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Here is how it can be done better – The Economist 12/21/96

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A Survey of democracy: Happy 21st century, voters! (part 3 of 8)

Some of the Swiss do it even more directly

IF THIS does not sound quite like the way your own national government operates, take a look at the next level down in Swiss politics. The country’s 26 cantons (six of them technically ‘half-cantons’, but for all practical purposes separate entities) are powerful bodies. They raise and spend almost as much tax money as the central government does-and a larger share, let envious over-centralised countries note, than half a century ago, when the central government swept up more of the total tax take than it does now. The cantons control all of the country’s police forces, virtually all of its education system, much of the law-making power over each canton’s economy, and a large chunk of Swiss welfare spending. And these sturdy bodies are, in the matter of direct democracy, generally even more people-friendly than the central government. Here are three examples.

The biggest canton, Zurich, with one in six of the country’s voters, gives to these voters a considerably wider range of supervision over the cantonal government than they have over the central one. Any law emerging from Zurich’s parliament, or any expenditure of more than SFr2m ($ 1.6m) a year, automatically has to go for public approval. The number of signatures needed to bring smaller matters to a referendum, or to start a new law on its way, is an even smaller proportion of the electorate than at the federal level. This means that Zurichers vote on about 16 cantonal subjects a year, ranging in recent months from the provision of SFr873m for the expansion of Zurich airport (approved) to an indignant signature-backed demand for ‘separation of church and state’ (defeated).

Indeed, Zurich has one voting device that goes beyond anything on offer in any other canton. Under its Einzelinitiative, the ‘single initiative’, one solitary signature on a petition can be enough to put a proposal for a change in the law to the people’s vote, provided the signatory gets some backing in parliament. This may sound like democracy gone daft. Yet in March 1995 one Albert Jorger was able to bring about by this device a sensible (and voter-constraining) change in the way Zurich’s schools are run. Before, the teachers had been appointed by each community’s voters, and this had led to some odd choices. Thanks to Mr Jorger and his signature, they are now picked by a professional selection committee (itself, to be sure, chosen by the voters). Most people reckon this has improved things. One part of the machinery of direct democracy has corrected another part’s excess.

Not too often, please

In the second-biggest canton, Bern, they have decided that the correction process needs to go further. The Bernese are a slow-speaking, circumspect lot, not given to dramatic action, but in 1995 they made some radical changes to the way their canton’s direct democracy works. They had come to the conclusion that they wanted not to have to vote so often, but when they did vote they wanted to be able to aim their votes with greater precision.

The voting-less-often part has been achieved by abolishing most of the mandatory referendums in which petty issues had to be brought to the people’s vote whether or not anybody asked, and by stiffening the signature-collection requirement for optional referendums. Other cantons, and the central government, may decide to imitate the Bernese in this; it seems a sound way of slowing down the now rather over-hectic Swiss referendum tempo.

Bern’s most adventurous innovations, however, are those in the precision-aiming category. The voters of Bern can now make up their minds about the general shape of a new law without having to wait until it has been drafted and enacted by parliament; this December, for instance, they were able to choose between five different ways of reorganising the canton’s hospital system. They can also pass judgment not only on proposed new laws but also on their government’s bigger administrative decisions. Since such decisions-the building of a new reservoir, say, or the expansion of an airport-can arouse a lot more passion than many minor laws, the extension of direct democracy into this field should encourage more people to vote.

Both of these things seem good ideas. There is more doubt about the new Bernese constitution’s other innovation, which is to let people vote not merely yes or no to a proposed law but to offer amendments to it, which the voters can then decide upon. There is a certain amount of grave head-wagging that this is going to produce laws which contradict themselves. The Bernese will find out, on behalf of the rest of the Swiss, whether this is so.

The face-to-face way

The other way of running a canton, of course, is not to bother about putting crosses on pieces of paper but to turn out once a year in the town square, call out your opinions, and stick your hand up to vote. Glarus, up in the mountains of eastern Switzerland, is one of five small cantons that make their laws by the Landsgemeinde, the cantonal get-together. Its 24,700 voters employ the usual paper-consuming method for choosing the canton’s seven-member government and 80-member parliament (and for doing their bit in federal referendums) but when it comes to the serious business they can assemble on a Sunday in spring to do the canton’s law-making, elect their judges, set their income tax and decide about any cantonal spending over SFr500,000 ($ 400,000) in the good old face-to-face way.

Last May about 6,000 of them turned out-almost exactly the same number, as it happens, as the voters in the direct democracy of ancient Athens, but in Glarus a third of them were women-and, having sworn the formal oath to do the right thing, settled down to an 18-item agenda. It went on for about four hours; most people stayed on their feet, there being few benches in the square, and some slipped off for a quick drink round the corner during the proceedings. It was decided to build a new hospital and, more reluctantly, a new roundabout on the main road at Nafels, a bit to the south of Glarus town. A proposal to stop schooling on Saturdays was rejected, and there was a tremendous row about limits on hunting. All in all, those ancient Athenians would have felt quite at home in Glarus town square, except for the sight of women voting.

As this suggests, direct democracy at the cantonal level is still in reasonably good shape. It is a puzzle that the French-Swiss cantons make less use of the referendum than the German-Swiss cantons do, or Italian-Swiss Ticino; perhaps, like their cousins across the border in France itself, they are more willing to tip their cap to the wisdom of those in authority. The Swiss should also take note that the turnout for cantonal referendums, as for federal ones, is less than it ought to be: only a quarter of Glarus’s voters came to that stirring Sunday morning last May. But these things will doubtless come right if the cantons absorb the lesson the central government is slowly learning. The people want to have the big decisions in their hands, but they do not want to spend so much time on fiddling ones.

© 1996 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved

So long as it’s clear who’s in charge – The Economist 12/21/96

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A Survey of democracy: Happy 21st century, voters! (part 2 of 8)

Take Switzerland for both a model and a warning

BRIAN BEEDHAM

THE first lesson from Switzerland is that direct democracy is hard work. The second is that, though it makes politicians less important than they like to be, it does not remove the need for an intelligent parliament; the system works most efficiently when politicians stop assuming they know best, but do their proper job with modest zeal.

