The Big Hitch in Lawrence Lessig's Plan to "'Occupy' AmericansElect.org"
There is a moment, about two and a half minutes in
to Buddy Roemer's appearance with Americans Elect advisory board member Lawrence Lessig last month,
on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" (video), when Roemer
very emphatically — in a way that makes it clear that
this is the one message he wants the audience to remember — says:
"And the issue is reform — the issue is reform."
This dovetails very conveniently — perhaps
a little too conveniently — with Lessig's own
message in his compelling new pocket treatise,
One Way Forward, in which Lessig calls for citizens
to "'occupy' AmericansElect.org." Lessig discussed
this with the historian and journalist Colin Woodard,
for a piece that appeared a few weeks ago in the Washington Monthly.
Specifically, Lessig writes (emphases mine):
Become a delegate. Today. Make reform your number-one issue. Work to convince other AE delegates that this number-one issue for you should be the number-one issue for Americans Elect. And then cast your ballot only for a candidate who promises reform first.
Lay aside, for a moment, the fact that, in promoting —
and, indeed, campaigning with — Buddy Roemer as the "reform" candidate for whom Americans Elect delegates should be casting,* while at the same time serving in an official capacity as member of the Board of Advisors of Americans Elect, Lessig is in violation of both the spirit and the letter of the corporation's strict policy on neutrality (Section 10 of the corporate Rules and Sections 4.12 and 6.1 of the By-Laws).
Lessig's plan calls for Americans Elect delegates to use AmericansElect.org as the mechanism through which to identify and organize as "reform" delegates, and then to vote for a "reform" candidate.
Could Lessig's Web-based plan actually work?
:: :: ::
NOT IF Americans Elect delegates would be relying on the Americans Elect Web site, to know what candidates mean by "reform."
Let's take another walk in the weeds, shall we?
Click in to any candidate profile at AmericansElect.org, and you'll see a list of nine "Priorities" — Economy, Education, Energy, Environment, Foreign Policy, Health Care, Immigration, Reform, and Social Issues — each with a numerical percentage that is meant to indicate the relative importance of that Priority to the candidate.
Screenshot from AmericansElect.org
Americans Elect uses this same list of nine Priorities to organize a much longer list of hundreds of multiple-choice questions — called the "True Colors" survey — that the corporation invites delegates to answer at AmericansElect.org (under "Colors"). Each question is identified as an Environment question, a Foreign Policy Question, a Reform question, and so on.
At the outset of this True Colors process, delegates
are asked to "Rank Your Priorities," then are invited
to answer nine "core questions," one question for each
of the Priorities.
The Web site uses these nine answers and self-
rankings to generate, for each delegate, a ranked
listing of "matches" — declared and draft candidates who, according to the "matching algorithm" at AmericansElect.org, most closely share the Priorities
of the delegate.
So, one would think that the definitions of the Priorities themselves — for example, the framing of "Reform" that Americans Elect uses for delegates and the framing of "Reform" that it uses for candidates — should, well...match. Yes?
Think again.
:: :: ::
DELEGATES who begin the True Colors process are shown a wheel, like a pie — with each slice representing one of the nine Priorities.
Adjacent to the pie is a set of nine draggable sliders, each slider corresponding to one of the Priorities. As the delegate adjusts all of the sliders to reflect how s/he "ranks" the Priorities, the pie slices fill up with colors to reflect this weighting.
Screenshot from AmericansElect.org (click to read "Reform" pop-up)
Hovering over either the "Reform" slice of the pie or the "Reform" slider reveals the following explanatory pop-up text, which obviously is intended to guide the delegate in deciding how to rank this Priority:
Government regulation, campaign finance reform, judicial reform, legislative reform, electoral reform
Which is what most people — including Lessig — mean by "reform."
And, as one gets deeper into the True Colors survey,
the "Reform" questions do cover these sorts of issues.
But, once a delegate has completed the "Rank Your Priorities" section, the initial "core question" on
"Reform" — the one Americans Elect uses to help establish a delegate's candidate "matches" — would seem to have little at all to do with the establishing commonsense framing of "Reform" that is used
in the pop-up.
Screenshot from AmericansElect.org (click to read "Reform" question)
Which of the following comes closest to
your personal opinion?
