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WIRED 2.01
Electrosphere
*************

Direct Democracy
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Are you ready for the Democracy Channel?

By Evan I. Schwartz


Good evening, citizens. The electronic town meeting is about to begin.
Everyone take your seats and make sure your voter ID number is handy and
your touch-tone phone or remote control device is by your side. Those of
you tuning in via computer please click on the "start" icon on the top of
your screen.

Today's topic is gun control. We assume everyone has read the issue
brochure sent to all of your electronic mailboxes one month ago. Our first
speaker will be Robert Corbin, executive director of the National Rifle
Association, followed by Sarah Brady, president of Handgun Control
Incorporated. We will follow that up with a discussion among a panel of
twelve randomly selected citizens and an impartial moderator. At the end
of the meeting, we will ask you to vote on the proposed legislation.

Ever since Ross Perot made the concept of an Electronic Town Hall a
central part of his stop-and-go bid for the presidency, the idea has been
catching on. The Texas tycoon is still talking up electronic democracy as
something that would not only restore the American Dream but also give us
something useful to do after work. "If we ever put the people back in
charge of this country and make sure they understand the issues," Perot
has said, "you'll see the White House and Congress, like a ballet,
pirouetting around the stage and getting things done in unison."

The idea of holding these events regularly is now being carried into the
future by people not associated with Perot. In September, the Public
Agenda Foundation, a nonprofit group, hosted a two-hour electronic town
meeting (ETM) in San Antonio, Texas over that city's new interactive cable
system (special software and set-top boxes allow the user to send signals
upstream - "I'd like to order this," or "I disagree with that.") That
forum allowed the locals to deliberate the health care crisis and use
their remote controls to vote on solutions. Future forums all over the
country could attack everything from the federal budget deficit to
abortion to foreign policy.

And Public Agenda is hardly alone in its quest to popularize such events.
There are now dozens of foundations and entrepreneurs forging an entire
ETM industry. There's even a cable executive at John Malone's Denver
headquarters who is quietly planning to launch the Democracy Channel as a
sort of 24-hour branch of government.

Mixing television, politics, and interactive electronics could be a
formula for either new public enlightenment or a country run by
push-button impulse. It all depends on how the concept is executed.

No doubt, it will run into some opposition. Big Media hates the idea of
giving the public too much of a voice because that would diminish its own
role as arbiter of opinion. Fully half of registered voters don't even
bother to show up to pick their president, press veterans argue. Why would
anyone think the public would be interested in, not to mention capable of,
wading through complex issues? When the idea was broached on his Sunday
morning talk show a while back, David Brinkley's lips crinkled. "What do
we do with all the senators and congressmen?" he asked. "Send them home?"

But ask the average person on the street whether he or she can do a better
job than the average politician, and the answer will usually be: Hell yes!
In fact, Eon Corporation of Reston, Virginia did something of that sort.
One of several companies planning a 1994 rollout of interactive TV in
major media markets, Eon commissioned a survey of 1,465 random television
viewers and found that people are substantially more interested in using
two-way TV for political opinion purposes (85 percent) than they are
interested in using it for electronic shopping (70 percent) or playing
along with game shows (64 percent) or sporting events (42 percent). The
public seems to be saying this: We are already deluged with results from
opinion polls in which uninformed people are abruptly telephoned and
questioned. Why not give us a chance to take part in voting on topics we
have taken the time to understand?

Madison and Hamilton might retch at the vision of sofa spuds choosing to
ratify or eradicate NAFTA with a click-click of their remote controls or a
beep-beep of their touch-tone phones. Our Founding Fathers, in their white
wigs, feared that the lower classes would vote to seize their property. So
they intentionally created a representative republic, not a full-fledged
democracy, to keep power out of the hands of the masses. But others at the
Constitutional Convention were notably less paranoid. Thomas Jefferson
might find electronic town meetings an absolute scream.

Since those heady days in Philadelphia, the trend has been to expand the
power of the people, not limit it. First, non-property holders were given
the right to vote, then African Americans, then women, then those between
ages 18 and 21. Twenty-three states have amended their constitutions to
allow referenda on election ballots. With California leading the pack,
citizens now commonly vote directly on a few issues per year. Sometimes,
they vote in favor of what may well be harebrained ideas, such as
Colorado's 1992 choice to turn back the clock on homosexual rights. But
Congress has also passed some clunkers in its day. It's all part of the
inherent messiness of democracy.

The notion of a nationwide network for participatory politics goes back to
the 1940s, when scientist Buckminster Fuller first proposed voting on the
issues of the day via telephone. Psychologist Erich Fromm, in his 1955
book The Sane Society, wrote of "a true House of Commons," where citizens
would vote on the issues "with the help of the technical devices we have
today." In 1982, futurist Alvin Toffler wrote that such a system "would
strike a devastating blow at the special interest groups and lobbies who
infest most parliaments." Perot, in fact, has been advocating the
electronic town hall for twenty years. It's just that no one took him
seriously - that is, until public frustration with ineffective government
reached a crescendo in 1992.

