Engineering Democracy

Recent events have bothered me to such a degree that I began to think on how we got here and where we should go. I started thinking about how I could apply skills I learned in my career to this problem and I thought of this.

I want to jump out of this system for a moment so that we can look at it from above. From this vantage point it's just a machine with powers and checks. An entity such as a legislative body can execute a power. A check is a power exercised by one branch of government over another.

Let's examine a simple process

The Supreme Court has a vacancy. The president nominates a candidate to the position.

There are three outcomes:

1. Senate likes the nominee. Result: Approve
2. Senate does not like the nominee. Result: Reject
3. Senate does not hold a hearing. Result: Error

The first two are normal outcomes. The third outcome is an error because the process was not followed.

In a well-engineered democracy, there should be no errors.

Errors incentivize people to circumvent the democratic process.

The cause of the one above is pretty simple: Mitch McConnell wanted to pack the court with a GOP candidate so he never brought it to a vote.

People lose faith in democracy when rules are inconsistently followed.

More complicated scenarios require more extensive analysis.

Consider a problem where democracy produces poorly-qualified legislators. The people voted them into office, but that's not the end of the story. It seems like an insurmountable problem at first until we break it down. Come up with questions and keep drilling into them with the question "Why?" until you get to the root cause.

• What defines well-qualified?
  • Agreed upon by experienced legislators
  • What differentiates it?
  • Is this standard published?
• Why do you think they are poorly-qualified?
• What were the factors that led to the public's decision?
• What about these factors led to the error?
• Did the public have the right information?
• Were they able to quickly and easily find good information?

When you start to break it down you can see where errors could manifest. Legislative members have the most experience here and I will defer to their wisdom. The other projects I outline should help.

I lack complete information to follow it through completely. I suspect your root cause will come down to lack of good information sources at election time and you'll want to engineer information systems that get critical information to voters quickly so that a generally ignorant voter can make a reasonable decision.

I would recommend a committee to investigate errors when they happen and use this knowledge to make our democracy more resilient in the future.

Learn from your mistakes so that you do not repeat them.

I suspect that it probably does, but not with political parties. Political parties introduce too many sources of error. The nomination example above clearly demonstrates this as it was entirely done along party lines. Eliminate political parties and you can apply statistical analysis more reliably.

I have my own thoughts on what I see as the biggest threats. I would prefer to let our legislators come up with their own list unless they specifically ask my opinion.