democratic work, so be it.

© 1996 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved

The end of a dividing line – The Economist 12/21/96

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A Survey of democracy: Happy 21st century, voters! (part 8 of 8)

BRIAN BEEDHAM

IT WOULD be wrong, however, to rest the case for direct democracy on utilitarian grounds alone. To vote directly on the issues of the day is more efficient than to delegate the issue-deciding job to a bunch of representatives, because it almost certainly provides more people with more of what they want at little or no extra cost. But it also does something else. By giving ordinary people more responsibility, it encourages them to behave more responsibly; by giving them more power, it teaches them how to exercise power. It makes them better citizens, and to that extent better human beings. It improves the producers as well as the product.

Getting more out of democracy, and out of the people who are supposed to be the operators of democracy, was bound to take time. For most of history most of mankind has been poor, ignorant and timid. It has not been hard for the minority who had some money, a sword and the rudiments of knowledge to persuade everybody else (and often themselves too) that they were the only ones fitted to take the decisions of government.

The turning-point came with the Reformation, which declared that every individual is directly responsible to God for his own life, and does not need a priestly class to tell him how to conduct that life. It then became possible for people to start working out the secular deduction from that religious premise. That too happened horribly slowly. But, two or three centuries after the Reformation, it was coming to be seen that equality before God must imply equality in the running of earthly affairs too.

Even then, this realisation had a hard time overcoming the self-interest of those who wanted to insist that they knew best how to run things. In particular, it was hindered by a damaging by-product of the Enlightenment, the next great sharpening of consciousness after the Reformation.

The Enlightenment was a necessary reassertion of the power of reason after too many centuries in which dogma had too often suppressed reason. The trouble was that this reassertion of reason tempted some people to think that reason could produce a scientific answer to every problem, including all the problems of politics. The most spectacular victims of the temptation of scientific certainty were the communists, who were so certain of the rightness of what they planned to do that they saw no need to consult anybody else at all. But a milder version of the temptation still tugs at other politicians. It is why so many of them still claim to possess a special skill which enables them to decipher what the incoherent voters are unable to say clearly: why, in short, they reckon they should be left in charge of the decision-making process.

Self-government and self-discipline

If you believe in democracy at all, it is hard to see why in most democratic countries the proceedings of democracy should still be divided between, on the one side, a few hundred people who take all the detailed political decisions and, on the other, the vast mass who walk down the road once every few years, push a button or mark a cross in a square, and then walk home again. Democracy, after all, assumes the basic equality of all grown-up human beings. Yet the overwhelming majority of these beings are still expected to be content with an occasional vote for a party some of whose proposals the voter agrees with, but others he doesn’t; then a wait of several years to see whether the winning party does what it has said it will do, and whether it does the right bits; and after that another stab in the dark to find out whether this time more voters can get a little more of what they actually want.

It is unlikely that the 21st century will put up with this for long. Of course, the fuller form of democracy, the one in which the voters directly take the decisions they want to take, will put down its roots only in places where the soil is ready.

The soil will generally be readiest in countries where economic and educational equalisation has made a special class of politicians largely unnecessary: which means, at first, chiefly in the countries around the North Atlantic. Even in these countries, parliaments will continue to exist; there is still plenty of useful work for a parliament to do once it has accepted that the people have a right to act over its head. And, if the new direct democrats of the 21st century learn from the experience of late-20th-century Switzerland, they will concentrate their referendum-voting work on things that really matter, by limiting the number of minor issues that parliament has willy-nilly to send to the voters and by tight signature-collecting rules for the referendums the voters can impose on parliament. Like all good things, direct democracy needs self-discipline.

If it is done right, though, it could finally remove one of the oldest and deepest of the dividing lines that run through mankind. So far, the business of government has always separated those who do the governing from those who are governed, the rulers from the ruled. The invention of democracy healthily blurred that distinction. But it did not wholly expunge it, so long as it limited the democracy’s voters to the subordinate role of saying every now and again which of various groups of politicians they on the whole preferred to the other groups.

The dividing line is bad for those on both sides of it. It is bad for the minority who hold most of the real power, because they can conceal what they are doing with their power, and can therefore be corrupted by it. It is bad for the majority, because it confines them to the generalities of politics and discourages them from voting with a proper, detailed sense of responsibility; that makes them superficial, careless and increasingly cynical. The division can now be removed. The idea that the people should govern themselves can at last mean just that.

© 1996 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved

Traffic circles of hell exemplify city’s misguided policy

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Guest Opinion published 12/4/96 in the Boulder Planet

I thank letter-writer C. Kliger, whose building lost resident parking on 13th St. when bike lanes were striped on last month for not taking the bait offered by Transportation Division to again divide neighbors against cyclists. We have a Division which takes the cake -about the same portion of the City budget as the Defense Department is of the Federal budget- by getting citizens to fight over crumbs.

