Vote Bank Espresso Love

Hi! Happy Saturday!

Dedicated to Leonard Nimoy! 

"I have been, and always shall be, your friend."
-Leonard Nimoy, Spock to Kirk, Nimoy to the World.

This post is about empathy and is dedicated to Leonard Nimoy. If only...we could all look into each others eyes and express this empathy. Mmmmm. Leonard made this statement and for many of us world over we felt he was speaking directly to us. Agape. A kind person indeed. So long Leonard!

Yesterday I proposed a solution. That solution was to take the science of six-degrees of separation and build an empathy map between groups of peoples. I was only joking about Facebook. In closing I suggested that Facebook build this map. Ha! That suggestion was mostly illustrative just to highlight the fact that Facebook has 1.25 billion active monthly users today and that technically building this map is very doable today.  Facebook is clueless how to manage world empathy.

However, Irreni has a rock solid plan for managing empathy,  for six-degree maps using the Device of Life [DoL]. One of the DoL's primary applications is the Vote Bank. The Vote Bank turns voting on its head where votes are deposited perpetually and not cast on a given day. A person's vote for an elected position is always on deposit. The Vote Bank then is akin to a financial bank where instead of depositing money into our bank account then we deposit votes into our vote account.

Technology got us to 7 billion people and so it is that the highest capacity for technology is now a requirement for governing. Irreni brings the political process into the 21st century.

The Vote Bank addresses these critical aspects to world scale:

1. World Empathy
2. Corruption
3. Franchise
4. Communication

The Vote Bank voting depends on the following:

1. Public voting
2. Bribes
3. Vote who you know
4. Random elections

As I am a person who has a certain capability it is always a challenge trying to convey certain thing...in this case public voting and legal bribing. To me it is so obvious because scale is my wheelhouse. However, most people are private people and react to public voting and bribing with revulsion. Understandably so. If the "man" knows your vote then he will come after you and maybe fire you from your job or worse. We all can see the detrimental effects corruption and bribery has on our governments.

You are not thinking in the billions. I am, that's the key difference. So, I'm going to ask you to take off your one-person hat for a moment and put on a billions hat and hear me out as I make the cases.

Public Voting

1. Anyone can pick up on anyone else's political leanings just from casual conversation. The point here is that your actual vote in the voting booth is moot when it comes to political discrimination and those you know. If you live under a tyrannical government and violent threat for voting the wrong way then voting is meaningless anyway.
2. People will use the thinnest of casual information to make judgements if that is their objective. People looking to discriminate typically do so for the thinnest of reasons, even skin color.
3. The "man" already knows how you vote and the proof is called house-by-house gerrymandering. They, as in the government, already knows how you vote so as to gerrymander house-to-house. Your vote is being manipulated by putting you in a district where everyone votes like you.
4. Most people are good.
5. Most people are not looking to judge you to the point of harming you on the thinnest of casual conversation or even direct knowledge. I'm an atheist. I do not worry about religious persecution in the modern world. Trust me, the people who would discriminate against me are not the people I would want to work for and they are few and far between. This is kinda the same notion as what Groucho Marx was going for when he said, "I would not join a club that would have me as a member." If someone doesn't want to hire me because I'm an atheist then the feeling of is reciprocated, I do not want to work for them.
6. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. There are always exceptions to the rule but for the sake of the greater good of the benefits of public voting will materialize discrimination. The vast majority of public voters will not experience discrimination.

Bribes

1. Most people are corruptible. Ok, I just made the claim that our human nature is that most people are good. It appears I just contradicted myself. Let me rephrase. Most people are good in that people in general do not wish or work to harm people. Taking a bribe doesn't directly harm people or express maliciousness. I first heard the following corruption truthiness from Dean Martin who said, "A man is only as loyal as his opportunities." A man who gets chased by a lot of women has a lot of opportunity and will be less loyal than otherwise. Benjamin Franklin expressed this by recommending that men always hire old lady secretaries.
2. Checks and balances. The U.S. Constitution is modeled on allowing corruption. The Continental Congress contemplated having the Supreme Court review all laws before passing them on to the President. However they did not because of Adams. Adams used Cicero as his guiding star when writing the original constitution of the entire planet Earth for Massachusetts. Cicero lamented that the fall of Democracy in Rome was in part due to a government that did not allow for any corruption. Power corrupts human nature so therefore corruption was unchecked because there was no way to recognize, acknowledge or control corruption in Rome. Adams created the theory of checks and balances and argued that by allowing corrupted laws to pass Congress and the President then corruption had an outlet. Only later would the Supreme Court check the corruption by overturning corrupt laws. For the record, money is not the only kind of corruption. Populist heat-of-the-moment corruption also exists. The incident that comes to my mind that is most flagrant is that of Terri Schiavo. The Schiavo bill passed the House on March 21, 2005 at 12:41 a.m. (UTC-5). U.S. President George W. Bush flew to Washington, D.C. from his vacation in Texas in order to sign the bill into law at 1:11 a.m. What is remarkable about this populist bill is that for the first time in American history a bill was written for a single person. A single person. Truly a populist-heated moment and corrupted bill passed Congress. The Supreme Court fulfilled its duty and checked the Congress by overturning the bill. 
3. Bribery being illegal does not do away with bribes, but instead limits of the number of people to bribe. If bribing is made legal then the number of people to be bribed is 7 billion.  That's impossible. In college I took a civics class. In that class the professor espoused that one of the strengths of the American form of government is that government is federated. A federated government is very difficult to bribe. According to the professor that between the Federal, State and Municipal governments there where just too many people to bribe. Sadly, this feature of federation has been neutered by a central government so big and so powerful that our state and local governments have been rendered mostly impotent. 

