TBAGS

Saving American democracy with direct democracy on the blockchain

The Token Based Advocate Group System (TBAGS)

In this essay I propose a novel system for conducting democracy at scale: the Token Based Advocate Group System (TBAGS). This system lies between direct democracy and representative democracy. I will begin by describing how TBAGS works. Then I will discuss ways that TBAGS addresses problems with the current American paradigm, including low voter turnout, limited viable candidates, candidates who fail to represent voters, and the influence of big money. I will address the most salient critique of TBAGS – that more direct democracy, even if feasible at scale, would lead to worse outcomes. Then I will discuss how bills might be written under TBAGS. Finally, I will discuss how TBAGS could be implemented – both technologically through the use of blockchain, and politically, through changing laws and norms.

What Is TBAGS and How Does It Work?

While TBAGS can be used as a decision-making method for any sufficiently large group, I will here discuss it as a replacement for the American legislature.

Imagine every American with the right to vote is issued a token. The token is yours for life. You can give the token to someone else to hold indefinitely, but it is still yours, and you can withdraw it or transfer it to someone else at any time you choose.

Imagine there are a number of proposed federal bills. (For now put aside the issue of how these bills are proposed; I will discuss this later.) Instead of Congress voting to pass the laws, every person with a token would get a vote.

If everyone held onto their token, this would amount to perfect direct democracy – every eligible voter gets one vote on each issue. It’s easy to see that this is not tenable at large scales. Few people have the time, energy, and expertise to research every single bill and make an informed decision.

Instead, if you choose not to go to that effort yourself, you can entrust your token to someone else to hold. That person would cast their vote not just for themselves, but also on your behalf, and on behalf of anyone else whose token they hold.

It’s likely that some thought leaders and activists would accumulate large quantities of tokens from people who trust their decision making, and thus would cast thousands of votes on each issue. However, decision making would almost certainly be more widely distributed than it is under the current representative democracy system.

What happens if the person you gave your token to is going to vote in a way you don’t like? Those who hold the tokens of others would have to announce their votes in advance. If they are going to vote in a way you don’t like, you always have the right to cast a vote on any issue yourself (thus prohibiting the token-holder from voting for you on that issue). As well, you always have the right to withdraw your token back to yourself at any time, and/or to entrust it to someone else.

Advantages of TBAGS

Beliefs Represented

Under the current two-party system, it is hard to get my unique viewpoint represented. In voting for the legislator who will represent me, I have options between a Democrat and a Republican, each of whom holds a predictable collection of policy positions. But this is not satisfying. For people like me who have some views that fall into one camp, some views that fall into the other, and some that neither party supports, it is impossible for me to vote for a plausible congressional candidate who will come close to representing my view. Since there are so many policy areas and positions, it’s probably the case that most citizens have this same issue. For example, if you want open borders, high taxes, and marijuana prohibition, you will never be able to vote for someone who represents all of your beliefs.

Under TBAGS, this problem vanishes. Instead of having the option to vote between two candidates, you can search among millions of people for one who has beliefs very similar to your own. This allows people’s voices to be heard on all issues.

Term Length

Setting the appropriate term limit for an elected position is no easy task. On the one hand, it must be short, so that constituents can hold officials accountable, and bring in someone better if the elected official is doing a bad job. On the other hand, it must be long enough that the elected official has time to learn and to focus on advancing good policy, rather than worrying about reelection. The current system is a compromise that has both issues. Senators serve six-year terms, making them challenging to replace if they are doing a bad job a year or two in. And Representatives serve two-year terms, causing them to be consistently concerned about reelection. Both of these issues can cause elected officials to vote in ways that may not represent the will of their constituents.

Contrast this with TBAGS. Token-holders have no incentive to do anything other than vote according to what they believe in, knowing that their token-donees gave them tokens for this reason. They don’t need to worry about elections, and if donees don’t like the way their token-holders vote, they can withdraw their tokens immediately – instant accountability. It is possible that some token-holders would vote in ways they think their donees want, rather than how they themselves believe. But this causes no great harm – either way, the preferences of the population are being expressed.

