DDGN

Re-Inventing Democracy
With Swiss-Inspired Direct Democracy

Greetings!

For many years, as a citizen of Switzerland and the US, I've been comparing and evaluating their democratic institutions and processes.

One basis for comparison is the assertion by US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1938 that US voters should be the "ultimate rulers". In his opinion, they should not be "a President and Senators and Congressmen and Government officials."

On the basis of Franklin's assertion, my comparison indicates Swiss voters have significantly more political rights to act as the "ultimate rulers" than US voters.

This discrepancy appears to stem from diverging constitutional provisions in both countries, as well as in amendments, laws, court decisions, rules and regulations later adopted. It also stems from contrasting roles played by political parties and their influence over elections and legislation.

To cite one example, Switzerland places the power to initiate and implement legislation directly into the hands of Swiss citizens, creating what is referred to as direct democracy. In contrast, the U.S. system does not provide voters similar direct opportunities to exercise such authority.

I am writing this essay to share my observations and research findings illustrating how and why the two systems differ. I also share below my plan to enable US voters and voters abroad to emulate key features of the Swiss direct democracy model and tools.

The platform is the Direct Democracy Global Network now on the drawing board. It is designed to empower voters to tap into an expanded repertory of Switzerland's direct democracy tools, with opportunities to become the "ultimate rulers" as advocated by President Roosevelt.

They will be able to reform and even re-invent democracy by taking advantage of network tools and services -- without having to change constitutional provisions, laws, rules, regulations, or court decisions.

Past, Present, and Future

US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared the following in a renowned speech in 1938:

"Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and Senators and Congressmen and Government officials but the voters of this country."

Nearly 100 years later, a majority of US voters do not appear to consider themselves "ultimate rulers", according to research conducted by the Pew Research Center and similar non-partisan organizations:

"Seven-in-ten Americans say ordinary people have too little influence over the decisions members of Congress make."

"More than 80% of Americans believe elected officials don’t care what people like them think."

University professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page conducted research indicating Americans accurately perceive their inconsequential role:

"They analyzed roughly 1,800 policy questions over more than two decades and found that when the policy preferences of ordinary citizens diverge from those of economic elites and organized business interests, ordinary citizens have a near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on what government does. Their conclusion is blunt: the majority does not rule."

The main questions raised by these facts and figures are the causes of the stark divergence of US voters' views from those advocated by President Roosevelt and Benjamin Franklin, a revered framer of the US Constitution.

Prior concurring views were expressed by Geneva's world renowned political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In 1752, he published his famous Social Contract arguing that legitimate political authority rests solely on the consent of the governed.

Rousseau, Franklin, and Roosevelt agreed that voters' powers to determine what laws are passed is indispensable to democracy. When these powers are lacking, voters cannot be the "ultimate rulers."

It is sometimes argued that direct citizen control of government cannot scale beyond a small town meeting, such as the original Swiss town square, landsgemeinde, which pioneered direct democracy. The empirical record says otherwise. The Swiss model and methods provide the best counter-example, which has been proved over and over again for several centuries. It can now be faithfully updated using 21st century digital technology.

Critics in the 21st century claim that core provisions of the US Constitution were deliberately written to prevent American citizens from exercising these powers. Moreover, the provisions set the stage for undemocratic factors and forces to dominate US politics, right up to the present day.

According to Yale University Professor Robert Dahl, a highly regarded legal expert, he stated bluntly that provisions in the US Constitution conflict with core democratic principles, including "one person, one vote". In his acclaimed 2003 book, How Democratic Is the American Constitution? he cites the following provision governing the structure of the US Senate, and its impact on legislation.

By granting every state exactly two senators regardless of the state's population, the Constitution skews legislative power toward states rather than citizens. This provision gives senators and voters in less populous states vastly greater political leverage than voters in more populous states.

This provision also allows the geographically unrepresentative US Senate to exert greater influence over legislation than the geographically representative House of Representatives.The Senate can and does disregard the large majority of legislative proposals submitted to it for approval by the House. Since both chambers must approve legislation before it can be submitted to the president, this senatorial practice ignores -- and thereby defeats -- legislation passed by the geographically representative House.