The classic example of how The Division works is their multi-year promotion of traffic circles, which the Camera’s front page story of 10/30/96 says “have pitted neighbor against neighbor”:

In 1988, North 9th Street residents started asking for several 4-way stop signs to slow traffic. The Division said 4-ways wouldn’t work, although the one at Maxwell and 9th worked OK. Bolder Bicycle Commuters and most cyclists opposed the circles, medians and neckdowns the Division proposed, as these things violate national (AASHTO) and Boulder (Transportation Master Plan 1988, pg. 2-20) standards of 14-foot minimum lane widths for streets designated as bike routes. Many neighbors went for it since the Division refused them stop signs or raised crosswalks.

After 6 years and over $10,000 of studies, reports and acrimonious meetings, 9th Street got a circle, a median and a set of neckdowns, costing some $120,000. Some go the wrong way around the circle and accidents have increased. Last month 4-way stops were installed on 9th at Dellwood and Forest, finally solving the problem!! The “test” traffic circle at 17th & Pine is THE most dangerous intersection in town as measured by calls to the Close Call Hotline (441-4272). The test circle at 15th & Pine is 3rd worst. May these be the deathbed of the Division’s concrete chicanery, not of some child on foot or bicycle!

Bolder Bicycle Commuters members persuaded the Division NOT to stripe bike lanes on 13th from Balsam to Forest, thus preserving some 20 parking spots. There is little traffic north of Balsam on 13th and we don’t feel threatened there. (13th St. residents deserve the same resident parking as the better-organized -and politically connected- Mapleton Hill and Whittier neighborhoods they’re sandwiched between.)

Bolder Bicycle Commuters also persuaded the Division NOT to take parking for a bike lane on Sunnyside, a 2-block street immediately west of Broadway and south of baseline that is shared with the Broadway bike route, also because it is not needed. We were unable to convince the Division NOT to build the million-dollars-worth of tunnels under Mohawk and Gilpin.

It is sad that so much of Boulder’s business community buys into the image the Division creates of cyclists grabbing for every inch of turf. Let’s remember that Boulder has ONE good continuous E-W bike route (the Creek Path) and ONE decent continuous N-S bike route (Broadway-13th-15th-Broadway). While we fight over crumbs, the Division takes the cake as the biggest part of the bloated City bureaucracy. Ken Hotard of the Board of Realtors, also in the 11/13 Planet properly condemns City government for growing faster than the City. Our city government has 1,800 “full-time equivalent” employees, while Fort Collins with 10,000 more people has only 1,100! These extra employees of course vote for the City Council which pays them, Council hires more, and the vicious cycle keeps grinding away. This is like the council’s self-appointment process which citizens just ended at the polls, demanding to elect their own representatives by passing 2B.

The business community would be wise to join with environmentalists. If young, athletic, compact, sunny Boulder fulfilled its potential as a cycling town (biking for 25% of all trips like Davis, California or 40% like big, rainy Amsterdam, instead of our measly 12%), people would see that it is not primarily growth which makes our lives congested and polluted, but unnecessary over-use of vehicles. But the Division can’t build an empire on cycling. They are set on a wasteful “system” of tangled, weaving bus routes, which run emptier (an average of some 5.5 passengers on a 45-passenger bus) than single-passenger autos! Citizens voted against their $250-million Transit Tax 2-1 in 1994, but the parasitic Division is doing polls and focus-groups, honing their propaganda to wear us down.

The Division and City government as a whole slavishly re-enact what caused 18th-century philosopher Rousseau to observe: “Keeping citizens apart has become the first maxim of modern politics.”

Bolder Bicycle Commuters holds monthly public meetings and can be reached at 449-7439.

Stop the Transportation Master Plan

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Read on KGNU’s Morning Magazine 5/16/96

This is Evan Ravitz, with Citywatch, a peak behind the hot-air curtain of the Imperial City of Boulder.

Citizens of Boulder and Beyond: your testimony can help prevent a multi-hundred-million-dollar fraud from being perpetrated on Boulder. It’s called the Transportation Master Plan, and you can comment on it tonite at the Planning Board Meeting at about 6:30 at City Hall. Next Tuesday City Council will have a public hearing on the TMP; watch for the agenda published in Sunday’s Camera.

The Master Plan is so perverse and parasitic that even the League of Women Voters is harshly critical of it. Over the next decades Transportation Division wants a good part of a billion dollars to continue their policies which are taking us straight to gridlock. There have been so many revisions of the TMP that I’ve given up trying to keep track of the details. The bottom line is that they want more.

Transportation Division spends about the same proportion of Boulder’s bloated budget as the Defense Department spends of the Nations. Last weekend they spent ¼ million ripping out the perfectly good intersection of Canyon and 13th St. and putting in concrete in pretty colors. The TMP will have them do this at 9th & Canyon and Broadway and Canyon as well.

