The two party system is used to exploit us

Elections where your vote actually matters are possible. Most of us recognize our democracy and governments have been hijacked by influence peddlers and for profit interests years ago. What no one talks about is that they could never pull it off without a two party system to hide behind.

The trick is pretty simple. Divide the electorate in two, and convince people that the people on the other side are your enemy and a threat to your way of life. Agitate with heartstring issues as needed. 

But if you step back from it all, the two party system is an outdated concept from the time of horse and buggy. From a time before the internet or cars or even the telegraph. It made sense to join a party when it took days or weeks to communicate things across great distances. But it makes no sense in the information age when we can transfer information globally in seconds. The only reason it continues to exist now is to enable a ruling class to continue to manipulate our governments and electoral processes. 

Citizenship of a free democracy is not a right. It is a privilege and a duty and many of us seem to have lost sight of this. Particularly the duty part. We expect a government that represents our best interests to automatically exist, and for it to do all sorts of things for us, all without the average citizen needing to do anything to make that happen. But that’s not how it works. We own the government. It is our responsibility to make it what we want it to be. And without taking a sense of ownership of it, we lose control of it. It requires more effort than just choosing a color and we are seeing what happens if we don’t take that duty seriously.  

So how exactly do we move past this moment of extreme division and dysfunction in government?

Step #1 is to take away the sides. We stop giving them something to point at and blame for all of our shortcomings. The idea that half of the population can be grouped into two groups where everyone always agrees on a majority of issues is a ridiculous notion to begin with. But the larger problem is that it allows both sides to point at the other and blame them for all of our problems.

So logically the first step is to develop a way to intelligently choose candidates without any reference to party. That’s where we have begun. We are developing a platform to enable citizens to easily understand candidates’ stances on issues, without doing lots of research. 

But it does more than that. If you build a platform to identify public opinion and alignment with candidates on specific issues, it’s pretty easy to also allow citizens to also indicate which issues are most important to them. That’s what really sets this apart and makes it work, the ranking of issues.

And if we roll up ranking and public support on specific issues, it becomes a pretty clear set of instructions for what we want from our governments. At all levels of government. 

With real time data from verified citizens, and the only ‘sides’ being a side to an issue, we the people will have a unified voice. A unified voice to enable efficient two way communication between government and it’s citizens. That’s a voice we don’t have right now. 

A unified voice will be hard for politicians to ignore. And it makes it easy to call them out when they are serving interests other than what we all collectively want. It sure beats calling your congressperson and leaving a message.

Honestly the technology isn’t that complicated. Development is underway and the beta app works right now. We hope you’ll check out the beta and give it some thought.