Today is half for data collecting and half for continuing to write the paper. I looked for Gallup polls today since I had Pew Research center ones from last time. I will transfer my notes here as soon as I have time!
Voting and technology TED talk
Pia Mancini discusses the election system in Argentina and its outdated practices. Her team designed democracyos.org as a bridge between citizens and their representatives. Every new proposal that congress receives is translated into plain language so citizens can keep up with their government. A person could then vote on the site (yes, no, or abstaining) as to how they feel about the project that was introduced. However, none of Argentina's political parties were interested in using this data to see how their platform was aligned or not aligned with the ideas and desires of its constituents. Mancini's team then formed its own political party and won a considerable amount of the vote for the fact that it had only been in existence for two months. This lead to Argentina's plan to implement democracyos as a way for Congress to connect with the citizens.
"Coding a better government" TED talk
Jennifer Pahlka talks about founding "Code for America" which matches software geniuses with cities to create apps and reboot local services. While I don't think I can really incorporate the ideas into my thesis it is a great way to think about getting citizens involved with local government in ways that are faster than turning to the bureaucracy.
Open Source government TED talk
Former deputy CTO at the White House Beth Noveck pushes for opening up government data to allow citizens to participate more actively and frequently in the process of improving civic institutions. She cites crowdsourcing websites and initiatives across the world that publish data for public comment and thus help cut spending and fund the building of infrastructure. I hope this idea can be applied to campaign finance, so citizens can see where their candidates are really getting money from and also to the idea of legislation and debate, as seen in Mancini's talk.
Data (Gallup poll): roughly half of Americans support public financing for federal elections
(Gallup poll) Widespread support for campaign finance reform
(Sorry. I like TED talks. They present new ideas and often combine them with technology. Also don't have an agenda or a link to either political party or ideology)
To-do:
Pester one of my possible judges more (in a friendly manner of course)
Start the final presentation PowerPoint
Find/dig up more old data
Somehow find a family pic for the senior banquet...
Saturday update: Added my TED talk notes, still working with judges. Also, I learned a strange thing about caucuses: both primaries and caucuses have really low turnout in general, but especially so compared to the main election. However, they appear to have moderately good demographic representation. The bigger problem is that participation widely varies among states (sometimes by margins of 16%). This means that what I need to focus on is raising turnout in caucuses and primaries instead of revamping the system. I believe that is definitely doable with the rotating regional primary reform (which allows the state to keep its chosen nomination process of either caucus or primary in spite of the fact that the name does seem to imply otherwise).
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