How Well Do You Know Your Representative?

[dsernst]

Our Founding Fathers, here in this country, brought about the only true revolution that has ever taken place in man’s history.

Every other revolution simply exchanged one set of rulers for another set of rulers. But only here did that little band of men so advanced beyond their time that the world has never seen their like since, evolve the idea that you and I have within ourselves the God-given right and the ability to determine our own destiny.

— President Ronald Reagan, 1961

Representative democracy depends on being able to trust our elected officials to represent us.

But the distance between a constituent and their representative has grown to unprecedented levels. During the American Revolution, our system of Congressional representatives was designed with one representative for 30,000 citizens. Today that number is closer to 1-to-a-1,000,000.

It's rare that we have know our representatives, and this distance breeds mistrust.

What if we could bring that distance back down? That's one of the promises of liquid democracy.

Instead of being forced to pick between two people we only know from highly scripted performances, we could elevate the people we already know and trust to represent us.

And because of the scale of modern technology, we can do this nationwide, at low cost.

The idea of 6 degrees of separation shows how just a select few of these connections, stacked on top of each other, can bridge the gaps across society.