They again ask for much more money for more big empty buses weaving slowly through our neighborhoods spewing diesel. The citizens turned this down 2 to 1 in 1994, but they’re baaack!

Nowhere is there an indication they intend to straighten out the routes and put them on main streets where they would be used.

They trumpet nationwide their HOP shuttle, but two studies show that 2/3 of HOP riders would otherwise walk or bicycle. Pedestrians and cyclists are the enemies of Transportation Division as there is no money in it.

A million dollars is to be spent putting 14 fancy traffic circles on Pine and Spruce East of Downtown. All this does is shift some traffic to Pearl and Balsam; a million dollar shell game. All these circles will violate the 1989 Transportation Master Plan which implemented National standards mandating that traffic lanes on Bike routes be at least 14 feet wide.

A real solution to traffic congestion, adopted with enormous success in Aspen, is to simply charge more for parking so people drive less and use buses, bikes or feet more. Transportation Division isn’t telling us about Aspen’s success, instead taking $800,000 to study the idea for 2 more years, meanwhile spending as much as possible on bandaid solutions.

Director of the Transportation Division Phil Weisbach and his employees deliberately and repeatedly lied in 1994. Responding to Sierra Club and other complaints that cycling would get nothing in that year’s plan, Weisbach said cycling wasn’t relevant because most cyclists wouldn’t ride more than a mile or 2. I reminded him that the Boulder Valley Employee Survey showed that the average bike commute is 3.6 miles, but he said he’d continue to assert his “opinion”.

The TMP is supposed to guide our transportation future for many years. If you think it’s time to show the parasites the door, come to the Planning Board meeting tonight at 6:30 and the Council meeting Tuesday about 7.

This has been Evan Ravitz with Citywatch.

The Internet Vox Populi – PoliticsUSA, April 20-21, 1996

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As Election Day turnouts dwindle, many activists and lawmakers are turning to electronic networks to make voting easier and thus more appealing to busy Americans. Skeptics worry about the potential for abuse
By Graeme Browning, National Journal

BOULDER, COLO. — Voters here encountered several referenda issues on the local ballot in November 1993 but none more striking than question D. It would have made future elections dramatically different; people could use their telephones or computers to cast ballots.
Boulder’s voters rejected the idea, 59-41 percent. But two and a half years later this issue has resurfaced because computers have become a fixture in many households. Boulder, a college town nestled at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, now has one of the highest rates of Internet usage in the country. And some local officials are suggesting putting the electronic-voting proposition back on the ballot.
“I wasn’t in favor of the idea in 1993 because of security concerns, but I’ve gotten to the point where that issue doesn’t seem to be a big deal anymore,” Stephen M. Pomerance, a private investor and consultant who’s a city council member, said in a recent interview. “I’d rather people have more access to their government.”
Such talk makes Boulder Mayor Leslie L. Durgin nervous. “This idea would work well for those people who are already involved in technology,” Durgin said one morning as she sipped coffee in the refurbished dining room of the century-old Boulderado Hotel. “But I find that people who say, `Oh, everybody has a computer, everybody’s on the Internet,’ are overlooking a huge portion of our population that is not.”
As voter turnouts dwindle and cynicism about government continues to bubble across the country, many activists and lawmakers alike are turning to computer networks in efforts to make the traditional duties of citizenship — voting chief among them — easier to accomplish and thus more appealing to busy Americans.
Electronic-voting proposals get the most attention because they are the most controversial, but experiments with on- line voter registration, targeted electronic polling and “town hall” meetings conducted on the Internet are also under way.
Some of these experiments reflect the conviction of many Internet enthusiasts that computer-aided “direct” democracy — which relies on frequent referenda and voter initiatives — may be better suited to governance in the Information Age than traditional representative democracy is.
Back in Washington, even Congress appears to be warming to the concept of giving voters a virtual seat at the table during its deliberations. The recently formed congressional Internet Caucus has established a site on the World Wide Web, the Net’s multimedia corner, where people may one day be able to participate, via computer, in caucus meetings. “One of the things our Web page will allow us to do eventually is provide a funnel directly into Congress,” Rep. Rick A. White, R-Wash., a caucus co-founder, said at a late-March press conference.
Opponents worry, however, that fraud, abuse and breaches of security will be as much a problem on computer networks as they have been in the past at the ballot box. Conservative political analysts also fear that when people don’t have an opportunity to engage in or witness face-to-face deliberations, they will lose that sense of personal involvement in government that helps keeps a democracy alive.
“When you vote, you come to the same place as other people, you wait in line with other people, you see candidates standing outside the polling area. That has a lot to do with how people perceive the process of governing,” said David E. Mason, director of congressional studies for the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank. “The problems of people feeling alienated could be exacerbated by relying entirely on the computer or the phone, simply because the distance between what the voters do and the final action of the government is that much greater.”
That distance already seems too much for many Americans. Nationally, voter turnout has declined by almost 25 percent in the past three decades, RAND, the California think tank, reported recently. At the same time, the ranks of volunteers for such civic groups as parent-teacher organizations and the Red Cross have shrunk dramatically, while the number of people who say they have attended a public meeting in the past year dropped from 22 percent in 1973 to 13 percent in 1993.
“Electronic networks can facilitate citizen participation in the political process. Some individuals now use E-mail [electronic mail] to contact government representatives, for instance,” the RAND report noted. The report recommended that the federal government make E-mail available to everyone. “Broad access to computers and electronic networks. . . might help reduce if not reverse the trends toward disengagement in civic and political affairs,” the report concluded.
Declining interest in politics is evident in Boulder, where only 38.6 percent of the city’s 68,000-plus registered voters made it to the polls for last November’s municipal elections. In 1989, a mere 18.3 percent cast ballots in the city council race.
Officials here try to put a brave face on the statistics. The November election “was a good turnout, considering that many people in Boulder register just to establish residency, so they can go to school here” at the University of Colorado, city clerk Alisa D. Lewis said in an interview.
But local activists argue that the citizens of Boulder and many other communities are staying away from the voting booth because they’re convinced that lawmakers pay little attention to their views anyway. “Americans are deeply disturbed by how unrepresentative their government is,” Evan Ravitz, director of the Government by the People Foundation, a Boulder-based advocacy group that is a prime supporter of electronic voting, said in an interview. “People are looking for alternatives, and one of those alternatives is direct democracy.”