This proper job, as with any parliament, is to sit down, discuss the problems of the day, and propose solutions for them. The difference in a direct democracy is that the parliament’s solutions are not necessarily the last word in the matter until the next general election, which may be years away. In Switzerland, 50,000 signatures on a petition, a bit over 1% of the current total of qualified voters, are enough to haul any new countrywide law before a vote of the whole people. Twice that number of signatures will put a brand-new idea for a law to the people’s decision, even if parliament wants nothing to do with it. Because of a Swiss quirk, new federal laws coming from outside parliament have to take the form of amendments to the constitution, with the result that Switzerland’s constitution has come to look like an over-stuffed cupboard; but there is no reason why the same process could not put such new laws on the ordinary statute-book, as happens in many American states and in most of Switzerland’s own cantons.

From the ridiculous to the sublime

In all, almost 450 nationwide questions have gone to a vote of the whole Swiss people since the current system got going 130 years ago-over half the world’s all-time tally of national referendums, and overwhelmingly most of the genuine, non-Napoleonic, sort. At three and a half a year, that may not sound all that much. But the pace has been accelerating lately; and, when you add the votes in which the Swiss decide what to do in their cantons and communities, it means that three or four times a year they are invited to read in the meticulously impartial documents sent to them through the post, or watch on television, or pull off the Internet, the arguments for and against up to a dozen assorted issues, and give their decisions. That is hard work.

Those decisions, at the all-Swiss level, range from the tiny to the huge. Last March the country’s voters solemnly decided to let the French-speaking Catholics of the hamlet of Vellerat (population 71) leave the mainly Protestant and German-speaking canton of Bern to join the French-Catholic canton of Jura, which had itself for the same reason been allowed to break away from Bern in 1978. In September 1993 the Swiss rather belatedly gave themselves a day off work every August 1st, the anniversary of Switzerland’s birth a mere 705 years ago.

Such things bring a condescending smile to the foreigner’s face. But, a few months before the holiday vote, a band of signature- collectors who wanted to stop the Swiss air force buying any new fighter aircraft for the rest of the century, and to reduce the number of bases the army is allowed to use, had got within a few percentage points of winning their case. And six months before that the voters, against the advice of most of their leaders, had momentously decided not to join the European Economic Area, lest even this small step to Euro-cohesion should eventually enmesh them in a European political union most of them do not want.

It should not be deduced from that act of defiance, however, that direct democracy spells chaos for Switzerland. In return for the parliament’s acceptance that the people are the boss, the people are quite often willing to heed the parliament’s views.

Only a handful of the measures that could under Swiss rules have been summoned to a referendum in the past 130 years actually have been summoned. Of the laws written by parliament which have been called before the people’s judgment, half have then been given the people’s okay (see the table above). Nine-tenths of the new legislation proposed by the signature-collecting process has been turned down by the voters. When parliament puts up a counter-proposal, it is accepted two times out of three. If anything, people and parliament get on better these days than they used to; only about a quarter of the acts of parliament put to the referendum since 1960 have been rejected, compared with well over a half 100 years ago.

Still, a certain weariness has crept into the proceedings lately. The turnout for referendums, once pretty regularly 50-60% or more, went into a decline in the 1950s. Despite a few moments of big-issue excitement, it has been floating around the 40% mark for most of the 1980s and 1990s. The people of Switzerland have lost some of their enthusiasm for voting, compared with people in most of the big representative democracies (see the chart below).

It does you good, in moderation

This almost certainly does not mean that the Swiss no longer think direct democracy a good idea. The much likelier explanation is that, as the population has grown (and since women won the vote in 1971), the number of signatures needed to summon a referendum has become a much smaller proportion of the total number of voters than it used to be. This means not only that there is a lot more voting to do-ten nationwide votes a year on average in the 1990s, compared with three in the 1920s and 1930s-but also that a fair number of referendums are the work of small and excited groups of enthusiasts. This turns people off, and some of them stop voting. The politicians thereupon explain that direct democracy is dying, so they themselves should be put back in charge.

This can be remedied when the Swiss overhaul their voting system, as they plan to do in the next few years, especially if they look at what some of their more adventurous cantons are already doing; see the next article. If the number of signatures needed to call a referendum is raised to something nearer its old share of the electorate, there will be fewer referendums. If the procedure for collecting signatures is made a bit sterner (some Swiss supermarkets will let you do it at the check-out counter), maybe more of the referendums that do take place will be seriously thought through. The voting turnout will then presumably go up again; the fear that referendums are becoming the voice of excited minorities will subside; and the superior look on the politicians’ faces will duly disappear.

There is still a solid basis for partnership between the politicians of Switzerland and the people with their special power. The voters are content to let the politicians do most of the routine work of politics, and to listen to their advice on many complicated issues. The politicians, for their part, have learned that ordinary people are often surprisingly (to politicians) shrewd in their decisions.

In the 1970s, the voters refused to be frightened by anti-immigrant propaganda into sending home most of the foreigners working in Switzerland (and this December they declined to tighten the rules against asylum-seekers). In the 1980s and 1990s, they were persuaded to dig into their pockets to start paying value-added tax. And not long ago there was a splendid moment after most of the political class had shaken a furious fist at the voters’ refusal to accept an anti-urban-sprawl planning law. The politicians then discovered that just as much sprawl could be prevented, more cheaply, by a different scheme. Politicians and people may occasionally snarl at each other, but they have learned how to work together. The Swiss will go on doing democracy their direct way.

It’s not a war outcome of Swiss referendums, 1866-1993

(Accepted, Defeated, %Successful)

115 Parliamentary laws and decrees brought to people’s vote (56 59 48.7%)

110 New laws proposed from outside parliament (11 99 10.0%)

27 Parliamentary counter-proposals (17 10 63.0%)

143 Constitutional amendments proposed by parliament (104 39 72.7%)

————————————————————————

Source: ‘Referendums around the World’ edited by David Butler and Austin Ranney

© 1996 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved

It means government by the people, and we are the people – The Economist 12/21/96

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A Survey of democracy: “Happy 21st century, voters! (part 1 of 8)

“Democracy in the 20th century has been a half-finished thing. In the 21st, it can grow to its full height, says Brian Beedham”

This survey argues that the next big change in human affairs will probably not be a matter of economics, or electronics, or military science; it will be a change in the supposedly humdrum world of politics. The coming century could see, at last, the full flowering of the idea of democracy. The democratic system of politics, which first took widespread root in the 19th century, and then in the 20th century beat off the attacks of both fascism and communism, may in the 21st century realise that it has so far been living, for understandable reasons, in a state of arrested development, but that those reasons no longer apply; and so democracy can set about completing its growth.