Let's put the bribery and public voting observations together and draw a picture.  The Vote Bank means your vote is always on deposit. Public voting means your vote is always visible. Now you can be bribed. Someone pays you money and you change your vote in the bank. The change can be seen, money paid.

Vote for who you know

I have yet to settle on a name for "vote for who you know" voting. The idea is simple enough, you can only cast votes for people you know and the number of people you are allowed to claim to know requires a reciprocation by the other party. Further, vote for who you know has a cap, say thirty people.  Thirty people is just for the sake of this conversation. Vote are tallied by counting all the votes in the six-degree vote network. For example, assuming a six-degree chain of 'A -> B -> C -> D -> E -> F' then the candidate 'F' has six votes. One direct vote and five indirect votes.

Vote for who you know optimizes empathy and mitigates corruption, permanently.

Let us say you are the Koch brothers in 2015 and you want to buy a politician. Today it is easy, just pay the politician a large enough bribe and finance the campaign. Done

The Irreni system is not so "done".

1. Any one person has at most thirty direct votes. To win an election then the most vote getter will necessarily require maintaining a network of six-degrees so as to garner the most votes. Bribe money will need to be distributed. 
2. Campaigning is inferior to bribing. If your choices are to watch $50 worth of campaign TV ads or to get $50 in your pocket, which are your going to choose?
3. Former campaign finance money is now spent bribing the "vote for who you know" network. The money gets diluted. 
4. Public voting starts a bidding war. 
5. Since bribing is legal we can see the corruption first-hand in the system. 
6. We can take action to appeal to individuals to vote their conscience and not the bribe. 
7. Corruption's influence is diluted per person since the money necessarily needs to be distributed.

John Adams along with a cast of thousands have all lamented "woe be the day that voters realize they can vote themselves money." Legal bribing takes this notion and flips its head. People get bribed for their votes. Good people participate in the same system as corrupt people, a legal corruption system. Good people can ethically take the most money and still be good.

Random elections

Random elections are critical to making the legal bribing system work. Random elections are defined as during any given term of office then each day can be randomly chosen for the next election, including the first day of the current term. For example, when the next President of the U.S. takes office on January 20th 2016 then that is the first day available for random election. The entire four-year term is the period available for random elections.

Random elections make bribes risky, especially in the beginning. Paying off a bribe would only happen after an election and then your public vote is noted as having been cast as was bribed. Paying someone off by bribing them for the entire term will be much more expensive than bribing only at the end. You have a 50-50 chance of bribing the winner half-way through a term. You can concentrate your money and garner better odds in the last half of a term. Corruption then becomes diluted by odds making and uncertainty of the election day. Campaigning becomes problematic as well, opening the field of candidates.

Social Pressure

All election bribes become public knowledge in this system. People who take bribes can be managed. Studies can be done has to why and then social changes can be made to discourage bribing. A measure of how well any society is functioning can be a measure of the amount of open corruption. Less corrupt societies will be measurable.

Empathy Maps

Finally, vote for who you know becomes the empathy map presented in my previous post. People who you vote for represent someone you feel best represents your interests. No Facebook required as my previous post suggest. The public vote map doubles as an empathy map. Initially there will be challenges with the empathy map not having enough cross-over between countries and continents but with the Internet this can be easily remedied with virtual communities, virtual elections and world-wide voting.

 To conclude

The Vote Bank as outlined above optimizes empathy. Empathy is optimized by voting for those you empathize the most, vote for who you know. Corruption is checked in part by opening the population to be bribed to everyone. Bribery being made legal means bribery can be dealt with out in the open. This system also allows for good people to do good things and for corruption to co-exist. As Cicero said, promote the good and allow the corrupt.

The Vote Bank balances voting for money directly with voting for the best candidate. Voters using the 2015 election systems are voting themselves money but there is no avenue for voting the best candidate; just candidates promoted by corrupted parties. The Irreni Vote bank resolves this problem by six-degrees voting. This is realized by voting for a trusted voter, not a trusted candidate.  Take for example the case of trusted voter Jenny. Jenny is blogger and reporter and she is also known for her integrity. In Jenny's six-degree of voting network she represents a block of one-million votes for President of the U.S. People vote for people who vote for Jenny because they trust Jenny. Jenny writes and blogs about the candidate she has currently cast her vote. If she changes her vote for any reason she writes about her change. Jenny's vote block is contingent on her apparent integrity. If Jenny takes a bribe then her entire network falls apart. Jenny then votes for the best candidate, assuring her vote block remains in tact. This example illustrates how even with bribery being legal we can exercise our integrity and vote the best candidate for office. Voting the best candidate in 2015 is not possible in our corrupted two-party system today. Voting the best candidate is built into the Irreni Vote Bank model.

Cheers!

The future is coming!

Well come! and well met!