A. To make this country great, we should return to the examples and values of our forefathers.
B. This country is already great, we shouldn't change a thing.
C. To make this country great, we should keep building and adapting for the future.
:: :: ::
HERE'S where things start to get complicated.
Go to any candidate profile, and you'll see that the ambiguous "Reform" question and responses above are the same ones that Americans Elect uses to tell delegates and the public (1) what "reform" means to a given candidate and, given that definition, (2) how important "reform" is to the candidate.
Screenshot from AmericansElect.org (click to read "Reform" question)
But the candidates have not framed or answered this question themselves. Nor have they assigned their own ranking to the Priority to which this or any other of the questions and answers are meant to correspond.
Rather, Americans Elect pulls this information from OnTheIssues.org, a Web-based research service that tries to sift the votes and public statements of political figures into a matrix of various ranges of answers to questions.
The "answers" are not the actual answers of these figures. Rather, they are symbolic answers created by the On the Issues service; and these "answers" correspond to equally symbolic keywords and phrases, also developed by the service, to which the service has assigned actual "citations," in the form of a political figure's votes and public statements.
In other words: On the Issues has "plugged in" to its
own framework — as represented by its "questions" and "answers" — the on-the-record votes and comments of political figures.
Evidently, Americans Elect has contracted with On
the Issues to create, for the candidate profiles that appear at AmericansElect.org, a special "cut" of nine Priorities questions (and corresponding "answers") — based on the existing OnTheIssues.org database — called the "AmericansElect quiz." A "10th question" creates the relative weighting of candidates' "responses" to the first nine. These weightings are the percentages that appear in the Priorities graphic in Americans Elect candidate profiles.
From the explanation of the "AmericansElect quiz" at OnTheIssues.org (emphases mine):
The 10th question is the "weighting" for the first nine quiz questions. We weight the questions based on the relative number of citations for each question. If a candidate talks a lot about a particular issue, we include more citations on that issue; and hence that question gets weighted more....we infer each candidate's relative importance of an issue by how often that candidate talks about the issue....
We use a "framework for analysis" to associate each citation to an answer choice. For each possible quiz answer, we list keywords that
we associate with that answer choice. If a politician talks about the issue using the keyword listed below, we assign that answer (assuming the rest of the citation hints at that same answer — keywords might also
be used negatively!).
So, in theory, AmericansElect.org could flag someone as a "reform" candidate, simply because that person had spoken in ways that criticized "reform" or that ridiculed "reformers," and had spoken in these ways — a lot — using words and phrases that rang the bell of the On the Issues "framework for analysis."
:: :: ::
BUT HERE'S WHERE the wheels really fall off of Lessig's plan — at least, to the extent that Lessig seems to see AmericansElect.org as a sufficient logistical resource for Americans Elect delegates committed to "reform," as he defines it, to identify, support and vote for an Americans Elect candidate who shares the same commitment.
Bear in mind that it is the Americans Elect corporation that has decided that this question...
Which of the following comes closest to your personal opinion?
coupled with one of these three "answers"...
A. To make this country great, we should return to the examples and values of our forefathers.
B. This country is already great, we shouldn't change a thing.
C. To make this country great, we should keep building and adapting for the future.
are all that any Americans Elect delegate needs to
know, in order to:
1
determine both what Candidate X basically
means by "reform" and, given that definition,
what "priority" that candidate places on
"reform"; and to
2
trust that the candidates that Americans Elect
"matches" to her, using this information, are
indeed reliable matches.
Recall, however, that On the Issues generates a political figure's "answers" by associating his or her specific on-the-record citations — votes, public statements — with one or more keywords and phrases that On the Issues has selected to signify that "answer."
Only by taking stock of all the keywords and phrases
that drive the three "answers" to the question on "Reform" can one fully understand how Americans
Elect is using the term "reform" on its Web site.
Why this matters: Since Americans Elect uses this
same question-and-"answers" combo on "Reform,"
both in candidate profiles and as the "core question"
on "Reform" in the delegate True Colors survey, the meaning of "reform" on which this Q-and-"A" trades features prominently in how Americans Elect uses "reform" to make delegate-candidate "matches" at AmericansElect.org.
