### 112
Policies supported by majorities of both Republicans and Democrats
### 88
Policies supported by more than two-thirds of both parties
Program for Public Consultation, *The National Common Ground*, June 2026.
This is an exceptionally strong empirical foundation for your argument.
The areas of agreement include immigration, healthcare costs, taxes, government reform, energy, criminal justice, and social programs.
In other words, the same population that appears hopelessly divided when represented through political parties demonstrates substantial agreement when asked to evaluate individual policies.
That does not mean every disagreement disappears. But it raises the question your argument asks:
**Why do we continue governing through two competing bundles of positions when the people themselves agree across so many of those boundaries?**
And why should a vote for one particular bundle empower its leaders to enact policies that many of their own voters don't support?
The underlying research is worth putting directly into your public argument: [The National Common Ground](https://publicconsultation.org/common-ground/the-national-common-ground/).
## 2. The architecture: a living model of public consent
I see seven connected functions in your proposal.
**We the people**
Every citizen can express values, priorities, and policy preferences
Open input
Participate in any issue, as deeply as desired
Representative modeling
Estimate views and measure uncertainty across the population
Trade-off analysis
Reveal costs, consequences, and competing priorities
Collective decisions
Identify common ground and resolve disagreements
**Government implements**
Policies, services, budgets, and accountable execution
**Measure and benchmark**
Compare promised results with actual results at regular intervals
**Report back. Reconsider. Adjust.**
The people remain engaged throughout the governing cycle
The continuous feedback is essential. Rather than relying on an election every two or four years as an indirect referendum on thousands of policy choices, the public could evaluate policies independently as circumstances change.
And someone who cares deeply about fisheries management could participate in tremendous detail, while someone who cares primarily about healthcare could concentrate on that.
Both retain representation across all the issues that affect them.
## 3. The critical invention: representation without compulsory participation
This is the part that deserves the most development.
Traditional direct democracy has an obvious challenge: most people don't have the time, knowledge, or desire to evaluate every government decision.
Your proposal answers that through a combination of voluntary participation, statistical representation, and continuous confirmation.
A resident might receive a message:
**Your government, your priorities**
Illustrative
Based on the preferences you've shared and responses from people with similar circumstances, here's how we estimate your priorities for public spending.
| Priority | Example rating (0–100) |
| --- | --- |
| Healthcare | 82 |
| Education | 76 |
| Infrastructure | 61 |
| Defense | 45 |
Move any slider to replace the example estimate with your own preference. These are independent priorities, not budget percentages.
Explore my priorities
The system would never have to assume that silence means agreement. It could say, *we estimate your position based on these characteristics, with this degree of confidence. Is this accurate?*
That distinction matters.
Research on political polling supports demographic and political weighting, but it also demonstrates that statistical adjustment cannot fully correct for missing viewpoints. Pew's September 2026 analysis underscores that even samples balanced by political affiliation can misrepresent the views of people who decline to participate.
I would therefore build your model with four safeguards: regular randomized representative surveys to calibrate voluntary responses; visible uncertainty measures; an unrestricted right for individuals to correct inferred preferences; and protections against sensitive profiling, manipulation, and misuse of personal data.
An estimate should never be recorded as an actual vote or treated as personal consent. It could inform representation while remaining clearly distinguishable from directly expressed preference.
The OECD has documented 716 deliberative processes across 28 member countries between 1979 and 2023. That gives this proposal a substantial research base to build upon, even though your continuously modeled participation system goes considerably further.
## 4. The government as an accountable organization
Your collective CEO metaphor becomes especially powerful when we get into benchmarks.
Imagine a national healthcare reform proposal presented with measurable expectations:
| Public objective | Projected result | Accountability |
|---|---|---|
| Lower premiums | Estimated 12% reduction | Compare after 12 months |
| Improve access | Estimated 15% fewer uninsured | Quarterly tracking |
| Improve outcomes | Reduced avoidable hospitalizations | Annual evaluation |
| Control spending | Remain within agreed budget | Monthly reporting |
Illustrative targets, not healthcare forecasts.
People could inspect the projections, understand the assumptions, question their accuracy, and compare competing proposals.
When projections fail, government must explain why.
And public input would go beyond approving or rejecting a proposal. Citizens could change priorities and help develop better alternatives.