Influence of Big Money: Campaign Finance

Currently, there are significant issues with campaign finance. Rich interest groups can form political action committees (PACs) and spend virtually unlimited amounts of money to advertise for their preferred candidates. This gives moneyed interests disproportionate political influence.

Under TBAGS, moneyed interests would still be able to spend unlimited money on politics (assuming the same constitutional paradigm). However, it would be much more difficult for big money to control policy. While PACs could advocate that donees give their tokens to certain token-holders – similar to how they currently run ads for candidates – this money is less likely to be effective.

One reason for this is that there would be many more candidates. Under the current system, all the PACs need to do is convince voters that one candidate is better than the other. Under TBAGS, they need to convince donees that one candidate is better than thousands of others. This would be especially challenging to do because, as discussed above, donees could find candidates closely aligned with their views, and would thus require greater persuasion to shift their allegiance.

Currently, campaign finance benefits from spending during election season to convince people to vote for a candidate, and then enjoying the candidate’s policy during their term, regardless of whether those who were convinced to vote for that candidate are actually pleased with how that candidate is lawmaking. Advertising can mislead people into voting against their own interests, leading to candidates who then act against the wishes of their constituents. Since PACs only need to spend to get politicians elected, it makes campaign spending relatively efficient.

Under TBAGS, this efficiency is gone. Since there are no fixed terms for token-holders and donees can withdraw their tokens at any time, it is essentially a constant election season. In order for a PAC to get donees to give their tokens to a holder who won’t represent their interests, they would have to constantly advertise. If they lapse in their advertising, donees might withdraw their tokens – they would never be locked into a particular representative for years.

Influence of Big Money: Lobbying

Another way moneyed interests exert outsized control over politics is through lobbying. While lobbying isn’t always a bad thing, it is a cause for concern when having a lot of money and connections gives an entity a great deal of control over politics. This runs counter to the idea of democracy – that everyone should have an equal say.

While TBAGS wouldn’t necessarily get rid of lobbying entirely, it would make it much harder. Currently, interest groups need only lobby a select number of politicians to have significant influence on law. Under TBAGS, the number of people voting on issues would be so much greater, power so much more distributed, that it would be very challenging to lobby effectively. Even if one were to successfully lobby token-holders with lots of tokens to vote certain ways, if the donees to that holder didn’t like the way the holder started voting, they could withdraw their tokens immediately.

Is More Direct Democracy a Good Thing?

It’s clear that TBAGS would do a better job than the current system of representing people’s policy preferences, but would this actually be a disaster? Perhaps the reason to have representative democracy is not merely that direct democracy is challenging to implement at scale, but because we think that people are uneducated, shortsighted, selfish, or stupid. Perhaps most people don’t know what is truly best for themselves and for the country. If that is the case, then the current representative system makes more sense, because while it has some of the benefits of democracy, it also insulates important decision making from the whims of the people. This is probably similar to what the founding fathers were thinking when they restricted voting based on gender, land ownership, race, and age. But you need not be bigoted along those dimensions to be suspicious of the general population’s ability to make decisions.

Under TBAGS, of course, most people would probably not be making decisions on every bill themselves. They would donate their tokens to token-holders – purported experts. When I initially drafted this essay, I used the example of Kanye West as a fun quasi-political celebrity that people might choose to give their tokens to. Recent events – Kanye’s insanity and rampant antisemitism – have highlighted potential risks of TBAGS. A TBAGS critic would say that this is a great example distinguishing the current system and TBAGS – under TBAGS, the set of people you can designate to vote on your behalf is much wider, and includes people who are less educated, more flighty, selfish, and bigoted. Perhaps it’s best to restrain people’s options in choosing representatives.

