The practices of Democracy are not the same because they may be on different levels. We define the level of Democracy as the sum of two scores:
- If people can vote according to their free will, the score is 1.0.
- The rate of which people can vote on public issues is the second score.
In Cupertino, people control some concrete issues in the form of Measures (local level) and Propositions (state level), but nothing for Federal level. In every two years, there are about 10 Measures and Props for voters to vote. But at the same time, there are about 10,000 (estimation) issues decided by representatives at City Council, School District, State Legislature and the Congress. As a result, when we divide 10 by 10,000 and add it to Democracy 1.0, our current level of democracy is 1.001. (*)
Most of the candidates and organizations are focused on getting more people to vote, which is spreading the breadth of democracy, but not its level. This is great work, but not enough.
I would like to focus on increasing the level of Democracy, that is, to make voters the real decision makers behind concrete issues. The higher the level, the more power the people have.
Do we have some examples of higher levels of Democracy? Yes, as Switzerland is a good example. Switzerland is famous for its referendum process. Their citizens almost vote every month. Swiss citizens have more power than citizens in the United States because they can control more concrete issues.
If Switzerland can reach a higher level of Democracy with traditional technology, we should be able to reach even higher level of Democracy with modern technology. But on the other hand, people need to spend more effort to reach a higher level of Democracy. We need to find the level which will give voters the most power at the lowest effort.
* Not all issues are the same. Some are significantly more important than others. Ideally, we should use issues with weighted score. But I don’t have a good weight system to evaluate all the issues. By letting people vote on important issues, we should be able to reach high enough level of Democracy without putting too much burden on the people.