Ballot-Box Connections

Ravitz’s group — formerly called the Voting by Phone Foundation — designed the electronic-voting system that voters here rejected in 1993.
The system would work much like automated voice mail. A voter taps a password of his or her own choosing into a computer database and is, in turn, assigned a random identification number that is too long for anybody else to guess. At the same time the computer checks off the voter’s name on the rolls so that he or she can’t cast an additional ballot.
On Election Day, the voter calls a toll-free number and punches in the ID number on the telephone number pad. The computer then presents the ballot choices. If the system had been in use in the 1994 presidential election, for example, a digitalized voice would have greeted voters with a message something like this:

“For President and Vice President, to vote for Bush and Quayle, Republicans, press 1. For Clinton and Gore, Democrats, press 2. For other `write-in’ candidates, press 3. To skip this race, press 0.”

A voter who wanted to write in candidates would be asked to say, and spell, the candidates’ names.
To confirm votes, the digitalized voice would announce,

“You voted for [the candidates’ names]. Press 1 if this is correct, or 2 to change your vote.”

At the end of the procedure the computer would give the voter a confirmation number that could be checked against a listing of votes in the local newspaper.
The system presented to Boulder voters was geared toward the telephone, but all of these procedures could easily be carried out on a computer, over the Internet, said Vincent N. Campbell, a former Washington-based management consultant who has helped refine the system.
“This is not cutting-edge technology. It’s easy stuff,” said Campbell, who joined Ravitz’s group after he retired and moved to Boulder three years ago.
Two other systems now available expand electronic-voting technology even further. California computer programmer Marilyn Davis has developed “eVote,” a computer program that makes possible the casting of a variety of votes, from “yes/no” types to grouped votes that direct the user to “pick one of the following five” or “vote for 10 out of the next 20 items.” Davis’s system can also be programmed to let voters see how others voted, change votes until the balloting closes and watch the vote tally develop.
Lorrie Faith Cranor, a graduate student in engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has developed a more complex system called “Sensus.” Her system uses electronic cryptography and “blind” digital signatures to assure the privacy of votes. Cranor’s program automatically encodes each ballot, marks it with a signature that doesn’t reveal its contents, verifies that a voter is registered and has voted only once, and submits it to another computer program that decodes it and adds it to the vote tally.
Cranor’s system also gives people the opportunity to cast what she calls a “contingency” vote. Many backers of Texas billionaire Ross Perot didn’t vote for him in the 1994 presidential election because “they felt that [he] didn’t have a very good chance of winning,” Cranor said in a recent interview with Off the Record, an electronic magazine. “We have no idea how many people actually would have voted for Perot if they felt he was a viable candidate. And it would be nice to be able to somehow capture that [number] to determine whether the winner has a strong mandate or not.”

Democratechs Lead The Way?

