We are still using political systems that were devised before the invention of electricity.
I promise you, we can do better! It's time to start ushering in a new age of politics!
Our political system is set up to be a game. These elections are literally contests to win units of power for periods of time.
This makes government into its own organism, that is easy to corrupt and manipulate, instead of it being an arm of the people.
We are so used to this, it's hard to imagine how much better it could be.
As your Senator, I will introduce legislation to set up a digital 'Liquid Democracy' platform for the State of California.
This would be so incredible, the hope of it gives me goosebumps.
Because this is still experimental, it wouldn't have binding power initially, but the platform could be empowered to put propositions on the ballot, and also send proposals to the Legislature, where they could be required to study and vote on them.
This would be a platform where every registered voter in the state has equal influence.
They can submit and rally support for their own proposals, and weigh in on others.
Popular proposals would get put up for a vote on the entire platform.
Of course, most voters are busy people, who can't pay attention to every legislative idea.
That's why an important part of the system would be 'proxies'.
Every voter can choose their favorite person to represent them when they don't vote.
For example, 1 million voters might choose Jerry Brown as their proxy.
On a particular issue, maybe only 50,000 of those voters cast their own vote.
Then Jerry Brown's vote would count 950,000 times.
Instead of contests, like this State Senate Election, where it's essentially a corruptible political game to supposedly-represent 1 million people from a strangely-drawn district (most of whom will know very little about the winner), every voter can simply choose their favorite person to represent them, and can change their choice anytime, not just once every 2 or 4 years.
This is an incredible upgrade from winner-take-all contests to win political power for years at a time.
It's also possible for this system to benefit from having a leader. Even here, instead of electing this leader every 4 years (like a Governor), voters would be able to change their Ranked Choice Voting ballot at any time. When the present leader loses her majority, by a substantial margin or for a substantial period of time, they can be swiftly replaced, without the need for recalls or scheduled elections. Having a leader on the platform could help with enabling a coherent agenda.
We all know that one day, humans will benefit from better political systems than we have now.
The time is now to start ushering in and benefitting from such systems.