Good Government

New York, NY – New Yorkers may soon be able to vote early, according to a bill being introduced today by City Council Members Ben Kallos and Costa Constantinides with support of members of the City Council's Progressive Caucus. The bill would allow residents to vote in municipal elections early, from the second Tuesdayprior to the election to the Friday prior to the election from 8am-8pm during the week and from 9am-5pm on the weekend in at least one polling place in each of the fifty-one council districts.
Two-thirds of US States and Washington, D.C. offer early voting to residents. New York State, however, currently only allows early voting through absentee ballots with an excuse such as an unavoidable absence or an illness. In those cases, one can vote by mail or in person at the Board of Elections Office. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2010, 27% of nonvoters said that the reason they did not vote was because they were too busy or could not get time off.
 
“New Yorkers should be able to vote when it is convenient for them, not when it is convenient for elected officials,” said Council Member Ben Kallos, Chair of the Committee on Governmental Operations, which oversees the Board of Elections. “It should be easier for more New Yorkers to participate and to vote, so we can raise our city’s participation rates from one of the lowest in the nation. One step is removing the barrier to voting created by having elections on only one day.”

Democracy must be a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Today, that means freeing government from the chains of a bureaucracy intentionally created to maintain the status quo.  Digital democracy can help facilitate a more agile government that is as responsive to the needs of its people as the private sector is to its clients. In so doing, digital democracy cannot simply replace more traditional forms of record-keeping and communication, but must meet the people where they are, and to open democracy up to new possibilities.

Digital democracy can provide new tools to support making laws, representing citizens, scrutinizing the work and performance of government, encouraging citizens to engage with democracy, and facilitating dialogue amongst citizens.  While implementing digital democracy, the Digital Democracy Commission has an opportunity to build free and open source software tools in the United Kingdom that can be shared with localities as well as globally.

The recent experience of legislators in New York City, New York State, and the United States of America has illustrated the importance of several key components of a digital democracy:

• Law is a constantly changing code, and we must treat it as such when designing publication platforms. The free and open source software model can inform the principles by which the law is created and disseminated. If residents are presumed to know the law, then the law must be published for free online for anybody to access.
• Legislation should be treated as a work in progress, which can be drafted, commented on and followed by any interested resident.
• Representing citizens can be improved using a customer relationship management (CRM) software as well as a single point of contact such as a phone number like 311 or platform with an open API like open 311 for non-emergency government service requests and tracking of those requests until issues have been resolved.
• Scrutinizing the work and performance of government is essential but dependent on underlying laws that provide for open meetings along with their video and webcast, freedom of information law, open 311, open legislation and law, along with placing public notices and data online in a human and computer readable formats available through open application program interfaces (API) in as close to real time as possible.
• Encouraging citizens to engage with democracy can be improved upon by local government officials and agencies by using a combination of low- and high-tech tools to communicate with and serve citizens.
• Facilitating dialogue amongst citizens through programs that encourage and allow substantive resident involvement in government decision-making, such as Participatory Budgeting, result in better understanding of the decisions of government.

The solutions offered and those that the Digital Democracy Commission will ultimately recommend should be scalable and versatile both horizontally and vertically across democracies everywhere at all levels of government.  The Commission has an opportunity to continue and maintain the digital democracy brand as a convening point for the sharing of free and open source software tools and knowledge globally.