It is one of the many undemocratic features of the US system that lack parallels in the Swiss system, which does not contain similar provisions.

Given this stark divergence, I summarize below two significant differences between the two systems. I also describe the extent to which they appear to maximize versus minimize the divergent roles played by US and Swiss voters as "ultimate rulers". One difference relates to lawmaking, and the other to elections and political parties.

I. Lawmaking

Among the starkest differences between the political rights of Swiss and US voters is the extent to which Swiss citizens can directly determine what laws are passed at the federal level. Below I describe three options that appear to confer on Swiss voters the status of "ultimate rulers."

While the Swiss Federal Constitution empowers Swiss citizens to directly propose, alter, or block federal laws and amendments, the US Constitution strictly limits lawmaking power to elected representatives at the federal level in Congress. Their legislative actions are not constrained by voters' explicit legal mandates as are Swiss parliamentarians.

No comparable options are open to US voters at the federal level in the US. Article I, Section 1 states that "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States." There is no mechanism for citizens to directly introduce or vote on federal legislation.

In this regard, the Swiss government defines three direct democracy options open to Swiss citizens.

The first is an Optional Referendum regarding bills approved by the Swiss federal legislature, demanding they be put to a nationwide vote.

"Federal acts and other enactments of the Federal Assembly are subject to optional referendums. These allow citizens to demand that approved bills are put to a nationwide vote. In order to bring about a national referendum, 50,000 valid signatures must be collected within 100 days of publication of the new legislation.”

The second option is a Popular Initiative regarding amendments and additions to the Swiss constitution.

“The popular initiative allows citizens to propose an amendment or addition to the Constitution. It acts to drive or relaunch political debate on a specific issue. For such an initiative to come about, the signatures of 100,000 voters who support the proposal must be collected within 18 months. The authorities sometimes respond to an initiative with a direct counter-proposal in the hope that a majority of the people and the cantons support that instead.”

The third option is a Mandatory Referendum regarding changes to the Swiss constitution.

“All constitutional amendments approved by Parliament are subject to a mandatory referendum, i.e. they must be put to a nationwide popular vote."

In this regard, processes for considering and passing amendments to the US Constitution are reserved to elected representatives in federal and state legislative bodies. US voters do not play formal roles in these processes similar to those exercised by Swiss voters.

It is also noteworthy that the Swiss judicial system does not authorize Swiss judges to overturn laws passed by the Swiss federal legislature. This is not the case in the US, where judges in the federal judicial system, especially US Supreme Court justices, can declare unconstitutional laws passed at both federal and state levels. Since federal judges are not elected but appointed for lifetime terms by elected officials, they are not popularly accountable and only be removed from office through congressional impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction by the Senate.

II. Elections and Political Parties

A politically consequential difference between the Swiss and US systems derives from the roles of political parties and election laws.

Switzerland has an officially mandated multiparty system, in contrast to the US. A Swiss citizen-led popular initiative amended the Federal Constitution in 1918 to enforce proportional representation (PR).

The United States does not have a multiparty system primarily due to its undemocratic "Winner-Take-All" electoral rules in which the political party candidate with the largest number of votes in a district wins the seat. It is referred to as a plurality when it is less than the majority of votes cast. The candidates with pluralities in election districts win control of all the seats. Candidates who did not receive a plurality in all the districts, when all votes are added up, obtain no seats.

This "single member district" system, in which only one candidate can win representation in a legislative body, tends to create a two party system when the boundaries of each district are deliberately changed by the political party in control of the state legislature. The pattern skews elections by splintering and scattering opposing voters into districts where their numbers are too small to win elections.

In contrast, most European countries use Proportional Representation (PR) systems. In Switzerland, if a party wins 15% of the national vote, it receives roughly 15% of the seats in parliament. In the US, a party that wins 15% of the vote across every district wins zero seats.

With respect to Switzerland, Swiss election districts for the federal "National Council" are permanently fixed to the historical borders of the 26 Swiss cantons. (Switzerland is geographically divided into 26 cantons, which function similarly to states in the US). Canton boundaries cannot be changed, such as US House of Representatives election districts can be changed or "gerrymandered" by the political party controlling a state legislature.