So, here, from the "AmericansElect quiz" at OnTheIssues.org — question number 9 — is the
"Reform" question and the "answers," together with
the corresponding bulleted keywords and phrases that explain what the "answers" really mean.
You won't find this at AmericansElect.org.
Which of the following comes closest to your personal opinion?
A. To make this country great, we should return to the examples and values of our forefathers.
- Founding Principles
- Citing Founding Fathers
- Citing original Constitution
- Remove 10th amendment / 14th amendment
- "No foreign entanglements" (as a constitutional principle rather than as unilateralism)
- Free trade (if an issue of principle rather than a specific trade agreement)
B. This country is already great, we shouldn't change a thing.
- Maintain our sovereignty
- Support our troops
- American first
- Love it or leave it
- America is unique / light on the hill / an idea / shining city
- American exceptionalism
- American armed forces second to none
- Peace through strength
- Increase defense spending
- Restrict free trade (if on principle rather than a specific trade agreement)
C. To make this country great, we should keep building and adapting for the future.
- No Pax Americana
- No American empire
- End military adventurism
- Don't police the world
- America's long-term future
- Close all / most U.S. bases abroad
- Reduce American armed forces
- Decrease defense spending
- Free trade benefits both sides (if on principle rather than a specific trade agreement
:: :: ::
THIS DRILL-DOWN is what lies beneath the "Reform" Priority in the online profile of every declared and draft candidate at AmericansElect.org.
Two things stand out. First: An Americans Elect candidate presented as picking "answers" A, B or C still could be presented as a candidate of "reform" — even though these "answers" can be diametrically opposed.
Second: The notion of "reform" that emerges here has to do with U.S. military and defense (and, to a lesser degree, trade) policy as refracted through various competing ideas about war and peace; nation building; and empire.
This obscure framing of "Reform" has nothing to do with the commonsense framing — "government regulation, campaign finance reform, judicial reform, legislative reform, electoral reform" — that Americans Elect uses to invite a delegate to consider how to rank "Reform" as a Priority, in the first section of the True Colors survey.
Nor, in guiding a delegate directly from this "Rank
Your Priorities" section of the survey to a "core questions" section in which the "Reform" question is wired to the obscure framing, does the interface at AmericansElect.org either (1) alert the delegate to the disconnect or (2) explain the connections between (a) the obscure framing, (b) the echo of the obscure framing in the candidate profiles, (c) the "AmericansElect quiz" at OnTheIssues.org, and (d) the use of both the obscure and the commonsense framing in the Americans Elect delegate-candidate "matching algorithm."
To be clear: On the "Reform" Priority, this "matching algorithm" is wired for failure. The algorithm seeks to make the closest delegate-candidate correlations, using for each a combined index of (1) one's perspective on "Reform" and (2) the level of importance that one attaches to that perspective, relative to one's perspective on eight other Priorities. For candidates, both the "perspective" and the "level" sides of the index are
based on the obscure framing of "Reform." But, for the delegate, the "level" side of the index is pegged to the commonsense framing and the "perspective" side to the obscure. Under these conditions, it simply is not possible for the algorithm to generate a reliable delegate-candidate "match" on "Reform."
Most problematic for Lawrence Lessig, this obscure military-defense-trade framing of "Reform" is not, in any way, the notion of reform that Lessig had in mind when he called on citizens to "'occupy' AmericansElect.org,"
in part, by using the site to identify and "cast [their] ballot[s] only for a candidate who promises reform first."
Lessig's chosen candidate, Buddy Roemer, told Joe Scarborough — twice in a row — that "the issue is reform."
But it's hard to imagine that Lessig has done his due diligence on this. Even Buddy Roemer right now is listed in his profile at AmericansElect.org as having made the "Economy" — not "Reform" — his top Priority.
Screenshot from AmericansElect.org (click to enlarge)
And, as we've seen, even if Roemer was flagged on his profile with the icon showing "Reform" as his "Highest Priority," it wouldn't mean what Lessig means.
The truth is, it's highly unlikely that delegates will be able to "'occupy' AmericansElect.org" for reform.
But, if they wish to try, they won't be able to use the Americans Elect Web site to find out who the true
reform candidates are.
* Lessig, in One Way Forward, also promotes Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz as a possible Americans Elect "reform" candidate.