Blockchain and The Future of Voter-Representative Engagement

Can Blockchain technology improve the impact of constituent outreach to elected representatives?

Note: this blog responds to an opinion piece on the lack of political transparency in the United States. To keep the focus on a theoretical approach to increasing this transparency, the blog will remain factual and not opine on related politics.

Context

On April 7th, the US Senate voted to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. Ahead of the vote, The News & Observer — a regional daily paper based in Raleigh, North Carolina — published an opinion titled: “NC senators won’t tell me how much support they received for Judge Jackson. Why not?”

The author provides further context on the situation: “I am a registered unaffiliated voter concerned about transparency in the offices of Sens. Richard Burr and Thom Tillis. I called both offices to register my support for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. I asked for a summary regarding the number of calls received “for” or “against” her nomination. I was advised that their policy was to not release that data. Something stinks here. Transparency? Or keep constituents in the dark? We taxpayers deserve to know the public feedback that both senators have received regarding Jackson’s nomination.”

The Senators ultimately voted against confirming Judge Jackson. The author insinuates the Senators hold data showing their constituents instead wanted Judge Jackson to be confirmed. Senators are not required to disclose correspondence data, and this post will not theorize on the rationale for keeping the data private. Rather, this post will explore the author’s other point: voters deserve greater transparency into the feedback provided to their elected reps. This claim is important because, in theory, such feedback should help the reps carry forward the interests of the individuals they represent.

Is the voter / representative relationship in need of fixing, and can blockchain technology create a more impactful, transparent relationship?

Spoiler alert: yes and maybe. Still interested? 👇

The Significance of Constituent-Representative Correspondence

Public law entitles constituents to correspond with elected officials, and the US Senate’s website even provides guidance on how constituents can do so by mail and phone. Such correspondence allows voters to have their voices heard by the individuals chosen to represent them. Reps, however, are not required to reply to correspondence nor publish related data. While correspondence is encouraged, the process does lack transparency.

Before exploring how to improve the process, let’s first examine the broader topic of constituent-representative correspondence. Does constituent-rep correspondence matter? Does it work? And does it need to be fixed? Spoiler alert #2: yes, sometimes, and yes.

Correspondence matters to constituents. While social media gives voters a direct connection to representatives, traditional correspondence such as mail, email, and calls remain popular forms of outreach. In 2017, “multiple current and former aides from both parties and chambers said the number of phone calls and emails their offices received in 2017 was the highest they’d ever logged. One Democratic House office received roughly “four times as much mail” in 2017 than in any given year previously.” In 2019, more than 50 million Americans sent emails to members of Congress.

Beyond its popularity with constituents, correspondence offers reps a chance to improve their public perception. Correspondence can drive a materially positive shift in how constituents view their representatives. According to a study by The Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) — a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan nonprofit whose mission is to build trust and effectiveness in Congress — 78% of constituents said they would “find it acceptable for my Congressional representative to vote contrary my view if I had confidence that my views were taken into account.”

People like to be heard. They like to know their voice matters (or, at the very least, feel that to be true). If this data doesn’t convince you that people value communicating with reps, grab some Advil and take look at political Twitter.

Correspondence (sometimes) works. According to the same CMF study, 35% of voters surveyed said they had not received a response to their correspondence. Response rates are low, and some reps limit their responses to the so-called “frequent fliers” or “pen pals.” But the outreach does seem to make a difference. A 2014 Michigan study sought to answer whether “campaigns encouraging constituents to contact their legislator influence public policy.” The study’s conclusion: targeted constituent contacts increase the probability of supporting relevant legislation by about 12 percentage points. A 2013 study found that persistent contact (rather than one-off contact) drives a difference: if doctors in a district call their House member once a month to express their feelings on healthcare, while hospital administrators do not contact the representative, the legislator will be three times more likely to see the interests of physicians when considering his district’s interest on health policy.

Important note: the two studies illustrating a positive impact are from 2013 and 2014. Time matters. The political landscape has shifted since then, and the more recent CMF study (2019) demonstrates that many current constituents do not receive responses. With this low response rate, it is certainly possible that correspondence is not as impactful as it was eight years ago. If true, does that mean the topic of correspondence is not worth exploring? No. Quite the opposite. It indicates there is a more pressing need for increased correspondence transparency to drive rep accountability.

Constituents and representatives likely hold contrary viewpoints. In the last election, 24 of 35 Senators received under 60% of the vote. Only two Senators received more than 70% of the vote. Most states use a plurality voting system in which the candidate with most votes wins the election; as happens in such a system, many citizens do not vote for the winning candidate.

Individuals who vote for a rep may disagree with that rep on specific votes, such as Judge Jackson’s confirmation. In 2021, the Senate voted 528 times and The House of Representatives voted 449 times. Four current Senators have cast over 11,000 votes in their lifetime. Should constituents disagree with their rep, they can support a different candidate in the following election. However, this lagging remedy is unlikely to impact specific decisions made by the rep during their current term (such as COVID relief or a Supreme Court confirmation).