Instead of changing district boundaries, for example when populations shift, Switzerland simply recalculates how many of the 200 total parliamentary seats in the National Council" each canton receives based on the size of its population.

The "Winner-Take-All" electoral rules alter vote counting by granting legislative seats only to plurality winners rather than distributing seats among all candidates including those who did not obtain pluralities. The rules distort the allocation of legislative seats by creating a mismatch between candidates' and parties' total popular vote shares, and the disproportionate number of legislative votes that elected party members with pluralities can cast.

These undemocratic differences between Swiss and US electoral and political party systems have led US expert Lee Drutman to argue that the American two-party system using the "winner-take-all" rules is destroying democracy by fostering extreme, existential, and toxic competition. Drutman states the "winner-take-all" rules force voters into a binary choice, overrides actual voter support, and ignores the distribution of votes among competing candidates from different political parties.

As a result, it is possible to view such legislative votes as lacking authenticity. Another negative impact is the antipathy they have aroused among of a majority of Americans against the two major US political parties. Polls reveal an overwhelming majority of US voters hold deeply unfavorable views of both major political parties. Roughly 70% to 80% believe the United States is currently heading in the wrong direction.

What makes this whole dynamic particularly unsettling is that mainstream voters' legislative priorities diverge from those of the two major parties. Stanford University Professor Morris Fiorina, in his book Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, argues that the widely held belief that the American public is deeply divided is a myth. Most Americans actually hold moderate, centrist views, and are largely tolerant of differing opinions.

Fiorina's findings highlight the extent to which the functioning of the two US major political parties appears to deviate from the definition by the Encyclopedia Britannica of the role of political parties should play in democracies:

• Synthesizing Public Opinion and Representation

• Aggregating Diverse Interests: Parties pool related public opinions, demands, and interest groups together.

• Creating a Unified Stance: They synthesize these varying shades of opinion into a single, cohesive political platform that representatives can adopt.

The two major US political parties, and core democratic institutions and processes, do not appear to be accomplishing such crucial responsibilities. US voters have long been demanding -- to no avail -- viable third parties and third party candidates that can win elections against major party candidates. Nor can I envision workable, near-term remedies or traditional reform measures that might be activated across the board.

Considering the forces and factors described above that appear to be destabilizing and even dismantling democratic institutions and processes, I'm convinced it is unlikely they can be surmounted, altered, or removed in the near-term.

Consequently, Switzerland's inspiring direct democracy model and tools provide viable, system-changing alternatives. Voters everywhere -- in the US and abroad -- will be able to utilize them when the Direct Democracy Global Network is fully operational -- without changing existing laws, court decisions, or constitutional provisions. Voters will become the "ultimate rulers" by democratically building consensus across partisan lines, setting priorities and common legislative agendas, and electing lawmakers to enact them.

Direct Democracy Global Network Solution

Network video overview

To my surprize, I recently learned that US President Roosevelt favored direct democracy tools such as the "Oregon System." It is comprised of three core pillars of of voters' political rights, several of which are quite similar to the Switzerland's direct democracy tools:

• Initiative: Citizens proposing new laws via petition.

• Referendum: Citizens voting to approve or repeal laws passed by the legislature.

• Recall: Citizens voting to remove an elected official from office before their term ends.

What the foregoing comparison of the US and Swiss systems indicates is that Swiss citizens come far closer than US citizens to serving as "ultimate rulers". While both systems have unique sets of complexities, historic and contemporary analyses indicate Swiss direct democracy practices confer far greater political prerogatives to Swiss citizens the US system. These prerogatives are especially significant with respect to the comparatively undemocratic roles played by the two major US political parties. They exercise powers and prerogatives the US electorate could exercise directly, for example, setting legislative priorities and legislative agendas.

My dual purpose in writing this essay is to advocate implementation of an expanded 21st century version of the Swiss direct democracy model and method, currently being incorporated into the Direct Democracy Global Network now on the drawing boards. This initiative can voters in the US voters and around the world to exercise similar powers and prerogatives that were enshrined in the Swiss constitution in 1848, and are utilized continuously today by Swiss citizens.