The places that now consider themselves to be democracies are with a handful of exceptions run by the process generally known as ‘representative’ democracy. That qualifying adjective should make you sit up and think.

The starting-point of modern democracy is the belief that every sane adult is entitled to an equal say in the conduct of public affairs. Some people are richer than others, some are more intelligent, and nobody’s interests are quite the same as anybody else’s; but all are entitled to an equal voice in deciding how they should be governed. There is therefore something odd in the fact that in most democracies this voice is heard only once every few years, in elections in which voters choose a president or send their representatives to an elected parliament; and that between those elections, for periods of anything up to seven years, it is the presidents and parliamentarians who do all the deciding, while the rest of the democracy is expected to stand more or less quietly on one side, either nodding its head in irrelevant approval or growling in frustrated disagreement. This is part-time democracy.

There exists in a few places a different way of doing it, called direct democracy. In this straightforward version, the elected representatives are not left to their own devices in the periods between elections. The rest of the people can at any time call them to order, by cancelling some decision of the representatives with which most of the people do not agree or, sometimes, by insisting that the representatives do something they had no wish to do, or perhaps had never even thought about. The machinery by which this is done is the referendum, a vote of the whole people. If democracy means rule by the people, democracy by referendum is a great deal closer to the original idea than the every-few-years voting which is all that most countries have.

The test is: Who gives the order?

It has to be the right kind of referendum, of course. A referendum organised by the government, posing a question of the government’s choice in the words the government finds most convenient, is seldom much help to democracy. Not many referendums are quite as blatant as the Chilean one of 1978 (‘In the face of international aggression . . . I support President Pinochet in his defence of the dignity of Chile’). But General de Gaulle in the early 1960s plainly saw his de haut en bas sort of referendums as one means of making sure, as he put it, that ‘the entire indivisible authority of the state is confided to the president,’ meaning himself. Napoleon liked the technique, too. Even more modest politicians are unlikely to resist the temptation to put a spin on their referendums’ wording: ‘Your government, having after careful thought decided that X is the right thing to do, asks you to agree . . .’

No, the proper referendum for democracy-strengthening purposes is the one which happens whether the government wants it or not. This can be arranged by constitutional requirement, an instruction in the constitution saying that certain kinds of change in the law must be submitted to a vote of the whole people. Better, because this way is more flexible, an agreed number of voters can insist, by putting their signatures on a petition, that a law proposed by parliament must be submitted to the people for their approval or rejection. Best of all, an agreed number of signatures can ensure that a brand-new idea for a law is put to the voters whatever the president or the parliament thinks about it.

Change calls for change

These are the channels through which power previously dammed up by the politicians can be made to flow into the hands of ordinary people. The politicians, naturally, present various arguments against doing anything of the sort. Some of their arguments do not stand up to a moment’s examination. Others are more serious, and one in particular raises a genuine problem for direct democracy if a current weakness in the economies of Europe and America becomes a permanent fixture.

On the other hand, the defenders of the old-fashioned form of democracy have to face the fact that the world has changed radically since the time when it might have seemed plausible to think the voters’ wishes needed to be filtered through the finer intelligence of those ‘representatives’. The changes that have taken place since then have removed many of the differences between ordinary people and their representatives. They have also helped the people to discover that the representatives are not especially competent. As a result, what worked reasonably well in the 19th century will not work in the 21st century. Our children may find direct democracy more efficient, as well as more democratic, than the representative sort.

This is a far bigger change than any alteration in the way in which the representatives get elected-proportional representation rather than the first-past-the-post system, alternative voting, and so on. These are just variations in the method by which power is delegated. Direct democracy keeps it undelegated. First, then, a picture of how direct democracy actually works, a matter about which most people have only the haziest idea.

It is still, admittedly, a pretty scattered phenomenon. Slightly over half of the states in the United States use it, some with fairly spectacular results, though it so far has no place in American politics at the federal level. Australia has held almost 50 nationwide referendums, and its component states almost as many again (one in every six of which was about bar-closing times). Italy has recently become a serious exponent of direct democracy, and its referendums in 1991 and 1993 played a large part in breaking up the corrupt old Italian party system. The new light has flickered occasionally in Denmark, New Zealand, Ireland and a few other countries. But the best country to look at is Switzerland, which virtually invented direct democracy, and uses it at every level of politics. The next three articles describe how the Swiss manage to keep their politicians under control in the central government, in the country’s 26 cantons, and in the 3,000-odd communities which make up the cantons.

© 1996 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved

Traffic circles of hell exemplify city’s misguided policy

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Guest Opinion published 12/4/96 in the Boulder Planet

I thank letter-writer C. Kliger, whose building lost resident parking on 13th St. when bike lanes were striped on last month for not taking the bait offered by Transportation Division to again divide neighbors against cyclists. We have a Division which takes the cake -about the same portion of the City budget as the Defense Department is of the Federal budget- by getting citizens to fight over crumbs.

The classic example of how The Division works is their multi-year promotion of traffic circles, which the Camera’s front page story of 10/30/96 says “have pitted neighbor against neighbor”:

In 1988, North 9th Street residents started asking for several 4-way stop signs to slow traffic. The Division said 4-ways wouldn’t work, although the one at Maxwell and 9th worked OK. Bolder Bicycle Commuters and most cyclists opposed the circles, medians and neckdowns the Division proposed, as these things violate national (AASHTO) and Boulder (Transportation Master Plan 1988, pg. 2-20) standards of 14-foot minimum lane widths for streets designated as bike routes. Many neighbors went for it since the Division refused them stop signs or raised crosswalks.

After 6 years and over $10,000 of studies, reports and acrimonious meetings, 9th Street got a circle, a median and a set of neckdowns, costing some $120,000. Some go the wrong way around the circle and accidents have increased. Last month 4-way stops were installed on 9th at Dellwood and Forest, finally solving the problem!! The “test” traffic circle at 17th & Pine is THE most dangerous intersection in town as measured by calls to the Close Call Hotline (441-4272). The test circle at 15th & Pine is 3rd worst. May these be the deathbed of the Division’s concrete chicanery, not of some child on foot or bicycle!

Bolder Bicycle Commuters members persuaded the Division NOT to stripe bike lanes on 13th from Balsam to Forest, thus preserving some 20 parking spots. There is little traffic north of Balsam on 13th and we don’t feel threatened there. (13th St. residents deserve the same resident parking as the better-organized -and politically connected- Mapleton Hill and Whittier neighborhoods they’re sandwiched between.)