Electronic voting, or “E-voting,” systems offer many of the benefits that voting by mail does, supporters say. Not only does E-voting relieve citizens of the burden of having to vote in person, on a specified day, within a limited time period, but it also dramatically lowers costs.
Election Day 1995 cost Boulder approximately $2 a vote, Lewis, the city clerk, said. Campbell estimates that a vote-by- phone system would have cost 25-75 cents a vote the first time it was used, and proportionately less each subsequent time as installation costs were amortized. By comparison, Oregon’s recent vote-by-mail election for the U.S. Senate cost about $1 per vote.
Mail-in voting offers ease and convenience, but E-voting could theoretically give citizens a direct say in their government, supporters say.
In November 1994, Canadian authorities approved the accreditation of the Democratech Party of British Columbia. The party advocates turning all governmental decisions over to the public, to be resolved through electronic referenda.
“Representative government assumes that the people need to elect someone to represent them in a faraway legislative assembly,” the organization announced at its site on the World Wide Web. “But with modern, instantaneous communications, the people can directly make their own decisions, relegating politicians to the scrap heap of history.”
Motivated by the same reasoning, Marc Strassman, a free- lance television producer in Los Angeles, recently launched a “Campaign for Digital Democracy” whose goal was gathering signatures to put an electronic-voting initiative on California’s ballot in November. The initiative would have allowed “any otherwise eligible Californian” to register to vote, sign official petitions and vote through computers, telephones, personal digital assistants, interactive television “and any other device capable of originating and transmitting a secure digital signal.”
In April 1995, in an election that cost the city about $13 per voter, barely 20 percent of Los Angeles’s registered voters turned out for the city’s municipal elections, Strassman said in an interview. Voters all over California cast their ballots on IBM punch cards, “so it’s not like computers aren’t used in voting now,” he said. “I figured, `Let’s just take the power of this technology and move it into the political arena.”‘
Strassman got few signatures for his petition, and the initiative died. He continues to maintain the Web site he established for the campaign, however, in the hope that computer enthusiasts will rally to the cause when E-voting becomes more widely understood. “I still believe it’s a good idea,” he said. “I just don’t think it will happen right now.”

Thanks But No Thanks

Because of the 1993 referendum, Boulder Mayor Durgin, city clerk Lewis and city council member Pomerance have probably done more thinking about electronic voting than almost any other public officials in the United States. And they’re not sure it’s such a good idea.
Lewis fears that computer-based democracy would triple public officials’ workloads, encourage voting abuses and fraud and frustrate the very citizens they’re trying to help. “Where does your priority lie?” she asked. “Do you respond first to the person you’re talking to on the phone, or the person who is standing in your office or to the person who is sending you a request through E-mail?”
Durgin is reluctant to discard any of the strictures of representative democracy for what she calls “this quick, taking- the-pulse-of-the-community kind of thing.”
“There’s this notion that you can simply put out as a quick poll, `Do you favor X, yes or no?’ without understanding all of the complexities and the legal ramifications of whatever X is,” she said. “And then you have the assumption that the decision has to be legally binding. That worries me.”
Pomerance, on the other hand, says that E-voting would be terrific for referenda, where the only decision facing voters is whether they agree with actions the city council plans to take. He also says he feels strongly that “more participation in the political process is a good thing.”
He worries, however, that electronic voting will become an easy out for citizens who don’t want to resolve important issues face-to-face. For example, people here have been warring recently over whether to allow dog owners to take unleashed pets on jogging trails. “I could just see somebody turning that into an initiative and demanding a vote on it, instead of hashing it out at a city council meeting, where it belongs,” he said.
That’s a valid fear, conservative analysts say. “We’re going to have real trouble if we make voting as easy as going to the bathroom,” said Curtis B. Gans, director of the Washington- based Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. “There is something called the communal act of voting that shouldn’t be sacrificed lightly.”
Making voting easier doesn’t automatically lead to increased turnouts, Mason of the Heritage Foundation added. “In the days when people had to walk on foot and ride on horseback to vote, we had a higher turnout than today,” he said.
He also cautions against abandoning the filtering process that traditional government provides. “By electing representatives rather than having direct democracy, you have some level that proposals have to move through,” he said. “And there’s compromise. By discussing issues, and trying to balance competing interests, most of the time you come up with a better solution than if you’d gone to a straight yes/no vote.”
Many of these concerns pale, however — at least in the eyes of some voters — in the face of the immediate consensus electronic voting can generate.
Last December, Princeton University conducted campus-wide student government elections through an electronic-voting system as well as through traditional paper ballots. Eighty percent of the students who were eligible to vote did so, compared with approximately 40 percent in previous elections. Strict verification procedures kept incidents of fraud to zero, said Jared P. Schutz, president of Boulder-based Stardot Consulting, who administered the elections.
“The philosophy of the Internet is that government is not as relevant as it was in the past,” said Schutz, a recent college graduate himself. “In the past you could only talk about direct democracy in a theoretical sense. But now, due to this new technology, people can effectively legislate for themselves.”
A major reworking of the Constitution would have to take place before such self-legislation could become a reality, and that’s not likely to happen any time soon. But as voters become more accustomed to voicing their opinions via computer, the process of seeking public consensus may never be the same.

Related Links On The Internet
Following are links to Internet sites mentioned in the preceding article. To return to PoliticsUSA, simply click your browser’s “back” feature.

April 20-21, 1996

Transportation Master Plan going nowhere (again.)