Below is a description of the core building blocs for re-inventing democracy in American that will be provided by the network when it becomes fully operational.

A fundamental building block is recognition that centrist, pro-compromise stances characterize most mainstream Americans, according to extensive research. As cited above, Stanford University Professor Morris Fiorina has documented these stances, which differ from divisive and polarizing roles played by activists in the two major US political parties, particularly those soliciting financial contributions from special interests.

Fiorina's core thesis is described in publications such as Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America and Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics. His research indicates mainstream voters retain moderate views, while a polarizing "political class" drives division.

Core Findings of Fiorina's Research

• The Tolerant Majority: The vast majority of US voters are moderate, hold centrist positions on hot-button issues, and are open to compromise.

• Party Sorting vs. Polarization: The public has not grown deeply radicalized; rather, the political parties have "sorted". Instead of having liberal and conservative wings in both parties, the Democratic party has become almost entirely liberal and the Republican party almost entirely conservative.

• Elite-Driven Divisiveness: Polarization is a top-down phenomenon engineered by political elites, media pundits, and primary election activists.

• The "Responder" Dilemma: Mainstream voters are forced to choose between highly polarized candidates nominated by the party base, giving the illusion of a polarized country.

Fiorina emphasizes the distorting roles that political party activists and special interests now exert on US political processes. They use divisive rhetoric to mobilize donors, satisfy special interest agendas, and raise campaign funds to run and elect candidates whose legislative priorities lie outside the mainstream, often to the extreme right and left of the political spectrum.

This political dynamic generates what he terms "unstable majorities." Because political parties are responsive to their extreme bases rather than the moderate public, they routinely overreach when they seek to gain electoral and legislative power. When they govern strictly according to ideological extremes, they alienate independent voters and moderate swing voters who elected them, which tends to tip control of the US presidency and Congress back and forth between election cycles.

Voters, the US electorate, and population as a whole are also jostled back and forth trying to figure out what is happening, and how to identify and vote for the "least worst" of the candidates on the ballot in general elections.

In my view, findings such as Fiorina's demonstrate the need for a uniquely autonomous platform above and beyond incessant manipulations by disruptive and undemocratic political parties. The purpose of the platform I propose, the Direct Democracy Global Network, is to enable mainstream voters to connect to each other online and offline, discuss, debate, and build consensus around shared priorities -- without the interference of divisive, polarizing political parties.

The usefulness of these findings, and the need for such a platform, are highlighted if we also focus attention on break-through research showing what can be done to create effective consensus building environments. All play a pivotal role in reforming and re-inventing democracy in America and throughout the world.

An example of such research research was conducted by Professor Beau Sievers and colleagues at Dartmouth College and Harvard University. Their findings demonstrate that settings can be devised that are conducive to consensus building among diverse groups of people who did not previously know each other. Below are excerpts from their research findings published in 2023 in an article, entitled How consensus-building conversation changes our minds and aligns our brains.

"A few years ago, Dr. Sievers devised a study to improve understanding of how exactly a group of people achieves a consensus and how their individual brains change after such discussions.

"The results showed that a robust conversation that results in consensus synchronizes the talkers’ brains — not only when thinking about the topic that was explicitly discussed, but related situations that were not.

"The study also revealed at least one factor that makes it harder to reach accord: a group member whose strident opinions drown out everyone else.

“The groups with blowhards were less neurally aligned than were those with mediators, the study found.

"Perhaps more surprising, the mediators drove consensus not by pushing their own interpretations, but by encouraging others to take the stage and then adjusting their own beliefs — and brain patterns — to match the group. . . Being willing to change your own mind, then, seems key to getting everyone on the same page."

An additional major building block for re-inventing democracy facilitates this transformation. It is highly scalable technology for building consensus among virtually unlimited numbers of people, especially voters, past, present, and future. It is described in the AI-based technology in the decision-assisting patent recently granted me by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). It is also facilitated by pro-democracy AI and Machine Learning, such as the AI/ML software developed by the US company Anthropic based in San Francisco.

