A Digital Referendum for Colombia’s Diaspora.
About our first pilot in Colombia for those who found their political rights undermined at an historic moment, and what we found while doing it.
As an organization we were born with a knack for exploring the limits of what can be done through collective action. Sometimes we find them and we have to ask ourselves whether those limits make sense to our philosophy or not. Here’s we will unpack the limits we have found while working on Colombia’s historic decision.
On October 2nd the people of Colombia would vote in a referendum (a mechanism of civic participation) if they accepted or rejected the Peace Agreements reached by the Government and the Farc guerrillas, to put an end to armed conflict after the longest lasting civil war of the continent. As we all know now, 50,25% people said No, of the scarce 38% who voted.
We found that in the official referendum, 90% of the whole community of expats was left outside this big decision because of logistic problems. Colombia is one of the countries in the world that has more citizens living abroad. Official data estimates around 6 million. Among them just a 10% were registered to vote, and not because the rest didn’t want to: it was expensive for the government to allow new registers with so little time ahead.
A technical problem of this size and impact is first and foremost a political problem. The government decided they wouldn’t open for registrations, undermining a large part of its population’s right to vote. Crazy? Yes. Even more crazy if you consider the government did want people to vote! The stats show now that the very few expats who had the chance, voted for the yes. A preliminary conclusion could be that the government made a huge mistake.
We saw this in advance and with a number of civil society organizations in Colombia we launched plebiscitodigital.co for the Colombians living abroad to cast symbolic votes and let their country know they care about this important event, and let their government know this can’t happen again.
This experience was the first pilot of our platform for governance & decision-making, with components of deliberation, delegation of votes, drafting of proposals and options to custom each decision. The results are outstanding.
In the face of angry and perplexed reactions that resemble the post-Brexit drama significantly, we want to share with you our preliminary results and unpack three main limits we want to fight:
Sovereignty is shared equally.
Although it’s tempting to say now some groups were more entitled than others to make a decision -as some are doing after they saw regions affected by the war voting for the peace- truth is in a democracy all votes count the same. That is true too for the atonishingly large number of Colombians living abroad who faced barriers to participate in their country’s decision.
Around 7,000 people contacted us in just five days when the news about the Digital Referendum came out, asking how to participate. During the referendum we reached Colombians in 76 different countries. The abstention rates were very high, but the unknown number of people who wanted to vote and couldn’t do it is even greater. Think about how many expats left the country because of the conflict, and how they were left outside the decision.
In the digital age, diasporas are likely to keep growing as migration costs go down and opportunities flourish beyond the boundaries of Nation-States. Embassies and consulates usually have presence only in the capital city of a given country (if there’s any presence at all). Most citizens loose their right to participate once abroad. How is modern democracy going to acknowledge this issue on the 21st century?
Choices versus Intentions.
We need to allow people to participate more often and through the whole process of decision-making if we want real legitimacy. Asking ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to 52 years of negotiations seems a bit desproportionate and makes it very hard to know the reasons why people say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Democracy’s ultimate goal should be to reach a sweetspot that aims for two key things:
- The greatest amount of legitimacy in terms of guaranteeing participation of the full constituency being involved.
- The best possible outcome in the collective decision being made, in terms of either the financial performance of such decision in the case of a for profit organization, or insightful political criteria captured by the collective intelligence regarding social issues.
For this purpose the advantage of doing democracy in a digital form means that we should not limit ourselves to simply replicate what’s only possible with past technology, but rather use the new medium to take democracy to new heights.
With the Digital Referendum, we tested for the first time what’s commonly referred as liquid democracy. Instead of giving a voter the binary option of electing a choice, each voter had 100 votes allocated to be placed as they desire on each of the 7 open decisions of our referendum. Votes operate in the system as tokens, that can also be delegated to other users based on certain criteria as well.
We are aware that this model of democracy still has big challenges regarding User Experience (UX) in order to make the cognitive workload of managing votes as tokens as simple as possible. During this experience, we only saw 1.3% of the votes being delegated and on average each user assigned 10 votes per topic. Also we faced technical challenges considering this is the 0.01 release of a new software we are actively working on. But this experience offered us great insight on how to polish the UX and overall performance of the app to deliver a more robust and intelligent form of democracy.
Build electoral infrastructure for nuances, not polarization.
Half of the voters said yes, the other half said no. In between them there’s a solid wall because nothing else fits in between a universe of two opposting options.
Since it was a non-binding experiment, we allowed nuanced votes: people could vote and comment on each part of the agreement separately. The results there are amazing. Even though our message got spread mostly in networks of people closer to the “yes” and 89% voted accordingly, we observed a huge “no” in one of the agreements: the one about allowing proper political participation of the FARC guerrillas in the legislative power.
That gives us an idea of how much richer it would have fostered more participation during the negotiations and make all of the stakeholders discuss the nuances — not just the government and guerrillas — . No matter what the results are in the end, a less polarized decision-making process will help us avoid the rage and the maniqueist superstitions that come when people try to read a graph that says some regions voted for and some regions voted against something.
The angry and perplexed reactions of both post-Brexit and post-Colombia show how clueless people were about what others were thinking and feeling. It will be hard to overcome these limits if we insist in an infrastructure and a culture of participation in politics that permits only a binary vote every four years. Polarization, apathy and powerlessness are outcomes of a democracy in which sovereignty is reduced to a paper in a ballot box.
