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Show HN: I'm building a new political party (feedback welcome!)

Hi HN! I'm working on building a new political party (http://allogov.us/), and would appreciate some feedback on this!

If the website isn’t clear, the idea is to get voters to sync on who to vote on. If the party wins, voters will get direct access to individual policy items, instead of a bundle of policies (the representative will vote in line with the app.)

What're you looking for in a new political party?

I'm not sure how to go about finding the first users: Anyone know anyone who has advice on this?

Thanks!

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I got on the inside of the brief attempt at the Reddit thread which started the quickly failed “American Pirate Party”. While seemingly a good idea, this kind of “vote for policy” is exactly what destroyed that effort, it just doesn’t work. Long term there are lots of problems with trying to get direct democracy to drive the actions of a representative.

How will a candidate be able to vote on "unbundled" policies if they are not written that way? How do you expect to the process to change without replacing all members (which cannot be done in a single election)

Why do you call them users? What keeps a policy maker true to what is signaled in the app? Is the in app signal the same as what the entire constituents want?

That's a very good point - within our current democracy, it seems impossible to have "unbundled" policies. Part of Allogov is to change that - so you can't necessarily tack on a food bill to a medicare bill, and so forth. All the rules that we take for granted now (in legislation) were invented between 1776 and today - they're not necessarily optimal for democracy. I think we do need to think about which rules we want to keep, and which ones we don't.

With that said, Allogov is meant to be a software for the "hardware" of government. Given that we have existing political systems, it's unfeasible to change large portions of our existing democracy. Instead, it'd be much easier to change the "rules" via software, and have representatives plug into the existing system to implement those rules.

For example, if citizens decide in the app that they want the food portion and not the medicare portion of the bill, then the Allogov representative will propose an amendment to strike the unwanted portion out. Ultimately, the efficacy of Allogov will depend on how much "real" power it has (ie, the real number of representatives & voters), just like in a real party.

I do assume that Allogov can effect change, even at 1 or 2 "real" representatives. In politics, even a few representatives can make or break a bill, so both parties will be incentivized to keep Allogov on their side. Negotiating with Allogov representatives is easy (since everyone knows what they want by looking at the app).

So I call them users, because we're all users of democracy! As a product, democracy isn't great, and hopefully we can make it better.

For the user, Allogov is meant to be better at uncovering "true opinions" and implementing them, so the outcome is more satisfactory to more people. We do this by implementing governance/deliberation/voting schemes that would be impossible to do in real life (think of how long it'd take to implement ranked choice voting). So instead of doing 10 political campaigns to pass 10 issues, we're doing 1 (Allogov), with all the campaigns after that easier to pass.

In that sense, Allogov is meant to be a platform - for building new kinds of democracy. You can be conservative, or liberal, or any number of ideologies. Hopefully the kinds of public spaces we build will be more satisfactory than yelling into the void (ie, voting in gerrymandered districts), and will more truly reflect what constituents want.

I think you raise an important point - is the app signal the same as what the entire population wants? There's a good chance that it'll skew towards urban millennials vs rural baby boomers, for example. While I think it'd be important to eventually get everyone represented fairly - i'm not sure what the best way of doing that are. We'll definitely address the biases as we see them, though.

Happy to chat more if you want! (zen@allogov.us - it might fall in spam, idk why)

I'd start with term limits on Congress and separating income from spending bills, i.e. they cannot put both sides in the same bill.

that's a good thing we can implement! for example, Allogov representatives can just vote no on all bills that have mixed concerns. Then, people will learn that those kinds of bills won't pass, and it'll be a de-facto ban. Allogov representatives can also have term limits.

Also... do you imagine those things will take less (political) effort to implement than a new political party?

Depends on what the new party is about. I have serious doubts that app based signaling, and requiring a politician to adhere to it is a good idea.

Why not a direct democracy at that point? (This would be bad as well)

Think of the money and misinformation that would fly around to influence every vote. I don't really want to have to be involved with politics every day and know enough to make an informed choice. This is why representative democracy scales better.

Yeah, that's a good point. I think of the app as the "base layer" for implementing any kind of governance, on top of which you can implement any kind of democracy/bureaucracy you want.

In terms of voting, I'd imagine the ideal democracy to be representative - but actually so. Citizen load needs to be light. So you can imagine delegating your vote to a friend, or an interest group (if a community opts into this feature). We create virtual levels of representation (ie, neighborhood level representatives who you trust, etc), and at the very top is the "real" Allogov representative, which sits in Congress and enacts all the decisions.

Ultimately, the goal is to have predefined governance, so you can start a new city, install Allogov, and get functioning government (the app will tell you what all the roles are, what they do, and so forth). Good government is a mix between bureaucracy and democracy, after all..

We can't solve misinformation, but we can counter it with more effective civics -- and that starts with people having a more direct connection to government, and a tangible, clear process of change. Putting politics online, and designing thoughtful spaces for that, might be helpful!

I hope that money will not influence Allogov, but will have to think of a way to minimize that.

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