Anthropic's Co-Founder and CEO, Dario Amodei, PhD, emphasizes these prospects when he emphasizes the contribution AI can make to strengthening democracy. It can technologically fortify individual autonomy, rule of law, and fair governance -- provided it is developed under strict ethical boundaries similar to those required by Anthropic.

His core reasoning relies on the precept that AI can sharpen human values and accelerate democratic systems through specific mechanisms, such as those that will be incorporated into the Direct Democracy Global Network.

• Logical destination: Amodei posits that fundamental human desires for fairness, equal justice, and individual autonomy naturally lead to democratic governance.

• Speeding up progress: He views AI as an intellectual multiplier that will help society reach these "Enlightenment values" more quickly by making the logic of fairness starker and the societal benefits clearer.

AI-based technology is capable of connecting unprecedented numbers of voters -- past, present, and future -- to share, merge, and build consensus around common sets of priorities and legislative agendas. Current political parties lack such technologies, and the motivation to build them due to their continuous competition with each other to win elections, especially by attempting to rile up voters with false claims and exaggerated threats regarding the intentions of rival parties and voting blocks.

Fortunately, these forces and factors can be offset and neutralized by emerging, AI-based technologies.

US voters can use the Direct Democracy Global Network to engage in direct democracy practices such as Swiss citizens' referendums and initiatives.

One major potential benefit is that voters can use the network to connect and join forces across frontiers to address global problems, such as climate disruption and pandemics, while working within and across election district boundaries in their home countries.

Voters can tap into the resources and tools of the network to form and manage voting blocs, and use them to influence elections and legislation, by building consensus around shared priorities and common agendas. They can determine who runs for office, who gets elected, and what laws are passed.

Voters can use the network to crowdsource like-minded voters into consensus building voting blocs, political parties, and electoral coalitions, that are large enough to function cross nationally, and disaggregate their members to register in local election districts, nominate candidates, and win elections.

Since voters at the grassroots can experience difficulties and problems in maintaining sustainable livelihoods, accessing healthcare, and paying for basic necessities, they can often be more motivated to surmount them than lawmakers, and devise more appropriate and effective solutions.
Most importantly, as climate disruption and pandemics threaten their lives, voters can use network tools to directly legislate by conducting initiatives, referendums, and recall votes, mandating lawmakers to exert best efforts to enact the results. They can defeat in forthcoming elections lawmakers who are unresponsive to their mandates

Given the increase and expansion of conflicts around the world, and the difficulties encountered by supranational organizations in resolving them, a new era is unfolding in which voters at the grassroots can become essential partners in developing and implementing life-saving and peace-making plans and policies.

Voter-Driven Consensus Building

For skeptics who argue voters are an inherent source of political animosity and confrontation, recent research indicates that mainstream voters are inclined to compromise and build consensus.

Critics argue that voter empowerment will lead to more conflicts. But voters-- especially mainstream voters -- tend to oppose uncompromising, polarizing actions that spark legislative stalemates.

A research project was conducted by Professor Beau Sievers and colleagues at Dartmouth College and Harvard University. Their findings demonstrate settings can be devised that are conducive to consensus building among diverse groups of people who did not previously know each other.

These consensus-building settings are virtual opposites of the closed, conflict-producing political enclaves created by politicians and political parties attempting to corral voters into accepting their priorities rather than determine their own. Below are excerpts describing the research: How consensus-building conversation changes our minds and aligns our brains.

"A few years ago, Dr. Sievers devised a study to improve understanding of how exactly a group of people achieves a consensus and how their individual brains change after such discussions.

"The study also revealed at least one factor that makes it harder to reach accord: a group member whose strident opinions drown out everyone else.

“The groups with blowhards were less neurally aligned than were those with mediators, the study found.

What I find encouraging is that recent discoveries about consensus building opportunities and environments are complemented and facilitated by emerging technologies. One of them is USPTO Patent No.11,935,141 cited above.