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by Evan Ravitz
published 4/13/96 in the Boulder Daily Camera

Newly appointed City Council member Don Mock says of the TMP in the Daily Camera “I think it’s a lofty goal to think that somehow we can freeze our traffic at 1994 levels.” Given the misleadership of Transportation Division, it’s not just lofty, it’s impossible. Now they are purposely ignoring the most cost-effective transportation success in Colorado in many years: Aspen, in January of 1995, ended free parking and started charging $1.00 per hour downtown, double the Boulder rate. According to the Denver Post and Aspen officials, within 5 weeks bus usage was up 32%, parking is easy to find, and pollution is visibly down as cars no longer search endlessly. The business community, which fought paid parking tooth and nail, is now pleased as punch.

Why is Transportation Division ignoring this success?

Because even after Aspen’s success, they obtained a $600,000 Federal grant and Council’s approval of $200,000 more of ours, for a two-year “Congestion Pricing” study, to determine whether charging drivers by how much they drove (or parked) is a good idea. Parking and driving are now tremendously subsidized by all taxpayers, no matter how much they drive. For decades, organizations like the Sierra Club have campaigned for higher gas taxes and insurance paid at the pump to more fairly charge those who drive more. Boulder can’t legally charge a gas tax, or change the insurance industry. But Boulder could start charging more of the true costs of parking next week, if Council had the intestinal fortitude.

They don’t yet. The main point of their recent distribution of 33,000 pieces of campaign material for the TMP, called a “survey”, is repeated 3 times in the 9 “Questions for the Community”: they want more money. A similar “aggressive transit” tax was defeated by the voters 2 to 1 in 1994.

The “lofty goal” of maintaining traffic at 1994 levels isn’t lofty enough if the City’s other goal of increasing “alternative” transportation is to be attained. Cycling -still 3 times as popular as the bus- has been decreasing since 1992 according to the “Modal Shift in the Boulder Valley” report. Commuting to work by bicycle decreased from 14.9% of all work trips to 12.3% by ’94. Commuting to school by bicycle decreased from 27.1% to 22.6%. Although Council member Havlick claimed in a Colorado Daily article that these decreases are insignificant, the report states: “for a difference to be statistically significant between years, there must be a shift of at least 2.6% (1.3% around each study year).” Work and school bike commuting are down by 2.6% and 4.5%, respectively. With the HOP Survey Report showing that 59.1% “use the HOP instead of using their bike or walking”, we can expect the coming 1996 Modal Shift survey to show cycling decreasing even faster, as the 1994 survey was done a month before the HOP began.

Why is cycling declining in a city formerly famous for it? The increasing danger. 3 years ago traffic engineer John Allen of Bolder Bicycle Commuters compared FBI to local reports of cyclist injuries and deaths. We had a rate 19 times higher than the national average for cities our size. Of course, Boulder bikes 6 times the average, but this still makes each cyclist more than 3 times as likely to be injured or killed here than the average! Considering this, the City’s expensive Bike Week promotion of cycling amounts to reckless endangerment (Remember to tell your lawyer that if you’re in an accident!) -as well as a failure.

Transportation Division: why won’t you check our figures, as promised last year?

Downtown businesspeople: this decline in cycling citywide is the big reason the 13th Street Bike Path is not the success we expected.

How much does “free” parking really cost?

Parking lots are designed with 2-300 square feet of space for each car, including access and backing space. This is much more than your typical office space! If you drive to work you use more than twice the expensive real estate as someone who doesn’t. Council member Pomerance told me that building a parking structure costs roughly the same per square foot as an office building. Yet, a downtown office space rents for about $20/day while your bigger parking space costs $0-4/day! The difference is hidden in sales and property taxes (which are passed on to renters too). With 7,115 total downtown parking spaces, using the average parking cost of $2/day (per diem for the $175 quarterly parking structure permit) the hidden subsidy just downtown is about $128,000 a day! (7115X$18)

Free parking to businesspeople is like a free lunch to a bureaucrat: both put it on our tab. But business folk should realize that by devoting a quarter of downtown to subsidizing empty cars, the remaining land costs skyrocket. In each 2-300 sq. ft. parking spot 50 customers can park their bikes. (in Amsterdam, a much bigger City with far worse weather, where 40% of travel is by bike, high-rise bike parks fit over 150 bikes in one car space)

How to fix it fairly:

Downtown businesspeople properly say that increased parking costs would drive business to Crossroads, etc. But Boulder citizens helped fund Crossroads, and Transportation Director Weisbach told me the City could charge for parking there. I propose creating parking price zones based on real estate costs. I suggest starting by doubling our downtown parking rate to match Aspen’s modestly successful $1.00/hr, with the surrounding zone costing $.50/hr. and the city periphery $.25/hr. for the first year, to give people time to start changing their habits, and for the provision of better bus and bicycle systems. I also suggest that we treat people like adults and tell them that this is stage one, with rates re-doubled after a year. The City’s TMP treats us like kids by avoiding this main issue, “tweaking” things weakly.