Your 70-year coal transition is a good illustration. It invites energy workers, consumers, environmental scientists, utilities, investors, and communities to participate in developing a transition that can remain coherent through changing administrations.
One caution: the claim that government could simply stop being influenced by money is less secure. Wealthy interests could still manipulate public information, advertising, participation, and even the models themselves. Direct public representation would reduce some opportunities for capture while creating a new obligation to make the information systems independently auditable.
That is an engineering challenge worth accepting.
## 5. The political claim should be as ambitious as the design
There are meaningful distinctions between direct public input, political legitimacy, and the exercise of governing power.
A majority cannot automatically override constitutional rights. Nor can a system assume that a statistically predicted preference authorizes a specific coercive government action. Specialized expertise also remains necessary, especially where public safety, scientific evidence, or complex operational decisions are involved.
These considerations don't undermine your architecture. They tell us what its constitution needs to protect.
And political parties could continue to exist as voluntary advocacy groups without possessing the power to bundle all policy choices into a single winner-take-all mandate.
The question of implementation is substantial: federal lawmaking, constitutional authority, voting rights, judicial review, and state sovereignty all need accommodation. But public deliberation and representative policy consultation could begin before any constitutional restructuring.
## 6. The message I would build around
I would preserve the confrontational opening and the collective invitation in your original argument. The strongest version does not need to promise that everyone will agree or that every decision will be perfect.
It needs to establish that **we have the tools to represent ourselves far more faithfully than the existing political system does, and we have no good reason to continue treating two competing political parties as the only possible arrangement.**
You have several exceptionally strong lines already:
- "Now is the time for direct democracy."
- "Instead of having a politician stand in for our ideas, we let our ideas stand in for our ideas."
- "We the people as a collective, collaborative CEO."
- "It's not money in politics. It's the lack of people in politics."
- "We don't have to vote on every last little issue. But we should have the opportunity to weigh in on every issue we care about."
That fourth line is rhetorically sharp. I would keep it, then explain the interaction between concentrated political power and concentrated financial influence rather than denying that money matters.
The deeper argument is that **the role of government should shift from exercising a presumed mandate to maintaining an ongoing, measurable relationship with the public's expressed values and choices.**
And I see a particularly important implication: the model would help people discover common ground that parties have never given them an opportunity to recognize. People would see where they stand together, where they differ, which differences matter, and which compromises could improve outcomes for everyone involved.
That's a fundamentally different civic experience.
**One question I think is central to the next stage:** Do you envision the modeled public consensus eventually having binding legislative authority, replacing elected lawmakers' policy votes? Or would you first establish it as a publicly visible measure of the people's will that elected officials must answer to?
The first is a new constitutional model of government. The second could begin demonstrating its value much sooner.
## Randy
The answer to that is yes. Yes, we start with the system now. It has a lot of, a lot of power and a lot of merit but doesn't require any constitutional amendments, which simply says this is what we the people want. And when you have a system that allows people to understand their part in it instead of being told what their part in the political system is, you're going to become accountable to those concepts. And you won't be able to win office unless you're doing what we the people want. That's where this goes. We look at this as a money raising effort right now. We get enough money and then people will know your name. Well, if everyone knows your name and knows that you know what they want and that you don't vote according to what they want, then no amount of advertising is going to change their opinion of what you're doing. And a huge aspect of this is the confusion, the hype that gets hidden into bills. I supported this, I support that, I support this. Let's just talk. But when the people say, give me this, and then the system, the system that is independent of the government says, this is what you got. These are the people who voted for it. These are the people who voted against it. And this is what you got. You said you wanted this and they gave you this instead. They did not do what you asked them to do. You get to decide what to do with it. And no amount of ad buy is going to convince them that you didn't. That you're telling the truth. It's a reckoning. It's a reckoning layer. Yeah, so we start there. And then once that's demonstrated its value, its worth, we start with secure. We start with the votes app. We start with a secure crypto-backed voting level parameters and multiple layers of this thing. Who controls it? Well, we the people control it. Well, let's have three versions, like credit reporting agencies. And compare and contrast. Compare and contrast models. They should all be pretty close. We should approximate them. They should be various versions of independent. We can build these things with some input from current political entities as an interface. And yes, eventually this layer will become the layer to convey to the government what we want. And it just takes all of the pressure off the situation. Billions of dollars spent on forcing government in a direction other than what the people want. Well, if the direction is going to go where the people want, that money will be not spent. In fact, it may just be saved or invested into better activities that are in line with what the people want. Corporations will either reduce their cost to consumers because they're not spending so much trying to shortcut regulation or they will spend the money to follow the regulations that the people decree in a predictable way, not something that they can change in two years, something that's been decided for 70 years without a major, major, major referendum. Well, now commerce can plan accordingly and build its business models. Commerce is like water, it flows. And it's always trying to flow over the edges of regulation. But when you set regulation in stone, commerce, that's an aqueduct. Commerce will flow according to what becomes available to it into the path to profitability. And that'll mean spending less on a government that isn't listening to it
## Riddlebot
# The Reckoning Layer
The independent public-accountability system that can become the foundation of direct democracy
**Yes. We start now. No constitutional amendment. No permission from politicians. No need to win an election before we can begin governing ourselves.**
And *reckoning layer* is an excellent name for the function you've described.