Bolder Bicycle Commuters also persuaded the Division NOT to take parking for a bike lane on Sunnyside, a 2-block street immediately west of Broadway and south of baseline that is shared with the Broadway bike route, also because it is not needed. We were unable to convince the Division NOT to build the million-dollars-worth of tunnels under Mohawk and Gilpin.

It is sad that so much of Boulder’s business community buys into the image the Division creates of cyclists grabbing for every inch of turf. Let’s remember that Boulder has ONE good continuous E-W bike route (the Creek Path) and ONE decent continuous N-S bike route (Broadway-13th-15th-Broadway). While we fight over crumbs, the Division takes the cake as the biggest part of the bloated City bureaucracy. Ken Hotard of the Board of Realtors, also in the 11/13 Planet properly condemns City government for growing faster than the City. Our city government has 1,800 “full-time equivalent” employees, while Fort Collins with 10,000 more people has only 1,100! These extra employees of course vote for the City Council which pays them, Council hires more, and the vicious cycle keeps grinding away. This is like the council’s self-appointment process which citizens just ended at the polls, demanding to elect their own representatives by passing 2B.

The business community would be wise to join with environmentalists. If young, athletic, compact, sunny Boulder fulfilled its potential as a cycling town (biking for 25% of all trips like Davis, California or 40% like big, rainy Amsterdam, instead of our measly 12%), people would see that it is not primarily growth which makes our lives congested and polluted, but unnecessary over-use of vehicles. But the Division can’t build an empire on cycling. They are set on a wasteful “system” of tangled, weaving bus routes, which run emptier (an average of some 5.5 passengers on a 45-passenger bus) than single-passenger autos! Citizens voted against their $250-million Transit Tax 2-1 in 1994, but the parasitic Division is doing polls and focus-groups, honing their propaganda to wear us down.

The Division and City government as a whole slavishly re-enact what caused 18th-century philosopher Rousseau to observe: “Keeping citizens apart has become the first maxim of modern politics.”

Bolder Bicycle Commuters holds monthly public meetings and can be reached at 449-7439.

Stop the Transportation Master Plan

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Read on KGNU’s Morning Magazine 5/16/96

This is Evan Ravitz, with Citywatch, a peak behind the hot-air curtain of the Imperial City of Boulder.

Citizens of Boulder and Beyond: your testimony can help prevent a multi-hundred-million-dollar fraud from being perpetrated on Boulder. It’s called the Transportation Master Plan, and you can comment on it tonite at the Planning Board Meeting at about 6:30 at City Hall. Next Tuesday City Council will have a public hearing on the TMP; watch for the agenda published in Sunday’s Camera.

The Master Plan is so perverse and parasitic that even the League of Women Voters is harshly critical of it. Over the next decades Transportation Division wants a good part of a billion dollars to continue their policies which are taking us straight to gridlock. There have been so many revisions of the TMP that I’ve given up trying to keep track of the details. The bottom line is that they want more.

Transportation Division spends about the same proportion of Boulder’s bloated budget as the Defense Department spends of the Nations. Last weekend they spent ¼ million ripping out the perfectly good intersection of Canyon and 13th St. and putting in concrete in pretty colors. The TMP will have them do this at 9th & Canyon and Broadway and Canyon as well.

They again ask for much more money for more big empty buses weaving slowly through our neighborhoods spewing diesel. The citizens turned this down 2 to 1 in 1994, but they’re baaack!

Nowhere is there an indication they intend to straighten out the routes and put them on main streets where they would be used.

They trumpet nationwide their HOP shuttle, but two studies show that 2/3 of HOP riders would otherwise walk or bicycle. Pedestrians and cyclists are the enemies of Transportation Division as there is no money in it.

A million dollars is to be spent putting 14 fancy traffic circles on Pine and Spruce East of Downtown. All this does is shift some traffic to Pearl and Balsam; a million dollar shell game. All these circles will violate the 1989 Transportation Master Plan which implemented National standards mandating that traffic lanes on Bike routes be at least 14 feet wide.

A real solution to traffic congestion, adopted with enormous success in Aspen, is to simply charge more for parking so people drive less and use buses, bikes or feet more. Transportation Division isn’t telling us about Aspen’s success, instead taking $800,000 to study the idea for 2 more years, meanwhile spending as much as possible on bandaid solutions.

Director of the Transportation Division Phil Weisbach and his employees deliberately and repeatedly lied in 1994. Responding to Sierra Club and other complaints that cycling would get nothing in that year’s plan, Weisbach said cycling wasn’t relevant because most cyclists wouldn’t ride more than a mile or 2. I reminded him that the Boulder Valley Employee Survey showed that the average bike commute is 3.6 miles, but he said he’d continue to assert his “opinion”.

The TMP is supposed to guide our transportation future for many years. If you think it’s time to show the parasites the door, come to the Planning Board meeting tonight at 6:30 and the Council meeting Tuesday about 7.

This has been Evan Ravitz with Citywatch.

The Internet Vox Populi – PoliticsUSA, April 20-21, 1996

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As Election Day turnouts dwindle, many activists and lawmakers are turning to electronic networks to make voting easier and thus more appealing to busy Americans. Skeptics worry about the potential for abuse
By Graeme Browning, National Journal

