Today's blog is the conclusion of the piece published last week, entitled "The Tools We Need To Be Amazing Citizens, Part I", aka "Don't Be A Star-Belly Sneetch." I won't attempt to re-hash part I because it's short enough for you to read yourself.  Instead, I return directly to the questions we began to consider there:  What kinds of tools do we need to be amazing citizens? How can we make each registered voter believe their contribution is valued and important to the processes of our republic?  The second part of my answer--the part I will discuss today--is access.  We have to increase access to our political processes for our registered voters if we hope to inspire the levels of participation we need for a healthy republic.

You may be thinking, well, this is America, and we have all the access we need.  The problem, you say, is that not enough people are taking advantage of the access we have.  Okay, I agree that the problem is not enough people taking advantage of the access we have.  By default, I submit that means we need more access for registered voters. We can judge people who don't vote today, but that is just a star-belly sneetch trap, and it doesn't solve the problem.  Solving the problem requires some more understanding of what is causing the problem.

What factors discourage participation?  Well, for one thing I think many people are just busy with higher priority tasks like family and work.  The process of making an informed political choice is a time commitment, and many people simply do not make that commitment.  To the extent we could reduce the time required to make an informed choice, or give people more time to make that choice, we would encourage participation.  This is the low-hanging fruit of improving our republic.  

Another discouraging factor is that an overwhelming number of congressional districts today are solidly one-party districts.  In other words, the districts have been re-drawn by one party or the other so that there is little chance of the minority party winning an election. The most recent estimate I have seen in the Wall Street Journal is that 400 of the 435 congressional districts are now solidly one-party districts.  Faced with what is essentially an inevitable outcome, some minority party voters in these districts simply consider it a waste of time to vote.  If you are a Republican in a gerrymandered Democratic district, or a Democrat in a gerrymandered Republican district, you are effectively disenfranchised.  Restoring districts where each party has a real chance at winning an election would encourage participation.  

What makes one-party districts even more toxic for our republic is the fact that the candidates appearing on the final ballot are determined in primaries that exclude independent voters.  In other words, the 40+ percent of registered voters who refuse to align with either the Democratic or Republican party are not allowed to participate in the primary elections paid for with their tax dollars.  Those voters are then confronted with a general election where the majority candidate--a candidate they could not help select--is assured victory.  The 40+ percent of registered voters who refuse to align with either the Democratic or Republican party are effectively disenfranchised.

Access enables participation.  Although it is certainly our individual responsibility to vote and to participate appropriately in the political processes of our republic, our elected officials can do a number of things to encourage--or discourage--participation.  Participation goes up the more we make our political processes accessible:  accessible to busy Americans who correctly prioritize taking care of their families and jobs over babysitting the people they elect and pay to caretake our government.  

Many politicians are more interested in preserving the status quo than increasing the accessibility of our political processes.  Elected officials should take it as part of their jobs, in my opinion, to encourage good citizenship and promote accessibility so more Americans exercise their right to vote.  The reason I emphasize electing career citizens over career politicians is that career citizens won't be afraid to make increasing access a priority.  We should measure elected officials by their willingness to increase access for registered voters and by the percentage of registered voters in their districts who actually vote.  

Not all elected officials see it as part of their job to encourage political participation.  A few years ago, I had lunch with my representative, Jason Chaffetz.  I pitched the idea of real-time polling on his web site as a way of increasing voter participation. In support of the idea, I lamented the fact that, because they were so busy with work and family, many people just didn't make time for politics and wound up acting like sheep.  His response: "If people want to be sheep, we should let them be sheep."  My concern is that many people unintentionally let themselves become sheep because they are busy.  We can and should do things to make participation more accessible for these people.  For Jason, increasing political participation is simply not a priority.  

About 38 percent of the registered voters in Jason's district voted in the last election.  Even though an overwhelming majority--72 percent--of that 38 percent voted for Jason, it is hard for me to accept that we let 27 percent of the registered voters in my district (72 percent of 38 percent) choose our congressman.  We let 27 percent of registered voters--that's less than one-third--choose our congressman because 62 percent of registered voters didn't exercise their right to vote.  I was one of the independent candidates running against Jason in that election, and he got a whole lot more votes than I did.  That probably would have been the case even if more people had voted.  Statisticians would tell you it certainly would have been the case.  But the fact is we just don't know, because 62 percent of the people who could have voted did not.

I listened to a conference call recently about the Open Our Democracy Act.  This bill has been re-introduced in the current Congress.  The bill would go a long way toward increasing voter participation by addressing the three causes of non-participation discussed above.  For one thing, the bill would make election day a national holiday.  Imagine the power of that simple change!  People would have a chance to finish their research and go to the polls without missing work.  Frankly, I can think of few things more worth celebrating with a day off work than our ability to vote.  

The Open Our Democracy Act would also require Top Two non-partisan primaries.  Top-Two primaries are primary elections in which everyone can vote, even if they are not registered with the Democratic or Republican parties.  The two candidates receiving the highest number of votes would then be the only candidates appearing on the general election ballot, again without regard to their political affiliation. 