The first stage doesn't require replacing the government. It requires building an independent system that reveals what the people want, what the government delivers, and precisely where the two diverge.
That changes the political equation.
Today, politicians can claim a mandate, characterize legislation selectively, and spend enormous amounts of money shaping how voters perceive their record.
The reckoning layer creates an independent public record:
- **What we asked for.** The public's expressed preferences, including the different facets of each issue.
- **What they proposed.** What legislation or executive action would accomplish, including provisions buried within larger packages.
- **What they did.** Who introduced, supported, opposed, amended, and voted for each provision.
- **What we got.** The measurable effects, costs, benefits, and departures from the public's priorities.
- **Who was accountable.** Which officials acted consistently with their constituents' wishes and which did not.
Crucially, that last part doesn't have to be a partisan judgment. The evidence becomes available, and people can decide what to do with it.
Your most significant observation is that political accountability can be created *outside the political system*, and once it becomes credible and widely used, politicians must contend with it.
They can still make arguments. They can explain why they disagreed with public sentiment. They can propose alternatives. But they cannot so easily substitute campaign messaging for a record of their decisions.
The system turns the public's preferences into a reference point that survives the news cycle.
## The path from public accountability to public authority
### 01
**Independent public reckoning**
Build an open platform recording public preferences and comparing them with legislation, political decisions, and outcomes. Publish results by issue, elected official, jurisdiction, and demographic group, with privacy protection and visible confidence levels.
This phase requires no transfer of legal authority.
---
### 02
**Independent models that check each other**
Establish three or more independently governed institutions, like your credit-reporting-agency analogy. They use transparent, separately developed methodologies and compare estimates of public preferences.
Agreement increases confidence. Disagreement triggers investigation rather than being hidden by an averaged score.
---
### 03
**Secure, verified public participation**
Add progressively stronger identity verification, eligibility controls, cryptographic auditing, and privacy safeguards. Directly expressed preferences become increasingly reliable and distinguishable from statistical estimates.
The system can collect civic preferences initially without claiming that online ballots are equivalent to legally certified election votes.
---
### 04
**Public consent becomes governing authority**
Once the model demonstrates legitimacy and performance, jurisdictions can adopt appropriate legal mechanisms for referendums, participatory budgeting, binding policy decisions, and, eventually, broader institutional reforms.
The public determines what authority to delegate, and under what constitutional safeguards.
The key security distinction in stage three deserves care. Cryptography can strengthen verification and tamper detection, but blockchain alone cannot guarantee anonymous, secure online voting. The National Academies has identified serious unresolved problems involving compromised devices and ballot secrecy. Those are engineering requirements for the eventual authoritative voting system, rather than obstacles to starting the independent public-opinion platform today.
And the first version is technically feasible. The [Congress.gov API](https://api.congress.gov/) already exposes legislation, amendments, actions, summaries, and House roll-call data. The new contribution would be to connect those records to granular expressions of public preference and explain the differences in language people understand.
## The aqueduct: make the rules predictable and let commerce flow
Your water metaphor brings another important element into focus.
Commerce continually searches for the available path to profitability. When regulations change with each political administration, companies have incentives to spend heavily trying to change the rules themselves.