BOULDER, COLO. — Voters here encountered several referenda issues on the local ballot in November 1993 but none more striking than question D. It would have made future elections dramatically different; people could use their telephones or computers to cast ballots.
Boulder’s voters rejected the idea, 59-41 percent. But two and a half years later this issue has resurfaced because computers have become a fixture in many households. Boulder, a college town nestled at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, now has one of the highest rates of Internet usage in the country. And some local officials are suggesting putting the electronic-voting proposition back on the ballot.
“I wasn’t in favor of the idea in 1993 because of security concerns, but I’ve gotten to the point where that issue doesn’t seem to be a big deal anymore,” Stephen M. Pomerance, a private investor and consultant who’s a city council member, said in a recent interview. “I’d rather people have more access to their government.”
Such talk makes Boulder Mayor Leslie L. Durgin nervous. “This idea would work well for those people who are already involved in technology,” Durgin said one morning as she sipped coffee in the refurbished dining room of the century-old Boulderado Hotel. “But I find that people who say, `Oh, everybody has a computer, everybody’s on the Internet,’ are overlooking a huge portion of our population that is not.”
As voter turnouts dwindle and cynicism about government continues to bubble across the country, many activists and lawmakers alike are turning to computer networks in efforts to make the traditional duties of citizenship — voting chief among them — easier to accomplish and thus more appealing to busy Americans.
Electronic-voting proposals get the most attention because they are the most controversial, but experiments with on- line voter registration, targeted electronic polling and “town hall” meetings conducted on the Internet are also under way.
Some of these experiments reflect the conviction of many Internet enthusiasts that computer-aided “direct” democracy — which relies on frequent referenda and voter initiatives — may be better suited to governance in the Information Age than traditional representative democracy is.
Back in Washington, even Congress appears to be warming to the concept of giving voters a virtual seat at the table during its deliberations. The recently formed congressional Internet Caucus has established a site on the World Wide Web, the Net’s multimedia corner, where people may one day be able to participate, via computer, in caucus meetings. “One of the things our Web page will allow us to do eventually is provide a funnel directly into Congress,” Rep. Rick A. White, R-Wash., a caucus co-founder, said at a late-March press conference.
Opponents worry, however, that fraud, abuse and breaches of security will be as much a problem on computer networks as they have been in the past at the ballot box. Conservative political analysts also fear that when people don’t have an opportunity to engage in or witness face-to-face deliberations, they will lose that sense of personal involvement in government that helps keeps a democracy alive.
“When you vote, you come to the same place as other people, you wait in line with other people, you see candidates standing outside the polling area. That has a lot to do with how people perceive the process of governing,” said David E. Mason, director of congressional studies for the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank. “The problems of people feeling alienated could be exacerbated by relying entirely on the computer or the phone, simply because the distance between what the voters do and the final action of the government is that much greater.”
That distance already seems too much for many Americans. Nationally, voter turnout has declined by almost 25 percent in the past three decades, RAND, the California think tank, reported recently. At the same time, the ranks of volunteers for such civic groups as parent-teacher organizations and the Red Cross have shrunk dramatically, while the number of people who say they have attended a public meeting in the past year dropped from 22 percent in 1973 to 13 percent in 1993.
“Electronic networks can facilitate citizen participation in the political process. Some individuals now use E-mail [electronic mail] to contact government representatives, for instance,” the RAND report noted. The report recommended that the federal government make E-mail available to everyone. “Broad access to computers and electronic networks. . . might help reduce if not reverse the trends toward disengagement in civic and political affairs,” the report concluded.
Declining interest in politics is evident in Boulder, where only 38.6 percent of the city’s 68,000-plus registered voters made it to the polls for last November’s municipal elections. In 1989, a mere 18.3 percent cast ballots in the city council race.
Officials here try to put a brave face on the statistics. The November election “was a good turnout, considering that many people in Boulder register just to establish residency, so they can go to school here” at the University of Colorado, city clerk Alisa D. Lewis said in an interview.
But local activists argue that the citizens of Boulder and many other communities are staying away from the voting booth because they’re convinced that lawmakers pay little attention to their views anyway. “Americans are deeply disturbed by how unrepresentative their government is,” Evan Ravitz, director of the Government by the People Foundation, a Boulder-based advocacy group that is a prime supporter of electronic voting, said in an interview. “People are looking for alternatives, and one of those alternatives is direct democracy.”

Ballot-Box Connections

Ravitz’s group — formerly called the Voting by Phone Foundation — designed the electronic-voting system that voters here rejected in 1993.
The system would work much like automated voice mail. A voter taps a password of his or her own choosing into a computer database and is, in turn, assigned a random identification number that is too long for anybody else to guess. At the same time the computer checks off the voter’s name on the rolls so that he or she can’t cast an additional ballot.
On Election Day, the voter calls a toll-free number and punches in the ID number on the telephone number pad. The computer then presents the ballot choices. If the system had been in use in the 1994 presidential election, for example, a digitalized voice would have greeted voters with a message something like this:

“For President and Vice President, to vote for Bush and Quayle, Republicans, press 1. For Clinton and Gore, Democrats, press 2. For other `write-in’ candidates, press 3. To skip this race, press 0.”

A voter who wanted to write in candidates would be asked to say, and spell, the candidates’ names.
To confirm votes, the digitalized voice would announce,

“You voted for [the candidates’ names]. Press 1 if this is correct, or 2 to change your vote.”

At the end of the procedure the computer would give the voter a confirmation number that could be checked against a listing of votes in the local newspaper.
The system presented to Boulder voters was geared toward the telephone, but all of these procedures could easily be carried out on a computer, over the Internet, said Vincent N. Campbell, a former Washington-based management consultant who has helped refine the system.
“This is not cutting-edge technology. It’s easy stuff,” said Campbell, who joined Ravitz’s group after he retired and moved to Boulder three years ago.
Two other systems now available expand electronic-voting technology even further. California computer programmer Marilyn Davis has developed “eVote,” a computer program that makes possible the casting of a variety of votes, from “yes/no” types to grouped votes that direct the user to “pick one of the following five” or “vote for 10 out of the next 20 items.” Davis’s system can also be programmed to let voters see how others voted, change votes until the balloting closes and watch the vote tally develop.
Lorrie Faith Cranor, a graduate student in engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has developed a more complex system called “Sensus.” Her system uses electronic cryptography and “blind” digital signatures to assure the privacy of votes. Cranor’s program automatically encodes each ballot, marks it with a signature that doesn’t reveal its contents, verifies that a voter is registered and has voted only once, and submits it to another computer program that decodes it and adds it to the vote tally.
Cranor’s system also gives people the opportunity to cast what she calls a “contingency” vote. Many backers of Texas billionaire Ross Perot didn’t vote for him in the 1994 presidential election because “they felt that [he] didn’t have a very good chance of winning,” Cranor said in a recent interview with Off the Record, an electronic magazine. “We have no idea how many people actually would have voted for Perot if they felt he was a viable candidate. And it would be nice to be able to somehow capture that [number] to determine whether the winner has a strong mandate or not.”

Democratechs Lead The Way?

