Intriguing digital democracy platform launches in Iowa

Kathie Obradovich | The Des Moines Register

Show Caption Hide Caption Why Iowa’s water quality debate matters to you In early 2018 the Iowa Legislature took a step in addressing Iowa's water quality with a plan to reduce nitrogen and phosphorous levels by 45 percent.

An Australia-based organization that aspires to bring democracy into the digital age is opening its first U.S. chapter in Iowa, the group’s founder says.

MiVote has set a goal of having an engaged community of 400,000 people in Iowa by the 2020 presidential caucuses. That’s more than the nearly 359,000 voters who participated in the Iowa caucuses in 2016. The first Iowa vote, on water quality, is scheduled for October of this year.

The not-for-profit organization already has thousands of voters signed up in Australia. It is setting up a program in Scotland and has partnered with a political party of 1.3 million members in India. It is also fielding chapter requests from several other countries, MiVote founder Adam Jacoby, an Australian entrepreneur, said during an interview in Des Moines last week.

It’s a fascinating effort to amplify citizens’ voices within the existing structure of government and politics.

MiVote offers a unique mix of high-tech public opinion gathering and voter education. It also operates as a nonpartisan political action committee that works with politicians to bring MiVote members’ views into the legislative process.

Over my past 25 years of covering politics, I’ve seen plenty of idealistic, fix-democracy groups come and go. MiVote is different from all of them — in part because it strives to be not only nonpartisan but also ideologically neutral. It's also unusual because it has a potentially substantial bank account.

When MiVote decided on its current structure, it spun off its technology wing into an entirely separate company called Horizon State. MiVote gave up $101 million worth of equity in the technology company, but in return will receive 2 percent of all topline revenues quarterly through Horizon State’s charitable foundation, Jacoby said.

“So not only … are we the best operating system from a policy-creation perspective, soon we’ll also be the richest political group in the world,” Jacoby said.

The organization’s first vote in Iowa will be on the issue of water quality — a complex subject that involves competing goals and priorities. The MiVote process bills itself as a vehicle for uncovering consensus on issues like this one.

The movement is the culmination of an eight-year process that aimed to identify and eliminate roadblocks to democracy — barriers such as money in politics, lack of transparency and lack of accountability, Jacoby said.

“We believe democracy is a commitment in two parts,” Jacoby said. “The first part of the commitment is for the constituent to really understand what they’re voting on and ramifications of the vote.”

The second commitment is on the part of the elected representative. “And that commitment is about making sure, if you have an informed constituency, that you always follow majority rule” regardless of party ideology, Jacoby said.

Here’s how MiVote works

Voters register on the website, mivote.com, or download the free app. Each new voter’s identify is verified — in the U.S., that will involve companies that specialize in identity verification. It costs nothing to register, to access issue information or to vote. Registration is open now in Iowa on mivote.com.

MiVote informs the voting community of upcoming votes and then provides what it describes as strictly factual, nonpartisan information to voters about complex issues. Each issue so far has included no less than 150 international research reports. The questions and background information are vetted through a series of committees, Jacoby said. The Iowa chapter is just beginning to set up its committees.

The new version of the software that will be released in October will include multiple languages, video, animation and accessibility features for vision- and hearing-impaired users.

The voting process uses secure blockchain technology, which is also used by cyber-currencies. All personal data is separated from votes, so not even MiVote can see how specific individuals voted, Jacoby said, but the results can be audited and verified.

Once voters have viewed at least a brief version of the educational material, they are allowed to take a series of votes expressing their preferences. But no votes are allowed unless the voter at least views the minimum information. “So we say, if you choose not to inform yourself, we choose not to listen to you,” Jacoby said.

MiVote aims to hold politicians accountable

The group also strives to hold elected officials and politicians to account. They do that by encouraging candidates to run as independents on the MiVote platform. Alternatively, in other countries MiVote has partnered with political parties. In India, for example, MiVote partnered the Mission Democracy Party, which has adopted its platform and will use its technology. MiVote plans to hold training sessions there for over 200 party candidates.

The candidate has to sign a contract with MiVote, agreeing to abide by 17 different “behaviors,” including accepting no corporate or lobby-group donations and a two-term limit in office. They have to refrain from offering their own opinions about policy during a vote of the membership, to avoid prejudicing the discussion. They also would have to conform their policy positions to those adopted by a 60 percent majority of the MiVote members in their district.

In return, the contracted politicians get free access to all of the MiVote technology and data from their district, as well as support from the organization.

The contractual obligation by politicians is novel, in part because it has some teeth. Jacoby said the group is serious about enforcing its contract and demanding payment for its technology and data in the event of a breach. How many U.S. politicians would agree to such restrictions remains to be seen.

MiVote strives to build consensus

The system is designed to discover points of consensus among members of the voting community that transcend party preference or ideology.

MiVote does that in a few ways. One, it never asks “binary” questions — those that can be answered “yes” or “no.”

“The reason we don’t have a binary conversation is that it presumes that complex issues can be dealt with in black-and-white ways, which they can’t,” Jacoby said. “It also presumes that we as individual citizens can just flip from one side to the other.”

The group also does not ask about specific legislation, which the average citizen may not have explored in detail.

Instead, during a vote, MiVote always offers four “destinational frames” or options. “The choices don’t align to blue or red … it’s a much higher-level question.”

“What happens is you start to see consensus build and go, well, 47 percent of people like this but 80 percent could live with this outcome,” Jacoby said. “And so you’ve taken all of the heat out of the debate, all tribalism out of the debate.”

It’s an intriguing idea. Whether the process will work in Iowa, or anywhere in the United States, will depend in large part on whether MiVote can gain enough people’s trust. Their “community” has to be not only huge but inclusive and demographically representative.

For that to happen, MiVote must persuade hundreds of thousands of people that they are truly independent and nonpartisan, that the information they provide is accurate and unbiased, and that their voting system is secure.

Achieving that sort of trust is like scaling Mount Everest in American society today. But what I’ve seen so far makes me want to see how high MiVote can climb.