Communications and Society Program

Citizenship for the Next Generation

     The impact of the Internet has continued to spread to more aspects of society, including government.  Virtually every elected official in the United States now has a Web site and is able to receive e-mail communications from constituents.  Many routine government functions, such as obtaining licenses or paying taxes, can now be conducted online.  There is no doubt that the intense scrutiny paid to politics and politicians by bloggers has had a real impact on the political process.

     Has technology made democracies more democratic?  To explore this question, the FOCAS participants debated a hypothetical “modest proposal” from Tracy Westen of the Center for Governmental Studies for “Open Source Democracy for the Digital Age” (see sidebar for proposal text).  Framed as an amendment to the California constitution, the proposal from the (fictional) California Digital Coalition would expand that state’s current citizen initiative process to permit California voters “to create, circulate, qualify, and vote for ballot initiatives—all online.” The basic premise of the proposal is that we now have tools that will allow us to move closer to the ideal of participatory democracy. As Westen put it, “If everything else is going online, it makes sense for government to be online as well.”  He also pointed out that trust in government has been declining, and numerous polls have shown that voters want to be more involved in the political process. 

     Westen’s proposal was intentionally provocative.  His aim was to stimulate a meaningful debate on what measures should be taken, if any, to anticipate the logical future interaction of network technologies and the electoral process.

     The proposal would require California’s Secretary of State to provide every registered voter with a “free personal encrypted signature” that would provide each voter with a secure verifiable identity that would allow them to sign initiative petitions and vote online.  The proposal also would require the Secretary of State to create a wiki on the Internet that would permit citizens to post drafts of proposed initiatives and allow others to suggest amendments.  The proponents of an initiative would have 90 days to gather—online—the signatures needed to qualify the initiative for a ballot.  After a suitable period for consideration, the initiative would be voted on.  By 2016, all voting would take place online 30 days after a measure has qualified for the ballot. 

     Not surprisingly, FOCAS participants raised many questions about the feasibility and likely effects of the proposal.  Among the questions raised were the following:

• How trustworthy are digital signatures?  There has already been considerable controversy regarding the reliability of electronic voting procedures.  These concerns probably would be even greater if the entire political process were moved online.

On the other hand, we now rely on documents such as driver’s licenses to establish identity, even though we know that they can be counterfeited.  If a digital signature is as reliable as a driver’s license, it probably is good enough for this purpose.

• Is the current technology ready to support this kind of activity?   For example, is wiki software really the right tool for this process?  Although wikis have been used successfully for a wide variety of collaborative projects, and Wikipedia has shown that thousands of individuals can work together to create a valuable resource, what has been at stake in such projects is considerably lower than what would be at stake for elections.  We do not know if wiki software is capable of supporting millions of individuals who might participate in this online process. (There are approximately 16 million registered voters in California.)  Yet if a particular technology has been embedded in a constitutional amendment, we would be stuck with it.

• Even if technology is not a problem, will this proposal enhance democracy or diminish it? By lowering the barrier to participation even further—citizens would be able to vote without ever having to leave home—this proposal could actually erode true citizen involvement in politics.  Particularly if initiatives can be submitted, qualified for the ballot, and voted on at any time, the political process could become a nearly continuous activity.  How many people will have enough commitment to remain actively involved in such a process on an ongoing basis?  Special interest groups that would have the incentive to put in the time and energy required to remain engaged could effectively capture the process for their own narrow purposes. 

As Peter Hirshberg of Technorati observed, “Electronic democracy should be more about democracy and less about electronic.” In designing any online system, we need to be sure that it will actually broaden participation, not narrow it further.

• Finally, even if the proposed process worked as advertised, is it a wise idea? After all, at the founding of this country, our Founding Fathers had a debate about how we should govern ourselves.  Thomas Jefferson argued that the people should govern themselves as much as possible, whereas Alexander Hamilton argued that government should be made up of the best representatives of the people, chosen democratically. We chose a representative democracy then, and most Americans seem to approve of that system.  Simply because new technologies allow us to change the means of governance does not mean we ought to abandon a political system that has served us well for several centuries.