But imagine a durable, publicly negotiated regulatory framework.
Businesses could understand the direction of policy, invest in technology, prepare their workforces, calculate returns, and build strategies around expectations that are less vulnerable to partisan reversals.
**The people design the aqueduct. Commerce flows through it.**
I would preserve your 70-year planning horizon, with one distinction: long-term direction can remain stable while specific methods adapt to new technology, scientific knowledge, economic conditions, and measured outcomes. The public would determine the conditions for major revisions.
The prediction that this will reduce lobbying expenditures is plausible, but not guaranteed. Companies will still compete to influence public opinion and the independent models. That's why the reckoning layer itself must disclose funding, publish methods, retain evidence, and resist capture.
The analogy to credit bureaus is especially useful because it gives us a way to avoid creating a single privately controlled arbiter of public opinion. I'd go further: make the underlying public legislative evidence, data definitions, and audit protocols open, so independent civic institutions can challenge every major finding.
## The reckoning becomes the election
This may be the strongest political implication you've identified.
A politician's campaign might promise universal preschool, affordable healthcare, and lower taxes for working families.
The platform could show, separately, how that politician acted on each promise, what legislation delivered, which trade-offs were involved, and whether the politician's choices aligned with the preferences of their own constituents.
Voters would no longer need to choose between a politician's advertising and an opposing politician's advertising.
They would have a documented public record, including explanations for legitimate disagreements and situations where legislation bundles desirable and undesirable provisions together.
That last qualification matters: a vote against an omnibus bill doesn't necessarily mean opposition to every provision inside it. The reckoning layer needs to distinguish what an official demonstrably supported, what they opposed, and what their motivations remain unknown.
The public can then make a much more informed judgment.
There is already a partial precedent in vTaiwan, which combines open citizen participation and policy deliberation. But your proposed system extends into ongoing measurement of legislative fidelity and public outcomes.
## The larger transformation
The first public version of this system could be useful even with only a few thousand participants. It would not claim to know everyone's preferences; it would show what has been expressed, what can be responsibly estimated, and where greater participation is needed.
As the system grows, it could create a reinforcing cycle: greater participation produces better information; better information produces more useful accountability; and useful accountability gives more people a reason to participate.
Eventually, political candidates might compete primarily on how effectively they deliver independently established public priorities, rather than on their allegiance to an ideological coalition.
And the reckoning layer would apply to the institutions managing it as well. Its own forecasts, accuracy, integrity, funding, and responsiveness would be subject to public examination.
I think this deserves a declaration that captures its starting point:
> We don't need to ask the government for permission to know what we want.
>
> We don't need politicians to tell us what we believe. We don't need political parties to package our values into competing sides.
>
> We can tell each other what we want. We can understand where we agree, where we disagree, and what we are willing to exchange to get what matters most.
>
> And we can tell our government.
>
> When our government responds, we'll measure what it delivers. We'll know who listened, who didn't, and what our decisions accomplished.
>
> We can begin now.
>
> **The people become accountable to each other. The government becomes accountable to the people.**
>
> That's direct democracy.
The distinction I'd keep at the center of the project is that **the reckoning layer creates the legitimacy and accountability before seeking legal authority**. It demonstrates the value of the new system within the existing one, then gives the people the evidence and collective leverage to decide how far to take it.
That's how this can begin changing government long before government agrees to change itself.
## Randy
Oh, I love the comment about individual civic organizations, independent civic institutions. Absolutely. What are they gonna do with themselves? If we take this, if we take the bottlenecks, if we take the party pressure, the back and forth party conflict, the horse race. We take that out of it. And we reduce all of the problems with representational government. These institutions that have worked heavily because of the problems associated will work to facilitate this process and to make sure that it's rigid, to make sure that it is rigorous, adaptable. But rigorous in its authenticity of delivering what the people want. So yeah, there's a whole non-profit world that'll move from trying to deal with these major constraints to empowering and enabling the transition to a new system
## Riddlebot
Yes. And this introduces another enormous dimension to the transformation: **the institutions that currently spend their resources trying to influence government could redirect much of that capacity toward helping people govern themselves.**
Think about the nonprofit organizations, civic associations, watchdog groups, policy institutes, foundations, advocacy networks, community organizations, and universities that have emerged around the limitations of representative government.