Electronic voting, or “E-voting,” systems offer many of the benefits that voting by mail does, supporters say. Not only does E-voting relieve citizens of the burden of having to vote in person, on a specified day, within a limited time period, but it also dramatically lowers costs.
Election Day 1995 cost Boulder approximately $2 a vote, Lewis, the city clerk, said. Campbell estimates that a vote-by- phone system would have cost 25-75 cents a vote the first time it was used, and proportionately less each subsequent time as installation costs were amortized. By comparison, Oregon’s recent vote-by-mail election for the U.S. Senate cost about $1 per vote.
Mail-in voting offers ease and convenience, but E-voting could theoretically give citizens a direct say in their government, supporters say.
In November 1994, Canadian authorities approved the accreditation of the Democratech Party of British Columbia. The party advocates turning all governmental decisions over to the public, to be resolved through electronic referenda.
“Representative government assumes that the people need to elect someone to represent them in a faraway legislative assembly,” the organization announced at its site on the World Wide Web. “But with modern, instantaneous communications, the people can directly make their own decisions, relegating politicians to the scrap heap of history.”
Motivated by the same reasoning, Marc Strassman, a free- lance television producer in Los Angeles, recently launched a “Campaign for Digital Democracy” whose goal was gathering signatures to put an electronic-voting initiative on California’s ballot in November. The initiative would have allowed “any otherwise eligible Californian” to register to vote, sign official petitions and vote through computers, telephones, personal digital assistants, interactive television “and any other device capable of originating and transmitting a secure digital signal.”
In April 1995, in an election that cost the city about $13 per voter, barely 20 percent of Los Angeles’s registered voters turned out for the city’s municipal elections, Strassman said in an interview. Voters all over California cast their ballots on IBM punch cards, “so it’s not like computers aren’t used in voting now,” he said. “I figured, `Let’s just take the power of this technology and move it into the political arena.”‘
Strassman got few signatures for his petition, and the initiative died. He continues to maintain the Web site he established for the campaign, however, in the hope that computer enthusiasts will rally to the cause when E-voting becomes more widely understood. “I still believe it’s a good idea,” he said. “I just don’t think it will happen right now.”

Thanks But No Thanks

Because of the 1993 referendum, Boulder Mayor Durgin, city clerk Lewis and city council member Pomerance have probably done more thinking about electronic voting than almost any other public officials in the United States. And they’re not sure it’s such a good idea.
Lewis fears that computer-based democracy would triple public officials’ workloads, encourage voting abuses and fraud and frustrate the very citizens they’re trying to help. “Where does your priority lie?” she asked. “Do you respond first to the person you’re talking to on the phone, or the person who is standing in your office or to the person who is sending you a request through E-mail?”
Durgin is reluctant to discard any of the strictures of representative democracy for what she calls “this quick, taking- the-pulse-of-the-community kind of thing.”
“There’s this notion that you can simply put out as a quick poll, `Do you favor X, yes or no?’ without understanding all of the complexities and the legal ramifications of whatever X is,” she said. “And then you have the assumption that the decision has to be legally binding. That worries me.”
Pomerance, on the other hand, says that E-voting would be terrific for referenda, where the only decision facing voters is whether they agree with actions the city council plans to take. He also says he feels strongly that “more participation in the political process is a good thing.”
He worries, however, that electronic voting will become an easy out for citizens who don’t want to resolve important issues face-to-face. For example, people here have been warring recently over whether to allow dog owners to take unleashed pets on jogging trails. “I could just see somebody turning that into an initiative and demanding a vote on it, instead of hashing it out at a city council meeting, where it belongs,” he said.
That’s a valid fear, conservative analysts say. “We’re going to have real trouble if we make voting as easy as going to the bathroom,” said Curtis B. Gans, director of the Washington- based Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. “There is something called the communal act of voting that shouldn’t be sacrificed lightly.”
Making voting easier doesn’t automatically lead to increased turnouts, Mason of the Heritage Foundation added. “In the days when people had to walk on foot and ride on horseback to vote, we had a higher turnout than today,” he said.
He also cautions against abandoning the filtering process that traditional government provides. “By electing representatives rather than having direct democracy, you have some level that proposals have to move through,” he said. “And there’s compromise. By discussing issues, and trying to balance competing interests, most of the time you come up with a better solution than if you’d gone to a straight yes/no vote.”
Many of these concerns pale, however — at least in the eyes of some voters — in the face of the immediate consensus electronic voting can generate.
Last December, Princeton University conducted campus-wide student government elections through an electronic-voting system as well as through traditional paper ballots. Eighty percent of the students who were eligible to vote did so, compared with approximately 40 percent in previous elections. Strict verification procedures kept incidents of fraud to zero, said Jared P. Schutz, president of Boulder-based Stardot Consulting, who administered the elections.
“The philosophy of the Internet is that government is not as relevant as it was in the past,” said Schutz, a recent college graduate himself. “In the past you could only talk about direct democracy in a theoretical sense. But now, due to this new technology, people can effectively legislate for themselves.”
A major reworking of the Constitution would have to take place before such self-legislation could become a reality, and that’s not likely to happen any time soon. But as voters become more accustomed to voicing their opinions via computer, the process of seeking public consensus may never be the same.

Related Links On The Internet
Following are links to Internet sites mentioned in the preceding article. To return to PoliticsUSA, simply click your browser’s “back” feature.

April 20-21, 1996

Transportation Master Plan going nowhere (again.)

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by Evan Ravitz
published 4/13/96 in the Boulder Daily Camera

Newly appointed City Council member Don Mock says of the TMP in the Daily Camera “I think it’s a lofty goal to think that somehow we can freeze our traffic at 1994 levels.” Given the misleadership of Transportation Division, it’s not just lofty, it’s impossible. Now they are purposely ignoring the most cost-effective transportation success in Colorado in many years: Aspen, in January of 1995, ended free parking and started charging $1.00 per hour downtown, double the Boulder rate. According to the Denver Post and Aspen officials, within 5 weeks bus usage was up 32%, parking is easy to find, and pollution is visibly down as cars no longer search endlessly. The business community, which fought paid parking tooth and nail, is now pleased as punch.

Why is Transportation Division ignoring this success?

Because even after Aspen’s success, they obtained a $600,000 Federal grant and Council’s approval of $200,000 more of ours, for a two-year “Congestion Pricing” study, to determine whether charging drivers by how much they drove (or parked) is a good idea. Parking and driving are now tremendously subsidized by all taxpayers, no matter how much they drive. For decades, organizations like the Sierra Club have campaigned for higher gas taxes and insurance paid at the pump to more fairly charge those who drive more. Boulder can’t legally charge a gas tax, or change the insurance industry. But Boulder could start charging more of the true costs of parking next week, if Council had the intestinal fortitude.

They don’t yet. The main point of their recent distribution of 33,000 pieces of campaign material for the TMP, called a “survey”, is repeated 3 times in the 9 “Questions for the Community”: they want more money. A similar “aggressive transit” tax was defeated by the voters 2 to 1 in 1994.

