What's next for the CEA

[Bruce Skarin]

Greetings,

I just wanted to let folks know that the plan for this project to crowdsource the CEA is still going forward! We have decided to put the short term focus on developing the process for crowdsourcing the CEA in a way that is scalable to the number of people that end up taking part. To allow for the time to figure that out, and to do all the right market research, material and media development, we are setting the launch date to January 1. Over the next few weeks we will need to refine the overall strategy, but below is an outline for the current line of thinking.

In the most immediate future we could really use some help reviewing and revising an alternative sign-up/pledge page. The objective here is not to try and explain the CEA, but rather to provide a landing page for those that already know what it is via other media. Over the next few months Larry will continue to promote the CEA and we will release as many stories as we can on why this experiment of crowdsourcing legislation is our best shot for real reform in the near future.

Please do not publish or share this page. If we do end up going forward with it, we will point the citizenequality.us domain to it accordingly.

Also note that the Medium story linked on the page is a draft, so feel free to make comments there as well, because they will not be in the published version.

Thanks!

-Bruce

The current working strategy:

• Starting on January 1 we launch a ten month process to crowdsource the CEA
• From January 1, and ending on March 1, we ask people to become monthly donors for the ten month period. There will be no explicit goal, but for every 1K people that become sponsors we will add a CEA council member
  
• In March we will then hold online voting among sponsors that closes on May 1 to elect volunteer candidates to the prescribed number of council seats
• Each council representative must be available full-time and will receive a $5K per month stipend for a period of 4 months to: a) moderate the questions and ideas of at least 1K sponsors, and b) provide feedback on the weekly CEA versions and amendments
• From May until September 1, we will produce weekly versions/drafts of the CEA along with any new/revised explainers for the general public
• People may comment and vote as little or as often as they like on any current draft/explainer
• From September until the election we shift the support to a 501c4 or possibly Mayday to promote the finished CEA like crazy in order to line up the 218 simple majority of reps needed for the passing the CEA through the House
• We still need to calculate a suggested  minimum monthly pledge, but it will have to be over the $5 needed to cover the sponsor's council rep stipend, with the balance going towards a general fund to cover fees, admin, and the crowdsourcing tech
• We will also ask sponsors to consider doubling or tripling their monthly amount to help us sponsor free or subsidised accounts for students and those that can't spare the 5+ dollars a month
• One time gifts and anything over this amount would go into the tech, media, advertising, and possibly to pay for a couple public conventions

[Tim Huegerich]

Hi Bruce,

It's great to hear about this exciting plan! Here are some thoughts on the text for the new page. I think it would ideally be shorter overall, given that this is a page for people who are already informed about the CEA--and we want to expedite the pledge process. I also think the three-point summary should sound stronger and at least suggest the broader suite of reforms included in the CEA (rather than, for instance, implying that the voting rights portion is limited to reform of voter registration). Here are some specific ideas:

A proposal for the CEA summary, based on the wording here: 

• Providing better representation with an alternative to gerrymandered, winner-take-all elections;
  
• Ensuring equal voting rights, including secure and simple automatic voter registration;
• Transforming a Congress dependent on a wealthy few into one "dependent on the People alone," as the founding fathers intended.

Replace "Ninety-six" with 96.

Always use "democratic republic" (or, at a minimum, "representative democracy") instead of "democratic" or "democracy" because these terms may suggest a partisan bias to some. (What about the tagline #FixDemocracyFirst? Perhaps we could add #FixOurRepublicFirst into the mix?) Specifically, I would suggest replacing the three paragraphs beginning with "It is time we..." with a shorter, single paragraph like:

We will use a crowdsourcing process to draft the CEA, giving everyone a seat at the table. Sign your name as a co-sponsor now and make a small monthly pledge, if you can, to support this new process that will allow your voice to be heard over the ten-month life of this project. For this New Year, let's make a resolution to put citizenship before partisanship and fix our broken democracy first.

Then I think the second sentence of the last paragraph needs some slight changes to be consistent with the timeline you've laid out in this message:

If at any time you don't like what you see, you can cancel your remaining pledges. Until our launch March 1st, ...

Warm thanks for all your work on this.

Tim

[Bruce Skarin]

Thanks Tim, good suggestions, feel free to make further comments inline on this draft medium post.

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[Elizabeth Lindquist]

I've got an old browser here at work that won't let me edit the Medium post.

I agree with Tim's comments about the use of the word democracy alone, democratic republic or representative democracy has more cross-partisan appeal.

Also the 91% and 96% stats should link to the real polling data.