Finally, the Open Our Democracy Act would have the General Accounting Office study the idea of national standards for drawing the lines around congressional districts in order to make them less susceptible to manipulation by political parties. In my opinion, it would be best if each state fixed the problem of gerrymandering on their own, but a GAO study would help arm citizens in each state with the information they need to start state reform movements. The results of a GAO study are not law--it is just information to support the process of law-making.  Gerrymandering has been part of our political landscape from the earliest days of our country, but that does not mean we should continue to tolerate this increasingly toxic activity.  Many reasons suggest that the effects of gerrymandering--effectively disenfranchising large numbers of registered voters--is more harmful today than at any time in our history.  It is time to begin the process of addressing gerrymandered districts.

All three elements of the Open Our Democracy Act would, in my view, increase accessibility and participation in the democratic processes of our republic.  We cannot carry out our individual duty to vote if we do not have appropriate access to the political processes that make our individual vote meaningful.  We have allowed our access to be degraded to the point where access to the democratic processes of our republic is largely an illusion for most registered voters.  Our elected officials should be doing everything in their power to increase accessibility and participation.  The best litmus test to distinguish career citizens from career politicians is full and unconditional support for the Open Our Democracy Act.  Career citizens will support it.  Career politicians will try to stop it. 

Marcus Hamilton delivered the Day 1 general session at the Society of Human Resource Managers National Conference in Las Vegas in June (#SHRM15).  His bottom line:  the way to create amazing organizations is to give your team leaders the tools they need to be amazing team leaders. Hamilton's message is a terrific, fundamental insight that reflects everything I've learned in government and business over the past 30+ years.  Performance is personal, and great team leaders know how to bring out the best in the people on their teams.  Hamilton's quest is to provide the tools that team leaders use to achieve amazing results.

What kinds of tools do we need to be amazing citizens? How can we make each registered voter believe their contribution is valued and important to the processes of our republic?

The most important tool we need is information, but the information that is broadcast to us is not necessarily the information that will make us amazing citizens.  We all like to feel that we are right about issues.  Plenty of people are willing to make money catering to this aspect of our ego.  The information we receive passively is targeted to cater to our biases.  If this is your only source of information, you are likely to become more and more comfortable with your biases, and feel more and more superior to those with whom you disagree.  As Dr. Seuss taught us long ago, the only person who wins by making star-bellied sneetches feel superior is the one selling the stars ("But, because they had stars, all the Star-Belly Sneetches, would brag, 'We're the best kind of Sneetch on the beaches!'").  So, to be an amazing citizen, start with a commitment to not be a star-bellied sneetch.  In Accountability Citizenship, I break this down into the two steps of being appropriately positive and appropriately informed.  Simply put:  do your best to understand the best arguments for the other side--the side you do not agree with--of every issue.  Make a habit of finding sources of information that illuminate the best arguments of the other side rather than sources that present you with a cartoon caricature of those positions.

In a perfect world, our elected representatives would help us with this key step by using their official web sites--the ones we pay for with our tax dollars--to provide real-time polling of registered voters in every congressional district.  In the same way we log in to perform banking on line, registered voters could securely log in to the web sites of their representatives, record their preferences on a range of issues, and see the results in real time.  The sites could serve links to sources of unbiased information, like votesmart.org and opensecrets.org, as well.  

Providing an easy source of unbiased information for registered voters would increase participation. I spoke recently with a small group of voting-age people in Nevada, and many confirmed they felt they shouldn't vote because they did not know enough about issues and candidates.  Now it is easy at this point to slip into Star-Belly Sneetch mode and blame these individuals for not taking steps to learn about issues and candidates.  But this doesn't solve the problem.   Not all of us are as able or willing to sort through conflicting and confusing candidate messaging to prepare to vote, especially when confronted with legitimately higher priorities like family and job.  Not all of us have jobs that allow us equal control over our schedules. We live in an information age, and we should use available technology to make it easier for more people to be informed citizens rather than just accept the current level of confused, frustrated, and effectively disenfranchised citizens.  Unfortunately, too many of our elected representatives have a vested interest in preserving the culture of star-bellied sneetches.  They represent star-sellers more than they represent the people in their districts.

There are, of course, exceptions.  Congressman E. Scott Rigell of Virginia, for instance, is one of a very few members who not only has made efforts to survey constituents, but also to share the results of those surveys. The "sense of the district" polls he ran were fairly low-tech, and did not provide the kind of real-time feedback that is possible today, but I thought Congressman Rigell's initiative noteworthy.  Unsurprisingly, Rigell has only been in Congress a few years, and came to politics after a successful business career and service as a U.S. Marine.  He is a career citizen, not a career politician.