The “lofty goal” of maintaining traffic at 1994 levels isn’t lofty enough if the City’s other goal of increasing “alternative” transportation is to be attained. Cycling -still 3 times as popular as the bus- has been decreasing since 1992 according to the “Modal Shift in the Boulder Valley” report. Commuting to work by bicycle decreased from 14.9% of all work trips to 12.3% by ’94. Commuting to school by bicycle decreased from 27.1% to 22.6%. Although Council member Havlick claimed in a Colorado Daily article that these decreases are insignificant, the report states: “for a difference to be statistically significant between years, there must be a shift of at least 2.6% (1.3% around each study year).” Work and school bike commuting are down by 2.6% and 4.5%, respectively. With the HOP Survey Report showing that 59.1% “use the HOP instead of using their bike or walking”, we can expect the coming 1996 Modal Shift survey to show cycling decreasing even faster, as the 1994 survey was done a month before the HOP began.

Why is cycling declining in a city formerly famous for it? The increasing danger. 3 years ago traffic engineer John Allen of Bolder Bicycle Commuters compared FBI to local reports of cyclist injuries and deaths. We had a rate 19 times higher than the national average for cities our size. Of course, Boulder bikes 6 times the average, but this still makes each cyclist more than 3 times as likely to be injured or killed here than the average! Considering this, the City’s expensive Bike Week promotion of cycling amounts to reckless endangerment (Remember to tell your lawyer that if you’re in an accident!) -as well as a failure.

Transportation Division: why won’t you check our figures, as promised last year?

Downtown businesspeople: this decline in cycling citywide is the big reason the 13th Street Bike Path is not the success we expected.

How much does “free” parking really cost?

Parking lots are designed with 2-300 square feet of space for each car, including access and backing space. This is much more than your typical office space! If you drive to work you use more than twice the expensive real estate as someone who doesn’t. Council member Pomerance told me that building a parking structure costs roughly the same per square foot as an office building. Yet, a downtown office space rents for about $20/day while your bigger parking space costs $0-4/day! The difference is hidden in sales and property taxes (which are passed on to renters too). With 7,115 total downtown parking spaces, using the average parking cost of $2/day (per diem for the $175 quarterly parking structure permit) the hidden subsidy just downtown is about $128,000 a day! (7115X$18)

Free parking to businesspeople is like a free lunch to a bureaucrat: both put it on our tab. But business folk should realize that by devoting a quarter of downtown to subsidizing empty cars, the remaining land costs skyrocket. In each 2-300 sq. ft. parking spot 50 customers can park their bikes. (in Amsterdam, a much bigger City with far worse weather, where 40% of travel is by bike, high-rise bike parks fit over 150 bikes in one car space)

How to fix it fairly:

Downtown businesspeople properly say that increased parking costs would drive business to Crossroads, etc. But Boulder citizens helped fund Crossroads, and Transportation Director Weisbach told me the City could charge for parking there. I propose creating parking price zones based on real estate costs. I suggest starting by doubling our downtown parking rate to match Aspen’s modestly successful $1.00/hr, with the surrounding zone costing $.50/hr. and the city periphery $.25/hr. for the first year, to give people time to start changing their habits, and for the provision of better bus and bicycle systems. I also suggest that we treat people like adults and tell them that this is stage one, with rates re-doubled after a year. The City’s TMP treats us like kids by avoiding this main issue, “tweaking” things weakly.

Adults know there’s no such thing as a free lunch -or parking. Somebody’s paying! Now it is all of us, not just in the hidden subsidies, but in our health, safety, and the physical and social distance our paved world imposes. Let’s grow up and stop subsidizing Boulder’s worst problem! To help turn the Timid Misleading Plan into a Truly Meaningful Plan, please contact me at 440-6838 or evan (at) vote.org.

How I was “terminated” by the Colorado Daily

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Letter published in 3/28/96 Boulder Weekly (it took 6 weeks to get them to publish it.)

How hypocritical for Colorado Daily reporter Lisa Marshall to lament “Student activism at all-time low” on the 1/23 front page, and for editor Clint Talbott to write on 1/26 that Lisa is working to include a “broader array of voices on our opinion page.” When yours truly (voted “Best Activist” by Boulder Daily Camera readers) told a CU “diversity” meeting last May 1st that CU should “democratize”, Lisa told Clint that I had “disrupted” the meeting and he fired me as Daily columnist, denying me any hearing. I wrote “As the Millennium Turns” for 4 years.

The co-chair of the meeting, Assistant Professor Esteban Flores, wrote the Daily that he “much appreciated Mr. Ravitz’s comments at the May 1st meeting.” Professor Marty Walter, who jumped to his feet at the meeting (all 6’5″ of him) and began by saying “Yes, we need more democracy!”, later said “If anyone disrupted the meeting it was me.” Published letters ran 18-2 for rehiring me, the two negatives being from an employee each of the City and the University, institutional targets of my column.

Small-minded control freaks like Lisa and Clint, in media and politics, are the main reason people shrink from “activism”. The hopeful bumper sticker “If the people lead, the leaders will follow” rarely pans out. Usually, if the people lead, the leaders attack them.

Clint breaks his word to Daily readers. He wrote: “I have not `censored’ Evan Ravitz…and hope he uses the open forum [letters] to express his views”. Yet Clint (or subordinates) held back for months three of the four letters I’ve since written, and removed the key sentence -where I invite people to take “action”- from the fourth! I had to call the Daily publisher to get each one published at all. The same kinds of things happen to many other letter-writers. When Clint learned from Mr. Flores and others that I didn’t disrupt anything, he said he’d talk with me and reconsider, but after putting me off all summer, he reneged. “This conversation is terminated” Clint told me on the phone.

After failing to talk to Terminator, I finally called Lisa (who I’d never spoken to) and asked why she started this. She said she thought I “wasn’t very objective” at the meeting. Lisa doesn’t understand that her job as reporter is to be objective, but mine as columnist was to express opinions. I was at the meeting to participate, and not to write about it, anyway. Even reporters are free to “be active” at meetings they’re not reporting on.

I’ve never met Lisa. But I know Clint too well already. He told me himself that he’s a “misanthrope”, which my Webster’s defines as “A person who hates or distrusts all mankind.” Clint lords it over the community he’s cut himself off from: he rarely returns calls at work, and has an unlisted number at home, unlike those of us who care for and respond to our readers. I regularly give out my number: 440-6838.