 

Regarding the general timeline, it seems to me again too late. By January 1st, the people running for congress are, for the most part, already determined. In most states it is difficult to get on the general election ballot if you aren't already on the primary ballot.  Awareness of a plan like this may encourage those who aren't already running to run, particularly potential candidates who favor the previously lesser emphasized aspects of the plan; the voting rights part and the gerrymandering part. Most get money out people already know about the Citizen Equality Act, so if they are thinking about running, they know there might be some awareness raising help here that they can ride on. But the people for whom the voting rights and gerrymandering pieces are more important may very well have never heard of the CEA. If they'd been thinking about running, knowledge of this plan might help them decide to do it. 

 

After the decisions of who will actually run for congress are made, our ability to get this passed is more limited.

 

In my opinion, it would be better to launch the plan sooner, defining it as the American Anti-Corruption Act (my personal favorite) plus the Ranked Choice Voting Act plus the Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2015/Voter Empowerment Act of 2015. Say that some tweeking will occur later, but this is the gist of it. That way potential candidates can know this is going to be there for them before it's too late to decide to run.

 

-Elizabeth

[Joe]

Hi everyone. Just getting up to speed on all these emails. Thanks for including me. I took a look at the text at the Medium link, and I had the thought that maybe Ben Franklin might come in handy for kicking things off. (Citing a Founding Father is always a great way to establish bipartisan credibility.)  I also took a stab at rewriting just a bit of the text. 

Something like this:

After the Constitutional Convention, it is said that Benjamin Franklin was approached by concerned citizens who asked him what kind of government had been created. "A republic, if you can keep it," he replied.

Well over 2 centuries later, overwhelming numbers [LINK TO THE 96% POLL] of Americans of all political stripes have realized the sad truth – we lost our republic. Even worse, most Americans have little hope that there’s much that can be done about that. [LINK TO THE 91% POLL]

This Citizen Equality Group was founded on the belief that we can get our republic back, and we must get it back if there is to be any chance of tackling the major issues we face this century. We believe that this issue is so fundamental that it should be the highest priority for our elected officials. Our goal is to draft the most significant civil rights reform in fifty years, using a crowd-sourced platform that gives everyone a voice, and then get that legislation passed in congress. We call this legislation the Citizen Equality Act, and it will have 3 major goals:

1. Greatly reduce the influence of big money in politics by empowering small donors via a public matching system
2. Eliminate gerrymandered congressional districts
3. Ensure equal voting rights, and establish simple automatic voter registration

Please join our effort. Sign up with your email now to become cosponsor, and if you can, please tell us if you can make a monthly pledge over the ten-month span of this project. Unable to give? Just enter 0.01 so we can try to secure funds to sponsor you.

There is nothing to lose and you can change your pledge anytime. If you don’t like what you see after the January launch, we won’t hold you to it. Until then, help us spread the word, because a republic is only as good as the citizens it represents.

More soon,

Team #CitizenEquality

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[William Cerf]

I really love this one with the picture of Ben Franklin.

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[Al Cannistraro]

In retrospect, I think one of the shortcomings of the LESSIG2016 efforts I was involved with was that they were 100% verbal (and hashtag), and 0% pictorial.  We hardly ever even included photos of Larry, for cryin' out loud!

My suggestion is that we pay attention to pictures, as well as to words and verbal memes, in our marketing of CEA.  Pictures matter.

Al C.

[Joe]

I agree, Al. 

Also just want to mention that I think the phrase "federal matching system" may be preferable to "public matching system."

The phrase "Public matching" makes you think "my taxes will be used to..." whereas "federal matching" doesn't necessarily make people go to that place immediately. (Plus it has the other benefit of being more accurate, given that taxes don't actually "fund" things -- MMT fans will know what I'm talking about).

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[Elizabeth Lindquist]

If you want to get cross partisan support, it's better to go with a voter-directed voucher program as described in the American Anti-Corruption Act, rather than matching funds as in the Democracy is for People Act.
This is what just passed in Seattle.
The language Represent.us is currently using to describe that part of the plan is voter-funded elections. They used to call it citizen-funded elections. Both terms are well received by both sides of the political spectrum.
In my opinion, Represent.us is better at using cross partisan language than any other group.
See www.Represent.Us

-Elizabeth

[Bruce Skarin]

Thanks everyone for the feedback. I will continue to refine until we get the domain sorted out and make the official announcement. I've received a variety of really good and different takes, which in the spirit of this effort is exactly what it will require to reach the broadest audience possible. There is an option with the platform we are using to let anyone who is signed in create a post. If folks would like to write their own intro, you can try it out here. Feel free to remix the current text, start from scratch or pull from others. If it works out okay, we'll include it in the top level navigation.