It comprises the components described below:

Component 1. Data processing. The system continuously evaluates a living corpus of electoral laws, legislative proposals, and intra-network voter interactions, building a structured representation of the political landscape that any participant can query.

Component 2. Machine learning. Natural-language processing learns from successive rounds of voter queries, mapping overlapping priorities across divided populations and surfacing the issues on which broad cross-partisan agreement is in fact attainable.

Component 3. Voting utility. A cryptographically secure environment lets self-selecting aggregates of voters propose, debate, and vote on binding legislative agendas, producing auditable outcomes that legislators cannot ignore.

Component 4. Crowdsourcing. Researchers working on crowd-scale deliberation have published complementary models for resisting manipulation, weighting underrepresented voices, and making the entire process auditable end-to-end.

Earlier observers of networked civic life, including Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Penguin Group argued, long before this generation of tools, that lower coordination costs would make collective citizen action more, not less, feasible — if the platforms were built to that purpose.

I outline below a number of steps voters might take to tap into the resources of the Direct Democracy Global Network in whatever order they might choose:

Ten Steps to Direct Democracy

Shifting the Locus of Power

The transformative systemic change capabilities of AI-facilitated direct democracy are illustrated by the comparison below of the current US representative model and the Direct Democracy Global Network (DDGN) model, along four dimensions.

Power source and agenda setting. Today: top-down, dictated by party elites and closed-door platforms. With DDGN: voter-led, using natural-language AI to crowdsource cross-partisan, shared priorities.

Consensus building. Today: partisan gridlock and unresolved zero-sum stalemates. With DDGN: AI-assisted cross-partisan reconciliation built on fact-checked deliberation.

Candidate selection. Today: pre-selected party loyalists on restricted ballots. With DDGN: crowdsourced consensus-builders funded and nominated by digital voting blocs.

Post-election action. Today: voter passivity until the next election cycle. With DDGN: continuous accountability through online petition drives, referendums, and recall mandates.

Each row of the matrix is, in effect, a description of where political power lives. The shift the network proposes is not the abolition of representative legislatures but the addition of a continuous channel through which citizen-driven consensus building shapes and defines what these legislatures do.

Voters describe priorities and participate in dialogues and debates. Machine-learning and natural-language processing can act as a filter, to surface evidence-based legislative options that actually correspond to citizens’ stated goals, and draw on broad bodies of evidence to identify and remove demonstrable falsehoods.

The output is a set of collaboratively determined, fact-checked common agendas, not a popularity contest. The same digital tools that have been used for micro-targeted manipulation in election campaigns, when reverse engineered and built as a publicly accesible infrastructure, can be turned against the very disinformation they once distorted and amplified.

Voters can set their common legislation agendas strictly on the basis of accurate, evidence-based legislative options — effectively offsetting and neutralizing the modern arguments against popular sovereignty.

Circumventing Gatekeepers: Crowdsourcing Political Power

Once a fact-checked, collaborative, consensus building process enables voters to set common legislative agendas, the next challenge is organizational. How can dispersed citizens, who agree on priorities and proposals, create a political force capable of implementing it? A three-step process is outlined below.

Step 1. Connect. Voters link with like-minded individuals based on shared, AI-fact-checked priorities, using the most fundamental crowdsourcing principles.

Step 2.Form blocs. Flexible, self-governing digital voting blocs are created and hosted natively on the DDGN, operating independently of traditional geographic boundaries.

Step 3.Merge and scale. Blocs aggregate into formal, registered political parties and cross-partisan electoral coalitions capable of challenging the established two-party duopoly.

This is how to circumvent gatekeepers — party leaderships, donor networks, and the closed primaries that select “electable” candidates. The blocs simply reach across partisan lines, and create voter-backed alternatives that the gatekeepers did not authorize, and nominate and elect voters to implement their agendas.

The Consensus Building Engine: Creating Shared Solutions

The consensus building engine cycles continuously through four phases.

Phase 1. Input. Voters submit divergent priorities and needs without being forced into pre-existing party categories.

Phase 2. AI fact-check. The system removes misinformation and surfaces evidence-based legislative options that respond to the stated priorities.