Law ‘n order man Clint called Matt Franzen a “moronic vandal” when Matt in ’92 removed the County-erected “safety” gate which prevented cyclists headed to 4-Mile Canyon from using the Creek Path to avoid the Canyon Highway. The County’s gate forced cyclists like Cheryl Amet onto the highway, where she was killed by a dozing driver. This, not vandalism, prompted the local legend “Torchmaster busts County-gate”. Clint now proves a more real danger to law by tacitly advocating vigilante action in an October ’95 editorial, which attorney Patricia Mayne wrote to admonish him for.

Other letters have pointed out his paper’s prejudice against “transients” and “rainbows”. Here’s Clint’s September Freudian slip: “Sam Archibald taught journalism law and ethics (ha, ha) to 75 people at once.” You do have funny ethics, Mr. Talbott.

The Daily, supposedly run by its employees, should consider a new editor. In any case, they should make the editor accountable for his or her words and actions. Democratize, even.

Evan Ravitz

University Hill

U.S. policy helped fuel rebellion in Mexico

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GUEST OPINION by Evan Ravitz and Elisa Facio
Published in the Boulder Daily Camera 1/27/96

The arrest, 14-hour interrogation, and eviction from Mexico of Denver documentary-maker Kerry Appel (Camera, Jan 12) is the resurfacing of the 2-year `Mexican standoff’ in Chiapas from media obscurity.

Kerry is likely in trouble for his excellent video “Politics, Profits and Zapatistas”, aired by KBDI Channel 12 on December 13th, about the Mayan rebellion whose goals were affirmed by 97.5% of the 1.3 million Mexicans who voted in the Zapatista’s nationwide ‘consulta’ last September. Denver’s NBC News Producer Rick Salinger refused to use it, saying: “We have a business relationship with the Mexican government-controlled TV channel and we wouldn’t want to offend them.”

We have a copy of the video and am planning to show it soon. Please call 440-6838. Evan lived in Chiapas and next-door Guatemala for several years, and witnessed the first round of peace talks in February 1994. We can also tell you how to subscribe to the Chiapas internet email list, which the N.Y. Times has credited with saving lives. Please write: evan@welcomehome.org.

The video shows how U.S. policy, including the unpopular NAFTA, helped cause the “world’s first postmodern revolution”, as Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s most celebrated author and former Ambassador to France calls it. It shows Chiapas as a dirt-poor colony of Mexico which in turn is exploited like it was a U.S. colony. That’s how bananas from thousands of miles away can sell here for less than local apples: laborers are paid minuscule or no wages in Chiapas. The Zapatistas call NAFTA “a death sentence for the poor” for several reasons.

First, NAFTA gutted Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution which guaranteed that traditional community-owned lands would remain so. Now they can be bought or stolen in shady deals like those suffered by U.S. Indians last century. Article 27 was won by the 1910-20 Mexican Revolution in which Indian hero Emiliano Zapata and 20% of all Mexicans were killed.

Second, `free trade’ is no level playing-field. Mayans growing corn with digging sticks right up to the tops of the volcanoes (because the good land was stolen centuries or years ago) now compete with American agribusiness with giant tractors and center-pivot irrigation subsidized by us taxpayers.

The Zapatistas captured, briefly, the international media spotlight on their revolt 1/1/94, the inception of NAFTA, brightly enough to stop their massacre by the Mexican Army. Amnesty International and others have since documented widespread torture, rape and pillage, taught to Mexican officers by the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. American exports of cattle-prods and other torture devices are documented in Kerry’s video. As the Secretary of the ruling PRI party in one Chiapas town says in the video: “The application of justice in Mexico is based on torture.” More of our tax dollars at work.

The Zapatistas say they “lead by obeying”, having “made all the strategic decisions by referendum”, which led to the `women’s laws’ and the national “consulta” in September. Most polls showed a majority of U.S. citizens opposed NAFTA, which demonstrates the failure of Congress to represent us. The availabe alternative is to streamline the use of referendum and initiative laws -which exist in 24 states including Colorado.

This legislation by citizens -as the Swiss enjoy four times a year- is also the goal of our foundation. You can see our extensive web site on participatory and electronic democracy, with links to the Zapatistas, the Swiss, the Dalai Lama and others who champion real democracy, at http://www.evanravitz.com/vote/v. People Rule! Viva Zapata!

The National Commission for Democracy in Mexico is calling on us to protest “the Mexican government’s intensified campaign against foreign tourists” in letters to the Mexican Embassy in Denver. Contact us for further information.

Letter re: fleecing the flock

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Letter published in Nov/Dec. 1995 NEXUS

Editor,

Regarding “Question Authority” (July/August): Many religious leaders have exploited their flock for money (selling indulgences in past centuries, tickets to eternity, etc.) or sex (why Mia Farrow and the Beatles fled the “Maharishi”), spreading confusion and even death (Naropa’s late leader Osel Tendzin giving HIV to young students, thinking his power would prevent its transmission). Yet true teachers exist you can trust your soul to. It is said: “There’s fake gold because there’s real gold.”

In the political realm the same holds. Here most leaders are fleecing the flock. But there’s now “the world’s first post-modern revolution” (says author Carlos Fuentes) in Mexico, whose leaders the Mayan Indian “Zapatistas” say they “lead by obeying”, and have instituted true democracy, with all the Indians and supporters voting in “consultas” (referenda), by which means the “Women’s Laws”, etc. were instituted. The Swiss people have made their own laws since 1848, now voting four times a year for the future they all want.

Connecting the two realms was the inventor of the word “synergy”, Buckminster Fuller, whose book _No More Secondhand God_ proposed citizens “voting by telephone on all prominent questions before Congress” in 1940. He wrote: “If direct democracy is not tried now, future generations will again champion it and there will be world civil wars until it receives adequate trial.”

The Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela are among those proposing referenda on their countries’ futures. This is also the goal of Boulder’s Voting by Phone Foundation, which uses the name of the tool (successfully tested by the National Science Foundation) that makes it easy, environmental, and inexpensive, as well as more secure than current voting systems.

For information on the history, status and future of real democracy, please see our world wide web pages, linking to Mexico, Tibet, Switzerland, Canada, Germany, California and even Alabama, at: http://www.evanravitz.com/vote or contact us at 440-6838 or evan@welcomehome.org. The great liberation is near.

Evan Ravitz, Director, Voting by Phone Foundation

University Hill, Boulder

(Nexus ran a story on us, in 1992, as I recall)