Hello. You probably just wrote me an email that went something like this:

If a useful tool was put out there that was simple and engaging and closed the loop on opinion of the people and action by our representatives, it would get good traction.

or

The app will allow anyone with a smartphone, tablet, or the internet, to view bills moving through local, state, and national legislatures. We can vote on the bills after reading a summary. This allows 1) citizens to become aware and involved, and 2) give our representatives a very clear picture of their constituencies’ opinions.

These were recent emails. So you’re not the first to email me with an idea to:

Convince people that politics is interesting — because it really is.

Hold Congress accountable by measuring what the public wants.

Build a social network for politics/civics.

Have Americans draft legislation or comment on or vote directly on legislation in Congress.

And it’s great that you have your idea. I am thrilled you want to make our government better by rolling up your sleeves and doing something.

But your approach is all wrong.

You probably emailed me because you saw I’ve been working on this problem for a while. It’s true. Almost 15 years! So I know a few things.

(If you found your own way to this post — i.e. I didn’t send it to you after you cold emailed me — then welcome and I hope you get something out of it, but keep in mind this post wasn’t written for you so I’m not interested in why you think it doesn’t apply to your idea.)

If there was an idea that could ‘fix’ democracy, it would have been thought-up already.

Tens of thousands of people are working intensely on problems related to governance, like access to information (my area), voter registration, conflicts of interest, lobbying, organizing, polling, procurement reform, campaigning, campaign finance reform, criminal justice reform, investigations of corruption, gerrymandering, etc etc etc. Foundations and venture capitalists have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on making government and policy-making better, and many tens of millions of that just on use of technology.

Here’s you right now:

You’re not the first to think government could be better with tech.

If you wonder why you don’t see your idea already out there in the world, it’s because your idea didn’t work the hundreds of other times someone tried it. (I might have tried it: See my failures.)

Wasn’t GovTrack a good idea at the beginning?

When I started working on GovTrack, I thought I was building an accountability tool. If only the American public had more information they could head-off failures in government by voting more effectively in elections.

That was wrong. I was wrong.

Never to my knowledge has GovTrack affected an election. It’s never revealed a scandal, gotten anyone fired, or uncovered a failure in the legislative process.

And that’s totally fine because there are lots of other reasons why GovTrack is important, like engaging the public in understanding how Congress works, making the legislative process more real and accessible. [Update posted a year later: GovTrack has been a source for journalists and the impact certainly could have been to sway politics a little bit toward truth.]

On to your idea, which was probably:

Let’s tell representatives what their constituents think. Then they HAVE to vote with us!

Members of Congress don’t necessarily want to know what their constituents are thinking. And when they do, they have no trouble finding out:

They get a lot of feedback from constituents already. Many people write their representative and senators already, and each representative and senator’s office receives so many messages — hundreds on a slow day — that they can’t keep up. There’s no shortage of people telling Congress what they think!

Members of Congress also already do polling when they want to know what their constituents think. Whatever a Member of Congress wants to know, they can already find it out if they wanted to.

And no one wants to be polled — there’s nothing in it for people to want to participate. If your goal is to poll so many people that you’ll just know what Americans want, you’ll never get there: Only a small fraction of citizens will ever participate in a poll, and that causes selection biases. Unless you have a PhD in statistics and a background in polling, you’ll never overcome this better than the existing pollsters.

Everyone should vote on the issues before Congress — Let the people decide!

Congress takes more than 1,000 votes each year. Go through the actual list of votes and try to form an opinion on how you would vote on each. What do you think about the Wicker Motion to Instruct Conferees? Or the motion to approve the journal? Or the Defending Public Safety Employees’ Retirement Act? (Spoiler: That bill isn’t about public safety employees’ retirements!)

If that’s what you want people to do, try it yourself first and see how far you get.

The world is complicated and for good reason we elect representatives to make decisions so we don’t have to read 2,000-page bills. No only that, but the world REALLY IS complicated. What do you think the dividend rate should be for Federal Reserve member banks’ shares in their local reserve bank? This is an actual, serious issue in Congress that got a vote, and I bet you don’t know remotely what that sentence means. Now prepare for 999 more votes like that.

People are rationally ignorant. We want to live our lives. If everyone had to participate in every vote, there would be no time left to live. People don’t want a direct democracy.

We could delegate our vote to someone else.

You’ve just invented representative democracy! Well done.

We already do delegation, once every two years. First by delegating power to the political parties which draft candidates for office. Then we delegate to our elected representative to make governing decisions. And then our representatives often delegate their vote too — by taking instructions from party leaders on how to vote (rarely do they make their own decision)— and, finally, when a law is enacted (if approved by the President and not struck down by the Supreme Court — delegation upon delegation!), they delegate the details of policy implementation to government agencies which issue ‘regulations.’ There is so much delegation going on already.

How is your delegation system going to face the same challenges our existing delegation system faces? For instance: Selecting among delegates is hard. Did you vote in the primary election for your local water authority officer? How did you decide which candidate to pick? Start with the problems you see in our existing delegation system. Saying we simply need to delegate our vote misses how we’ve already done that, and that’s how we ended up where we are today.

Let’s make a social network for politics / civics.

Google has a social network called Google Plus. No one uses it. If Google couldn’t build a successful social network, neither can you.

Relatedly, people don’t wake up in the morning and say, “I sure hope I do something civic today!” Most people have other things to worry about. At most some might say, gosh it’s awful that [your favorite issue here] exists, maybe I can do something about [that]. Even you did that today. There are lots of civic volunteer opportunities you could have done today if you were just looking to be more civic, but instead you emailed me about … well, this is a generic response so I don’t know! But that.

We all have our pet issues. People aren’t looking to be civic, in a general way. They are looking to do something very particular that is important to them.

Ultimately you have to address an actual problem people are having in their lives. Spoons address the problem of conveying liquid from bowl to mouth without dripping too much. How is your idea like a spoon? What’s something some people want to do now that you can make less expensive? (You aren’t making anything possible with your idea. Everything is possible, with money. You only make things better compared to the next best alternative.)