Phase 3. Rank and debate. Self-selecting aggregates of voters dialogue, rank, and vote on the AI-provided options.

Phase 4. Common agendas. Unified, cross-partisan legislative agendas are established and the central database is updated, ready to be fed back into the next cycle.

Given this unending cycle — agendas are updated indefinitely to reflect new information and new participants, and blend new and old priorities. Voters' common agendas are continuously refreshed to express the evolving priorities of the network’s self-organizing, self-crowdsourcing members.

Continuous Sovereignty vs. Episodic Voting

The deepest flaw in conventional electoral democracy is that voting is a singular event orchestrated by political parties with scant voter participation. Voters act on Election Day to cast votes, but then have to wait, rather passively, for the next one. Candidates dictate platforms; voters ratify or reject them; everything else happens behind closed doors.

To counteract this pattern, the Direct Democracy Global Network facilitates the reform and re-invention of democracy worldwide by replacing episodic voting with a continuous Action Wave powering voters' civic participation. Between elections, network members can use network tools to compose and conduct online votes, and use their results to issue ongoing sequences of binding voters' mandates — petition drives, popular initiatives, referendums, and informal recall votes — each anchored to the common agendas voters have collaboratively set online and continuously updated.

This technologically facilitated dynamic enables voters to self-organize and self-crowdsource to collectively set priorities and common agendas, and nominate candidates and elect representative to execute their mandates. Representatives who ignore the agendas and mandates run real risks: coordinated, well-funded primary defeats in the next election, organized through the same network that produced the mandate they ignored. The threat of recall — not merely the ritual of a future election — has the power to ultimately determine who runs for office, who gets elected, and what laws are passed.

Citizens exercise their political sovereignty continuously, at the scale and tempo of the continuous flow of events, and the requirements of modern policy-making -- with 21st century direct democracy tools equal to the task.

Conclusion

Readers of this essay might wonder if contemporary mainstream voters, in the US and worldwide, will be motivated and able to leap back and forth across centuries, to follow the advice of world-renowned philosophers and statespersons such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

While they were keen observers of positive and negative character traits and behavioral influences on human behavior, and their evolution, can it be assumed that their advice and admonitions will play a transformative role in protecting and supporting individual liberties in the 21st century? Will the capabilities of ordinary people to exercise their political sovereignty over elections and legislation survive hardened opposition?

Encouragement regarding the transformative system-changing roles that voters in the US and around the world can and will play is provided by the research of UC/Berkeley Professor Dacher Keltner. His findings demonstrate the evolutionary strengthening of cooperative, mutually beneficial, humanitarian traits within societies around the world.

Keltner emphasizes inherent "pro-social" behavior patterns. These centuries old patterns indicate human beings possess inherent tendencies and capabilities for collectively caring for others. Keltner's research shows that human nature is fundamentally characterized by empathy, kindness, and caring -- a "compassionate instinct" that has evolved to ensure species survival through cooperation and power sharing, rather than competition and subjugation.

He expresses his views in The Power Paradox: The Promise and Peril of 21st Century Power’ | Talks at Google - YouTube; and the Survival of the Kindest - YouTube.

What I infer from Keltner's findings is that contemporary self-serving, aggrandizing, and conflict-producing interactions of competing parties and groups may be merely a passing, retrograde blip, when compared to the progress of humankind toward greater cooperation and capabilities for collectively contributing to the greater good.

The numerical preponderance of the world’s 8.5 billion people dwarfs the comparatively small numbers of power-seeking politicians, political parties, lawmakers, special interests, and autocrats, seeking to increase their wealth, status, and control.

Far more people will be sharing mutually supportive values, cooperative behavioral norms, and altruistically oriented interrelationships than political figures undermining the control ordinary people should exercise over their lives, livelihoods, futures -- and of course their control over elections and their governments.

To that end, the Direct Democracy Global Network will provide virtually unlimited numbers of people-- especially intrepid voters insisting on exercising their political sovereignty - unique opportunities to apply the altruistic and socially benevolent lessons humankind has been learning for centuries. They will hold the keys to the future. Yes, they will bring the best that is yet to come!

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