However, there are three rebuttals to this. The first is that although Kanye is perhaps a particularly egregious case, it is not clear that duly elected politicians under the current system are significantly more stable, rational, or altruistic. It’s possible that under TBAGS, the majority of tokens would be donated to people who are more educated, altruistic, and rational than the current congress. Second, if we did have TBAGS and people did give their tokens to Kanye, it’s almost certain that most of those tokens would be withdrawn when he became publicly antisemitic. Finally, while it’s possible that some tokens would be donated to celebrities, it seems likely that most would go to sociopolitical thought leaders.

How Would Bills Be Written?

One of the biggest questions raised by TBAGS is how these bills would be written. The simplest method would be to retain Congress and have them write bills, and then the American people would vote on these bills through TBAGS. But there is another potential method to discuss that is much more ambitious and interesting – is it possible to distribute the bill drafting process, just as TBAGS distributes the bill voting process?

Imagine a secure online platform, run by the government or distributed on the blockchain. On this platform, any token owner (regardless of whether they currently hold their token or not) can propose a bill. This would, of course, cause there to be thousands if not millions of proposed bills. In addition to proposing bills, users can browse other proposed bills and upvote the ones they like – picture something like the upvote system used by Reddit. As well, users can discuss proposed bills and suggest bill amendments, combinations, and compromises. When bills rise to a certain level of popularity – either an upvote threshold, or a top N bill in some time period – they become proposed laws, which will then be voted on by the public through the standard TBAGS method.

This sort of distributed bill drafting platform has a lot of potential to foster civic engagement and use the wisdom of the crowds to draft really good legislation. It is within the realm of technological feasibility, and it may lead to creative solutions to problems facing the country. It also poses some of the same downsides as TBAGS – what if people draft stupid bills because they are uneducated, immoral, or merely just meming? (I’m imagining proposed bills of John Cena Day, mandatory Harambe statues in every city, etc.) But I’m hopeful that through the combination of distributed drafting and voting, great ideas would win the day and be passed into law. Further discussion of the drafting system is outside the scope of this essay, but in the future I hope to conduct follow-up work on it, including discussing what rules such a website would have, and what the user interface could look like.

Implementation

Technology

The technology to efficiently implement TBAGS already exists. A secure blockchain system that keeps track of people’s tokens and votes is simpler than many existing cryptocurrency paradigms. The idea of voting digitally is novel – but so were mail-in ballots, before they became the norm in many jurisdictions. Irrespective of whether we adopt TBAGS, we should move to a system of digital voting, for the sake of efficiency and accessibility. So long as such a system is secure against fraud, it is clearly a good option.

Systemic Change

While it may be the case that TBAGS is a superior method to the current system, it seems challenging to implement, especially at the scale proposed. The two main challenges are getting buy-in to the idea, and the logistical difficulty of switching. However, there are strategies that could address both of these issues.

To begin with, TBAGS does not need to be implemented at a national scale. It can just as easily be used for local or state governments, or for decision making in any kind of organization. Starting small, with proof of concept, and gradually scaling up seems a lot more palatable than an immediate national shift.

Secondly, TBAGS doesn’t need to be all or nothing. To start with, a national TBAGS program could account for, let us say, 20 votes in the Senate, with traditional senators retaining their own 100 votes. The amount of votes that TBAGS accounts for could be gradually increased, until it overtakes and supplants traditional methods. This would be a good way of testing to see if TBAGS causes harmful or extreme laws, or is actually a solid or superior system.

Conclusion

I was pretty excited when I came up with this idea, but I am not the first to come up with something like this. Notably, Lewis Carroll of all people proposed something similar long ago, known as Liquid Democracy. I suspect that now, this sort of system is more important than ever.

On balance, there are far more and better reasons to implement TBAGS than there are to keep the current representative system. Some are reluctant to criticize the American political system – perhaps because it is a very good system compared to many others, perhaps because they consider it the first and most important “real” example of democracy. But just because the system has many great aspects doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. TBAGS is not just a better system, it is vitally important. Issues like corruption, voter turnout, electoral engagement, term limits, politicians breaking campaign promises, and above all, politicians failing to actually represent the values and opinions of Americans are why we need TBAGS. It is the next step to ensuring we have a democracy that truly serves the people, and thus comes to the most just outcomes possible.