Adults know there’s no such thing as a free lunch -or parking. Somebody’s paying! Now it is all of us, not just in the hidden subsidies, but in our health, safety, and the physical and social distance our paved world imposes. Let’s grow up and stop subsidizing Boulder’s worst problem! To help turn the Timid Misleading Plan into a Truly Meaningful Plan, please contact me at 440-6838 or evan (at) vote.org.

How I was “terminated” by the Colorado Daily

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Letter published in 3/28/96 Boulder Weekly (it took 6 weeks to get them to publish it.)

How hypocritical for Colorado Daily reporter Lisa Marshall to lament “Student activism at all-time low” on the 1/23 front page, and for editor Clint Talbott to write on 1/26 that Lisa is working to include a “broader array of voices on our opinion page.” When yours truly (voted “Best Activist” by Boulder Daily Camera readers) told a CU “diversity” meeting last May 1st that CU should “democratize”, Lisa told Clint that I had “disrupted” the meeting and he fired me as Daily columnist, denying me any hearing. I wrote “As the Millennium Turns” for 4 years.

The co-chair of the meeting, Assistant Professor Esteban Flores, wrote the Daily that he “much appreciated Mr. Ravitz’s comments at the May 1st meeting.” Professor Marty Walter, who jumped to his feet at the meeting (all 6’5″ of him) and began by saying “Yes, we need more democracy!”, later said “If anyone disrupted the meeting it was me.” Published letters ran 18-2 for rehiring me, the two negatives being from an employee each of the City and the University, institutional targets of my column.

Small-minded control freaks like Lisa and Clint, in media and politics, are the main reason people shrink from “activism”. The hopeful bumper sticker “If the people lead, the leaders will follow” rarely pans out. Usually, if the people lead, the leaders attack them.

Clint breaks his word to Daily readers. He wrote: “I have not `censored’ Evan Ravitz…and hope he uses the open forum [letters] to express his views”. Yet Clint (or subordinates) held back for months three of the four letters I’ve since written, and removed the key sentence -where I invite people to take “action”- from the fourth! I had to call the Daily publisher to get each one published at all. The same kinds of things happen to many other letter-writers. When Clint learned from Mr. Flores and others that I didn’t disrupt anything, he said he’d talk with me and reconsider, but after putting me off all summer, he reneged. “This conversation is terminated” Clint told me on the phone.

After failing to talk to Terminator, I finally called Lisa (who I’d never spoken to) and asked why she started this. She said she thought I “wasn’t very objective” at the meeting. Lisa doesn’t understand that her job as reporter is to be objective, but mine as columnist was to express opinions. I was at the meeting to participate, and not to write about it, anyway. Even reporters are free to “be active” at meetings they’re not reporting on.

I’ve never met Lisa. But I know Clint too well already. He told me himself that he’s a “misanthrope”, which my Webster’s defines as “A person who hates or distrusts all mankind.” Clint lords it over the community he’s cut himself off from: he rarely returns calls at work, and has an unlisted number at home, unlike those of us who care for and respond to our readers. I regularly give out my number: 440-6838.

Law ‘n order man Clint called Matt Franzen a “moronic vandal” when Matt in ’92 removed the County-erected “safety” gate which prevented cyclists headed to 4-Mile Canyon from using the Creek Path to avoid the Canyon Highway. The County’s gate forced cyclists like Cheryl Amet onto the highway, where she was killed by a dozing driver. This, not vandalism, prompted the local legend “Torchmaster busts County-gate”. Clint now proves a more real danger to law by tacitly advocating vigilante action in an October ’95 editorial, which attorney Patricia Mayne wrote to admonish him for.

Other letters have pointed out his paper’s prejudice against “transients” and “rainbows”. Here’s Clint’s September Freudian slip: “Sam Archibald taught journalism law and ethics (ha, ha) to 75 people at once.” You do have funny ethics, Mr. Talbott.

The Daily, supposedly run by its employees, should consider a new editor. In any case, they should make the editor accountable for his or her words and actions. Democratize, even.

Evan Ravitz

University Hill

U.S. policy helped fuel rebellion in Mexico

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GUEST OPINION by Evan Ravitz and Elisa Facio
Published in the Boulder Daily Camera 1/27/96

The arrest, 14-hour interrogation, and eviction from Mexico of Denver documentary-maker Kerry Appel (Camera, Jan 12) is the resurfacing of the 2-year `Mexican standoff’ in Chiapas from media obscurity.

Kerry is likely in trouble for his excellent video “Politics, Profits and Zapatistas”, aired by KBDI Channel 12 on December 13th, about the Mayan rebellion whose goals were affirmed by 97.5% of the 1.3 million Mexicans who voted in the Zapatista’s nationwide ‘consulta’ last September. Denver’s NBC News Producer Rick Salinger refused to use it, saying: “We have a business relationship with the Mexican government-controlled TV channel and we wouldn’t want to offend them.”

