Accountability is Power

I’m Rand Strauss (for all you newbies), an expert problem solver. I love talking about problem-solving in general, and especially what I found when I took a new look, deeply, into politics.

I want to talk about what I found: There’s a root cause for the problems in our American democracy.

The root cause is that politicians are not accountable to voters.

It turns out, for democracy to work reliably, politicians must be accountable to voters. Democracy can work if we mostly elect politicians who have an attitude of accountability and work hard to represent voters. But if the two parties fight constantly, representation suffers.

Without real accountability, politicians can’t get power from voters. This makes them need money to win elections. And they need parties to get legislation passed. They then end up being accountable to the wealthy and the parties. The lack of accountability to voters directly increases the power of money and the power of the parties.

Since politicians are accountable to the wealthy, the wealthy ensure legislation benefits them. The legislation voters want is either not a priority or is killed if it conflicts with what the wealthy want.

Politicians being accountable to the parties ensures that incumbents are reelected and political reform legislation is never even voted on. The parties are motivated to fight each other, even if it means creating lies and propaganda.

Accountability is a relationship. Relationships are made up of people communicating in certain roles. We don’t have the communication channels for politicians to be accountable to voters, so it doesn’t happen.

The reason I’m sharing this is that it leads right to a solution for our biggest problems. The solution is to build PeopleCount, a web platform to provide the communication channels that will reward politicians to be accountable to voters and empower voters to hold them accountable.

This is important because without adding accountability, things can easily get worse. With accountability, we can free Congress from gridlock so that together, we can solve our problems. We can free Congress from the corrupting power of money, and lessen the divisiveness of the parties.

I see a lot of people trying to win political battles. They spend their time and money fighting against other Americans. It’s mostly a stalemate, a waste. Spend just a fraction of that supporting PeopleCount and we can have an unbelievably better political system, government, and future.