Constituents contact Members of Congress who are not their own. Indivisible detailed how contacting Members of Congress (MoCs) that are not yours is counterproductive to successfully deploying constituent power. There are three primary reasons: 1. Members of Congress don’t care what people outside of their district (for House) or state (for Senators) think. 2. When you contact an MoC who isn’t yours, you make it harder for actual constituents to reach their own MoCs. 3. Contacting from out of district/state gives MoCs an excuse to dismiss legitimate concerns about an issue. When you call an MoC who isn’t yours, you make it harder for actual constituents to reach their own MoCs.

Transparency and Accessibility

In 2015, the Center for Public Integrity measured hundreds of variables to compile transparency and accountability grades for all 50 states. On a standard A-F scale, 11 states received an F and only three states scored higher than a D+.

“Transparency” is government’s obligation to share information with citizens that is needed to make informed decisions and hold officials accountable for the conduct of the people’s business. Per Ballotpedia (a nonprofit, nonpartisan political encyclopedia covering public policy in the United States), “Openness, accountability, and honesty define government transparency. In a free society, transparency is government’s obligation to share information with citizens. It is at the heart of how citizens hold their public officials accountable.”

Transparency is inadequate without accessibility. Consider this scenario: the North Caroline Senators agree to publish their correspondence data…but do so in the form of paper records, at a far-off location with restricted hours, accessible only after filing a complicated in-person request and paying a filing fee? Accessing the data would be burdensome and slow. Such a process is not uncommon. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy found that “often, public bodies delay responding to requests for months, or charge excessive fees to bully a requestor into abandoning a request. When a response finally arrives, it is often so heavily redacted that the remaining information is useless. And, thanks to these tactics, requestors are left with no options but to sue to receive records that should have been freely provided. Very few requestors have the resources or patience needed to hire an attorney and wait for months to receive access to information the government holds.”

Precedent Law Focused on Transparency

Fortunately, precedence exists for regulation that not only increases political transparency, but also makes the related data easily accessible online.

The Transparency and Government Accountability Act notes that “the burden of negotiating complex and costly Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) petitions rests squarely on the shoulders of citizens and journalists. Despite “sunshine” laws and much pro-transparency rhetoric, information requests by journalists and citizens are routinely ignored, given the bureaucratic “slow roll” and discouraged by inflated price tags for staff time and copying. FOIAs and official goodwill are insufficient in securing citizens and journalists information they need and have a right to review. Therefore, this act affirms that the government…has a duty to affirmatively disclose certain information, in a timely manner, and to shift the burden from citizens and journalists to the state, to share all information necessary, so that citizens may hold their elected officials accountable.

In 2012, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved new regulations requiring broadcasters to publish political advertising data online, a “move that could shed light on who is trying to influence elections amid unprecedented campaign spending.” Select broadcasters were already required to keep publicly-available paper files with this information. However, accessing the data was punishingly time-consuming and expensive. To demonstrate the difficulty of accessing broadcaster files under the current system, FCC staff spent 61 hours and $1,700 in copying costs trying to collect political advertising data from stations in Baltimore.

Per then-FCC Chairman: “[This regulation] fulfills the core intent of the public file rules, to provide the public access to information.” At an additional cost of just $400 per station, the new regulation was expected to lead to the disclosure of $3.2 billion in political spending during the then-current election cycle.

Blockchain Technology

We now have a high-level understanding of the issues within constituent-representative correspondence, the role of transparency in government, and the precedent that technology can be implemented to address needs in data transparency and accessibility.

In exploring a potential blockchain solution for these issues, it is important to understand some primary benefits of blockchain technology.