We have a copy of the video and am planning to show it soon. Please call 440-6838. Evan lived in Chiapas and next-door Guatemala for several years, and witnessed the first round of peace talks in February 1994. We can also tell you how to subscribe to the Chiapas internet email list, which the N.Y. Times has credited with saving lives. Please write: evan@welcomehome.org.

The video shows how U.S. policy, including the unpopular NAFTA, helped cause the “world’s first postmodern revolution”, as Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s most celebrated author and former Ambassador to France calls it. It shows Chiapas as a dirt-poor colony of Mexico which in turn is exploited like it was a U.S. colony. That’s how bananas from thousands of miles away can sell here for less than local apples: laborers are paid minuscule or no wages in Chiapas. The Zapatistas call NAFTA “a death sentence for the poor” for several reasons.

First, NAFTA gutted Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution which guaranteed that traditional community-owned lands would remain so. Now they can be bought or stolen in shady deals like those suffered by U.S. Indians last century. Article 27 was won by the 1910-20 Mexican Revolution in which Indian hero Emiliano Zapata and 20% of all Mexicans were killed.

Second, `free trade’ is no level playing-field. Mayans growing corn with digging sticks right up to the tops of the volcanoes (because the good land was stolen centuries or years ago) now compete with American agribusiness with giant tractors and center-pivot irrigation subsidized by us taxpayers.

The Zapatistas captured, briefly, the international media spotlight on their revolt 1/1/94, the inception of NAFTA, brightly enough to stop their massacre by the Mexican Army. Amnesty International and others have since documented widespread torture, rape and pillage, taught to Mexican officers by the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. American exports of cattle-prods and other torture devices are documented in Kerry’s video. As the Secretary of the ruling PRI party in one Chiapas town says in the video: “The application of justice in Mexico is based on torture.” More of our tax dollars at work.

The Zapatistas say they “lead by obeying”, having “made all the strategic decisions by referendum”, which led to the `women’s laws’ and the national “consulta” in September. Most polls showed a majority of U.S. citizens opposed NAFTA, which demonstrates the failure of Congress to represent us. The availabe alternative is to streamline the use of referendum and initiative laws -which exist in 24 states including Colorado.

This legislation by citizens -as the Swiss enjoy four times a year- is also the goal of our foundation. You can see our extensive web site on participatory and electronic democracy, with links to the Zapatistas, the Swiss, the Dalai Lama and others who champion real democracy, at http://www.evanravitz.com/vote/v. People Rule! Viva Zapata!

The National Commission for Democracy in Mexico is calling on us to protest “the Mexican government’s intensified campaign against foreign tourists” in letters to the Mexican Embassy in Denver. Contact us for further information.

Letter re: fleecing the flock

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Letter published in Nov/Dec. 1995 NEXUS

Editor,

Regarding “Question Authority” (July/August): Many religious leaders have exploited their flock for money (selling indulgences in past centuries, tickets to eternity, etc.) or sex (why Mia Farrow and the Beatles fled the “Maharishi”), spreading confusion and even death (Naropa’s late leader Osel Tendzin giving HIV to young students, thinking his power would prevent its transmission). Yet true teachers exist you can trust your soul to. It is said: “There’s fake gold because there’s real gold.”

In the political realm the same holds. Here most leaders are fleecing the flock. But there’s now “the world’s first post-modern revolution” (says author Carlos Fuentes) in Mexico, whose leaders the Mayan Indian “Zapatistas” say they “lead by obeying”, and have instituted true democracy, with all the Indians and supporters voting in “consultas” (referenda), by which means the “Women’s Laws”, etc. were instituted. The Swiss people have made their own laws since 1848, now voting four times a year for the future they all want.

Connecting the two realms was the inventor of the word “synergy”, Buckminster Fuller, whose book _No More Secondhand God_ proposed citizens “voting by telephone on all prominent questions before Congress” in 1940. He wrote: “If direct democracy is not tried now, future generations will again champion it and there will be world civil wars until it receives adequate trial.”

The Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela are among those proposing referenda on their countries’ futures. This is also the goal of Boulder’s Voting by Phone Foundation, which uses the name of the tool (successfully tested by the National Science Foundation) that makes it easy, environmental, and inexpensive, as well as more secure than current voting systems.

For information on the history, status and future of real democracy, please see our world wide web pages, linking to Mexico, Tibet, Switzerland, Canada, Germany, California and even Alabama, at: http://www.evanravitz.com/vote or contact us at 440-6838 or evan@welcomehome.org. The great liberation is near.

Evan Ravitz, Director, Voting by Phone Foundation

University Hill, Boulder

(Nexus ran a story on us, in 1992, as I recall)