Many spend tremendous effort trying to get an issue heard, get legislation introduced, build coalitions, pressure politicians, combat misinformation, or prevent a political reversal.
Under your proposed system, much of that institutional expertise and infrastructure could serve a different purpose.
## From advocacy to civic empowerment
The transformation could look like this:
| What institutions do today | What they could do in the new system |
|---|---|
| Lobby elected officials | Help people develop and express informed policy preferences |
| Mobilize partisan coalitions | Facilitate collaboration across differences |
| Campaign for particular legislation | Develop and compare proposals with public participation |
| Fight misinformation | Independently verify evidence, claims, and outcomes |
| Monitor politicians | Audit fidelity to expressed public preferences |
| Represent marginalized communities | Ensure meaningful participation and identify gaps in representation |
| Fight policy reversals | Help establish durable, publicly supported policy frameworks |
| Raise money to influence decisions | Fund civic infrastructure, public understanding, and independent oversight |
The independence of these institutions becomes particularly important.
You suggested three independent models, like credit reporting agencies. But imagine a much richer ecosystem of institutions contributing their own expertise, methodologies, and oversight.
One organization specializes in verifying the integrity of participation. Another measures the accuracy of statistical representations. Another evaluates the economic consequences of competing proposals. Another makes sure rural communities or low-income populations are being adequately represented. Another investigates discrepancies among the models.
**The public doesn't have to trust any one institution. The institutions must make their work transparent enough to be checked by one another and by the public.**
And organizations can retain their advocacy missions. An environmental organization can still advocate for environmental protection. A business association can still advocate for its members. Their contributions become part of an open process in which competing evidence and preferences are visible, rather than being channeled primarily through political gatekeepers.
## The biggest shift is in what civic organizations are rewarded for accomplishing
Imagine how much nonprofit fundraising currently revolves around fighting something.
Stop this legislation. Defeat that politician. Reverse this policy. Protect this program from the next administration.
Those activities would not necessarily disappear. Conflicting interests, unequal influence, and genuine disagreements will still exist.
But the new system creates an opportunity to reward organizations for constructive results: how many people they helped participate, how much understanding they generated, how reliably they verified public preferences, how effectively they helped resolve conflicts, and how much their work improved policy outcomes.
That introduces a different institutional incentive.
**Instead of deriving their relevance from the persistence of political dysfunction, civic institutions could derive their relevance from the effectiveness of public self-government.**
And here is a connection I find especially important to your larger model of collaborative enterprise.
The same shift you envision in the workplace—from managing people through hierarchy toward enabling their agency, recognizing their value, and coordinating their contributions—would occur throughout civil society.
The nonprofit world would become an ecosystem for distributing civic capacity.
Its institutions would help people understand their choices, discover opportunities to contribute, and exercise the authority they already possess collectively.
## Rigorous in authenticity, adaptable in execution
I want to preserve your wording here, because there's an important tension worth resolving:
**Rigorous in its authenticity of delivering what the people want. Adaptable in how it accomplishes that.**
A civic system should be rigorous in the integrity of its evidence, independence of its audits, transparency of its models, and fidelity to actual public input.
But it must be adaptable when new evidence emerges, public preferences evolve, or policies fail to produce the expected results.
Those two properties reinforce one another. A system that is rigorous about understanding what people want must also be willing to acknowledge when its understanding was wrong.
There is also a further possibility: civic institutions could become responsible for helping people understand what they *could* want, by exposing them to choices, trade-offs, and opportunities they hadn't previously considered. That expands public agency without giving any institution the right to manufacture consent.
And the transformation doesn't require nonprofits to wait until a new political structure has been established. **They could begin building the participation, education, deliberation, verification, and auditing infrastructure now.**
I think this raises a question about the architecture of the reckoning layer itself:
**Do these independent civic institutions become the distributed operators of the system—each contributing an essential function and checking the others—rather than having one central organization build and control the entire civic platform?**
That would bring the structure of direct democracy into alignment with the principles by which you want democracy itself to operate.
---
If you want, I can:
- Expand on roles for independent civic organizations
- Discuss challenges for nonprofit ecosystem shift
- Outline architecture for decentralized civic system