This concern was expressed most strongly by former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, who argued that elected representatives are ultimately accountable for their legislative votes.  If we allow voters to pass any laws, however, then no one can be held accountable for the consequences.  Laws will be passed by voters who are anonymous and unaccountable.  Moreover, many issues that politicians grapple with are complicated and require real deliberation.  Technology tends to shorten the timeframe for deliberation, and this proposal would encourage simplistic proposals to be offered and decided on, with little or no real deliberation.  As FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell warned, there is a danger that decisions will be driven by voters’ passions of the moment, with little regard for nuances or the long-term consequences of their actions. 

• A related concern is whether moving a key component of the political process online would inevitably favor voters who are tech savvy and disenfranchise those who are less technically astute. There has been considerable debate about the extent of the “digital divide” between the wired and unwired, but there clearly is a relationship between the likelihood of being online and factors such as income and level of education. Until everyone is online, proposals such as this will reinforce the power of elites.

     To address concerns about the reliability of online voting, Jeff Cole of the Center for the Digital Future at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication pointed out that e-voting is already in place in Estonia.  That country’s Parliament passed a law in 2002 authorizing online voting, which was used for the first time in municipal elections in 2005. The law required that e-voting “offer the same level of security and confidence as traditional voting,” which has meant instituting an elaborate series of safeguards to authenticate voters’ identities and ensure the integrity of their votes.  To vote online, Estonians must use electronic identification cards (“smart cards”)—which already are in use by more than 85 percent of registered voters—as well as a personal identification number (PIN) and a device that is attached to the computer used for voting to read the electronic ID. The voters’ choices are encrypted, and voters use their “digital signature” to reconfirm their identify before their ballot is sent to Estonia’s National Electoral Committee for counting.³¹  

     Although FOCAS co-chair Reed Hundt agreed that using technology to strengthen democracy is a laudable goal, he argued that this proposal seemed to be going about it the wrong way.  The role of government, he suggested, is “to do those things that need doing but the people can’t do for themselves.”  By contrast, the role of technology is to increase the number of things people can do for themselves and, therefore, reduce the scope of what government needs to do.  From this perspective, trying to use technology to expand the power of majorities is counterproductive; it is more likely to strengthen diverse local communities.  

     In reflecting on this debate, Madeleine Albright recalled some of the lessons she has learned as Chair of the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a federally chartered nonprofit organization set up to promote the concept of democracy internationally. When the NDI was founded, no one knew what the group’s message should be or how to explain what the real meaning of democracy was. The NDI’s founders realized that democracy is much more than elections. One vital element is the existence of a viable opposition party.  Another is the availability of multiple independent sources of information.  Although the Internet seems to be multiplying the sources of information, Albright said that she fears that getting unbiased information is increasingly difficult for citizens and that Americans are becoming less knowledgeable about how democracy and government actually work. She expressed some skepticism about the extent to which this kind of problem can be fixed by technology.

     Yale law professor Yochai Benkler noted that democratic governments already are being challenged by the new environment created by the Internet.  Modern democracies developed in a world dominated by mass media. We need to understand more about how they function in a new world in which user-generated content is flourishing. Benkler cited the example of a single blogger who raised the issue of the reliability of Diebold electronic voting machines and included some of the source code used by the machines.  After protests from Diebold, the site was shut down, but other bloggers quickly picked up the story and reposted the code.  Eventually, several government jurisdictions that had adopted the machines decided to demand that Diebold make changes to increase the reliability of their machines.

     This example illustrates how blogs can rapidly magnify the importance of an issue that is “of intense interest to a small group of people” in a way that would have been difficult or impossible in the pre-Internet world.  One of the effects of technology certainly is to shorten the timeframe for decisionmaking. Politicians who are used to a more leisurely pace of deliberation will have to adapt to this new reality if representative democracy is to remain relevant.

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