I believe the responsibility to vote is an individual duty.  That is why I called my book Accountability Citizenship.  We all have to hold ourselves accountable for using the powers given us in the Constitution to shape our government.  But that doesn't mean our elected officials should not be doing everything in their power to increase accessibility and participation in the democratic processes of our republic.  If our representatives cannot represent all of us on this most fundamental guarantee of our Constitution, how can we trust them to represent any of us on lesser matters?

In the classic 1999 science fiction movie, The Matrix, most humans live in a completely simulated reality (the Matrix) while their body heat and electricity are harvested to produce power for intelligent machines.  The main protagonist, a computer scientist named Neo, is given the opportunity to see reality outside of the simulation when a rebel leader offers him a red pill.  Choosing a blue pill, on the other hand, would return Neo to his previous reality.  Neo chooses the red pill and the movie progresses through his action-packed fight against the Matrix.  

The major premise of Accountability Citizenship is that changes in our information environment over the past 50 years have radically changed the skills necessary to process information and formulate reasonable opinions about current events.  One doesn't need to imagine a matrix-like conspiracy to acknowledge that deregulation of television and radio
along with the explosion of gadgets from personal computers to cell phones exponentially increases the amount of information presented to us each day,  You might, however, still believe the information that comes to you is random, and that is highly unlikely due to something called a filter bubble, first described by Eli Pariser in his best selling book The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web is Changing What We Read and How We Think.  Pariser presents examples where different users executing the same search on the same platform are served results that are significantly different, and he asserts the different results are a function of marketing algorithms that essentially create a little structured reality for each of us.  There are a wide variety of views about how pervasive or how serious the effects of the filter bubble are on social discourse... and you are probably being served the view that is most consistent with what your personalization algorithm says you will like!

Of course, with a little effort, you can escape the bubble, and www.AccountabilityCitizenship.org offers you some assistance in this regard. The way out of the bubble is with a relentless pursuit of the facts.  As indicated in the quotation from John Adams, facts are indeed stubborn things.  For all things, we should actively seek a foundation of facts that has not been selected for us by someone else.  The book Accountability Citizenship suggests a methodology for building such a foundation, along with a number of reasonably impartial sources of information.   AccountabilityCitizenship.org itself strives to be such a source, presenting both sides of most issues we cover in our newsletters and being clear about our biases when we choose to present an opinion.  Go ahead, take the pill.  We need you out here...

Well, its on.  Yesterday in Cleveland 17 Republican presidential candidates met in two different events for the first in a series of debates that will help determine the GOP nominee for the 2016 election.  Most of the coverage, pre- and post-debate, was about Donald Trump.  I had a lot of responses to my post last week, in which I advocated electing career citizens over career politicians.  Given some of those comments, I want to take some time this week and explain why Donald Trump is not what I mean by a career citizen--in fact, he's not anywhere close.

I concluded my post last week with the following definition of what I mean by career citizen:  credible people with real track records of merit-based success outside of politics."  I added, "When it comes time to decide between candidates, we need to favor challengers over incumbents.  We need to look closely for behavior-based evidence of character and selflessness.  Character and selflessness in this context are measured by the demonstrated willingness to make the good of a business or other non-political organization a higher priority than one's personal interests. Claims of religiosity or political affiliation are not evidence of character.  Such claims are cheap and often counterfeit.  For me, the candidate who gets my vote is the non-incumbent with a record of serving others who offers the best answer to the question: "what is the most important view you hold that runs against the popular opinion of your party, and what are your reasons for holding that view?"  It is clear to me why Donald Trump doesn't measure up to that standard:  he has a record of serving himself at the expense of others.  That makes him what I call a career politician, even though he has never served as an elected public official.  

Trump leads other Republicans in the polls because he has money and says outlandish things.  He does not have a record of merit-based success outside of politics.  He inherited a fortune from his father, and leveraged that fortune into a huge bankruptcy that essentially came down to a massive 9-figure bailout of Donald Trump.  We all know what a bankruptcy means, right?  You can no longer meet your financial obligations to your creditors, so you and they agree to some form of settlement.  Trump took goods and services from people for which he ultimately did not pay.  Some big banks came in and bailed him out by agreeing to a settlement.  So, in my book, his financial "success" has little or nothing to do with merit.  It doesn't help, either, that he secured for himself a medical exemption from the draft during the Vietnam War.  That hardly qualifies him to be Commander-in-Chief or to comment on the record of people who did serve, at great cost to themselves.  What I see in Trump's record is someone who has made his way in life by ensuring that he always had the best deal for himself while others did his dirty work for him.  That's what I call a career politician--a professional self servant--even though he's never held a public office.  The sooner the Republican party gets past its infatuation with Donald Trump, the better off we will all be.

I will be on air with Mark Hahn during Drive Time Live tomorrow, August 5th, at 5:13 PM Central Time (6:13 PM Eastern, 4:13 PM Mountain, 3:13 PM Pacific time).  You can listen live at kscj.com/listen-live/  

Tune in for a discussion of AccountabilityCitizenship.org's summer newsletter and the ramp up to the first Republican presidential debate!