The main worry among the ETM crowd is that Perot, in popularizing the
idea, has also co-opted the concept. When he bought a half-hour of time on
ABC last March and asked millions of people to fill out ballots in TV
Guide, the information he presented and the way he worded his questions
amounted to a form of teletyranny. A typical ballot question was: "Do you
feel trade agreements have cost this country jobs?" Ted Becker, an Auburn
University political science professor who has been running experiments on
ETMs for fifteen years, calls what Perot does "electronic town
manipulation." Becker also notes that what President Clinton has been
calling ETMs are simply glorified versions of Donahue, as there is no real
interaction with viewers. Any legitimate ETM, he believes, must be based
on the New England town meetings of yore, when ordinary citizens debated
the issues of the day and then voted yea or nay.

What distinguished the San Antonio forum on health care was its form of
interactive deliberation. Eight ordinary citizens were selected to appear
on a panel, which was moderated by two people from Public Agenda. The
panel, and the wider TV audience, reviewed seven options for cutting
health care costs, from regulating drug prices to rationing expensive
procedures to eliminating fraud and waste. Viewers watched
mini-documentaries on each option and then saw the panel debating them.

Of course, this form of ETM has its drawbacks. First, the typical
channel-surfer would not find these panelists the most telegenic or
articulate folks on the dial. Second, of the 18,000 San Antonio households
watching, only 200 were selected to be part of the cross-sectional sample
whose votes were tabulated by computers and quickly flashed on the TV
screen. All the others could have voted with remote control - or a mail-in
newspaper ballot if they didn't have the latest cable gear. But they
weren't part of the immediate action.

Still, the experiment yielded some interesting results. As the panel
discussion raged on, the group at least seemed to appreciate what a bitch
the health care issue is. And many among the voting sample - during the
course of the event itself - actually changed their minds on certain
options as they learned more about the issues. The first time they were
asked, only 27 percent said that hospitals should ration expensive
procedures like organ transplants. But by the time all the information was
presented, when the same question was asked again, that number had jumped
to 43 percent. This suggests that many people are willing to accept limits
when they understand the reasons for them. Says Public Agenda's Jean
Johnson: "Some of the worst problems in public policy arise when people
think there is a cost-free solution."

The ETM in San Antonio represents only one of many models for interactive
politics. Electronic bulletin boards on the Internet and other computer
networks already allow people to voice political views, take part in
electronic polls, even send e-mail to the White House. The Community
Service Foundation, a non-profit group in Pipersville, Pennsylvania, has
formed the Electronic Congress. Citizens call an 800 number, punch in
their ID codes, and register their opinions on national issues. In the
city of Reading, Pennsylvania, the locals use video-conferencing and cable
call-in shows to debate city, state, and national issues. And under an
agreement with Eon, ABC's World News Tonight and Nightline programs have
plans to pose instant opinion questions on the day's events to the viewing
audience.

Then there's Jeffrey Reiss, the man working with Malone. A former Viacom
executive, and co-founder of the Showtime and Lifetime cable networks,
Reiss has already drawn up plans for the Democracy Channel. He is now in
the process of tapping Malone's Tele-Communications Inc., the world's
biggest cable company, for the tens of millions of dollars it will take to
get the venture off the ground. The venture will also be partly funded by
advertising and membership fees from a new organization in charge of
lobbying Congress with poll results from the channel's ETMs.

The very thought of living in an electronic democracy raises fundamental
issues. While Reiss and other proponents see it as a way to create
consensus, democratize debate, and energize the electorate, the sticky
questions remain: Won't it be harder than ever for Congress and the
President to stand up for what's right, rather than what's popular? Can
voter privacy be maintained, or will marketers get hold of everyone's
voting records? Will everyone have access to the latest technology? Will
the people really be getting their say, or will the whole process by
controlled by moguls like Malone? And perhaps most important, what would
happen if votes somehow became binding, rather than just advisory?

Most advocates of ETMs, including Reiss, see the technology as a way to
supplement, not supplant, the existing system. Yet, could it be possible
that we've simply outgrown our current model of government? In the early
days of the republic, each House member represented about 30,000 people.
Today, each member represents an unwieldy 575,000 constituents. To better
represent the views of all those people, the US Constitution could be
amended to place national issues such as gun control on federal election
ballots - to be voted on either electronically or in the conventional way.
In fact, there was an ill-fated bill to do just that in the late 1970s.
The bill, which never made it to a floor vote, specified that an issue
could appear on the ballot if 3 percent of the public signed a petition to
place it there. It was co-sponsored by 55 members of Congress, including
Jack Kemp, who wrote in a 1981 book: "I feel strongly about this reform
because I believe it goes to the heart of our national malaise."

One thing most everyone agrees on is this: Democracy in America has always
been a living, breathing experiment. And no one knows just where the
experiment will lead. Reiss, for one, says, "I would not rule out
transforming our government into a direct democracy. Maybe that's where
government evolves, when we truly have an enlightened public." How will we
know when the public is at last enlightened? That's hard to say. But if
the electronic town meetings of the future start pulling better ratings
than Roseanne, Seinfeld, or Beavis and Butt-head, watch out!

                                   * * *

Evan I. Schwartz (morphman@aol.com) is a freelance writer and former
BusinessWeek editor.


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