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[Al Cannistraro]

This is about the distinction between the provisions of the CEA vs the language and design on the website, on which the public might base its first impression. 

After crowd-sourcing for raw content of the CEA, and before official roll-out (in May?) of what we actually will be presenting to the public, will there be a place for professional-grade copy writing and design based on conventional principles and on actual testing? 

I have in mind the adage that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee

Al C.

[Joe]

Four quick points, only because I think this issue is perhaps the MOST important of all, and we can't it wrong:

1. On the marketing topic: I don't think a political outcome in a big liberal city works as a litmus test for how an idea will hold up in congress. The language "Voter funded" has the disadvantage of immediately making you think of taxation and also the disadvantage of being, technically, wrong. At the state level, vouchers are voter funded. But at the federal level, they would not be. Federal spending is not our taxes. Federal spending is not revenue constrained. If congress wants to send someone a check for a trillion dollars, it can do that without taxing you first. State budgets aren't like that, obviously.

2. I think voucher programs are well-suited for cities and states, given the major limitation of cities and states, which is that they don't have unlimited spending ability.

3. Since the federal government has unlimited spending ability, we have an opportunity to design a system way more robust and scalable than what is available to states or cities. We can design a system that scales to whatever degree necessary to reduce the power of big money in federal elections to fractions of what it is now, just by adjusting the matching multiplier, which voters themselves never even need to be aware of. (e.g. If 6x isn't enough, make it 60x.) I created what I call the Small Donor Empowerment System (SDES) which is a proposal to legislate that this multiplier value be automatically calculated for each election using data from the previous election. SDES virtually guarantees that big dollar donations will be reduced to a small overall influence in the political system)

4. Voucher programs add unnecessary complexity on the Voter Side rather than the Candidate Side. (e.g. Instead of just making a donation to a candidate using my CC, I have to go find my voucher information. "Dammit, where did I put that letter with my unique voucher identification number?") Again, at the state level, we probably just have to deal with it. But at the federal level, I don't think there's any good reason to.

-Joe @NewsConnoisseur

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[Bruce Skarin]

Thanks again everyone for the feedback. It's really helping.

I've made substantive changes to refocus on the most immediate challenge of measuring how many people might take part and support this project.

There is also now an "about" page that could use some review.

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[Elizabeth Lindquist]

Food for thought about the specifics of the plan:

http://www.blueprintsfordemocracy.org/

 

On Tuesday, November 10, 2015 at 5:48:39 PM UTC-6, Bruce Skarin wrote:

[Joe]

Bruce,

Would you be able to give brief summaries of the purposes for each of these domains?

https://citizenequality.ryver.com

http://citizenequality.nationbuilder.com

http://citizenequality.us

http://www.citizens4equality.org

Also, is there any way an invitation to this group could be extended to @ClayShentrup (cl...@electology.org)? He's the co-founder of the organization Election Science and has a lot of expertise with different voting systems and could be a very helpful resource. He also has some interesting views on the work of FairVote.

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[Bruce Skarin]

Elizabeth, fantastic resource! I've reached out to talk with them.

Joe, we're in transition. Citizenequality.Us will be the final home for the site.

Ryver is collaboration tool

Sent from my Moto Nexus

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[Tim Huegerich]

Joe,

My understanding is that this group is public. You can invite anyone you like. And I'm sure there will be plenty of discussion of approval/score voting versus ranked choice voting in due time.

Tim

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[Joe]

Thanks, Tim. I let Clay know about that group.

Bruce, can Clay get an invitation to the Ryver site? (cl...@electology.org)

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[Mislav Kos]

Bruce, 

>> Feedback for the "sign-up/pledge" page:

I'm seeing two different drafts: 

• http://www.citizens4equality.org/
  
• https://medium.com/@bruceskarin/58c2a21bf5d5

Which of these should I be reviewing?

>> Feedback for the "about" page:

"the act was to be focused on" » "the act will be focused on"

"it is still the first problem that must be solved" » it would be good to link to something that explains why this is (perhaps something like the "The Problem" video from Represent.us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig) or maybe just add in some verbiage right there. Perhaps something like "it is still the first problem that must be solved, because, due to democracy corruptors like money in politics, gerrymandering, and voter suppression, it won't be possible to solve any other problem before this one is addressed."

"to all take up the fight" » "to take up the fight "

"and political independent that has fought" » "and political independent who has fought"

--Mislav