Benefits of Blockchain

1. Inclusion
   Writing for the World Economic Forum, Christine Moy (head of J.P. Morgan’s global Blockchain team) and Jill Carlson (co-founder of the Open Money Initiative; Principal at Slow Ventures) described blockchain as a technological infrastructure that is global, open source, and accessible to all who have access to the internet, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, and socioeconomic class. “Have we ever encountered an open system that anyone in the world could participate in, in any form and at any depth, without prerequisite or qualifications other than having a device capable of accessing the internet? The systemic waves of change that will result from this will only rival what we’ve seen in our lifetimes as the Internet of Information which democratized the creation, distribution, and access to information and content.”
2. Greater Transparency
   With some exceptions by design, blockchain data is accessible to everyone at every time. Because blockchain is a distributed ledger, all network participants share the same documentation as opposed to individual copies.
3. Enhanced Security
   Per IBM’s breakdown of blockchain benefits, there are several ways blockchain is more secure than other record-keeping systems. Transactions must be agreed upon before they are recorded. After a transaction is approved, it is encrypted and linked to the previous transaction. This, along with the fact that information is stored across a network of computers instead of on a single server, makes it very difficult for hackers to compromise the transaction data. In any industry where protecting sensitive data is crucial — financial services, government, healthcare — blockchain has an opportunity to really change how critical information is shared by helping to prevent fraud and unauthorized activity.
4. Flexible Permissions
   Blockchains can be either permissioned or permissionless. A permissionless blockchain is open for anyone to participate. A permissioned blockchain is not publicly accessible; it can only be accessed by users with permissions. Private permissioned blockchains have been discussed as an option for the healthcare sector to handle sensitive patient data. In this system, specific individuals can be given access to specific data (such as doctors in a certain hospital or registered voters in a certain state.)
5. Reduced Human Error
   Record-keeping through traditional processes — such as phone calls, emails, and letter — is a time-consuming process that is prone to human error. By streamlining and automating these processes with blockchain, records can be kept much faster and more efficiently.
6. Trust
   When everyone has access to the same information, it becomes easier to trust each other without the need for numerous intermediaries (IBM)

In summary, Blockchain enhances inclusion, accessibility, transparency, and trust.

Requirements for A Blockchain Solution

At the very least, a potential blockchain solution would need the below requirements:

1. Every eligible constituent can participate; ineligible constituents cannot. The process would therefore need to provide permissions to specific participants. The Invisible Project calls out how it is difficult for staffers to verify whether you are, or are not, a constituent. Good staffers will ask for a zip code to ensure they’re speaking to an actual constituent. If they don’t, chances are your phone call is not getting memorialized in any way. One potential solution lies in permissioned blockchains, which have seen an increase of popularity thanks to their ability to allocate specific permissions to various users on the network.
2. Constituents can contact only their own representatives. As noted in the opening discussion on correspondence, the Indivisible Project detailed why it is counterproductive to call Members of Congress who are not yours. It is important — both for the reps and the constituents — for this system to prevent improper communication. Blockchain permissions can provide such restrictions.
3. Verification. Joe is confirmed to be an eligible constituent in North Carolina. But Joe’s uncle could potentially impersonate Joe and send an email from his address. The system would therefore need to verify that Joe is in fact Joe. Per IBM, governments, businesses and educational institutions are turning to blockchain as a proven way to enable a secure and trusted infrastructure for digital identification and credentials, while keeping this highly personal information private and secure.
4. Transparent, accessible data. As previously discussed, the system would need to enable public access to correspondence data. Blockchain meets the needs of such transparency and accessibility.

Questions & Concerns

A specific solution would certainly be tricky to design and implement. Many questions and speedbumps remain. Some include:

• What exactly would it look like? Blockchain mail? Something similar to Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) voting protocols?
• Would constituents be permitted to use only this solution for correspondence, and no longer have an option to call or write letters? Would such a restriction have an inverse consequence and decrease constituent engagement?
• Would such a system be capable of gaining mass adoption? Even DAOs — blockchain native, member-led organizations — have a participation problem: one estimate is that the average voter turnout across most DeFi protocols is roughly 1%.
• Representatives are elected for a reason and must be given the freedom to act as they believe best represents their constituents. Would it be fair to hold reps accountable to acting on the data, as it is unlikely for all (or even a majority) of constituents to correspond?
• Are there prohibitive storage and scalability issues? Sparkpost — the world’s largest commercial email sender — wrote a post on the concept of blockchain email. The largest issues they highlight are : “Bitcoin uses a blockchain that was 210GB as of April 2019. While that’s a big database, it’s still not much compared to the amount of space emails typically take up. The average email is 75KB — multiply that by the 102.6 trillion emails sent every year and you’ll see that a blockchain email platform with even a modest number of users would quickly have sizable storage requirements. [A] blockchain email platform could easily dwarf the storage requirements for cryptocurrencies. [A] clever developer could potentially solve that problem by, for example, storing messages off the blockchain and only using it to verify senders and receivers. Salesforce recently won a patent for a blockchain-based platform that would store only part of an email, so that the sender and recipient’s copies could be compared to determine whether a message is authentic.”

Conclusion

Perhaps a blockchain solution is not plausible in either the short or long-term. Perhaps the topic of “constituent-representative relationships” is too large to tackle right off the bat. But, with the promise and growing adoption of blockchain technology, it is worth considering whether a blockchain solution can solve the many issues currently hindering the impact of a vital democratic process.

Perhaps a smaller-scale version of the concept could first be developed. A user-friendly product could benefit member-driven communities where individuals participate in small, frequent decisions and want an immutable history of their communications (proxy voting, condo comms, etc.) Big things have small beginnings. Such a system does not need to start with adoption on a federal or state level to provide value.

@HeyShif on Twitter