Tech and the Vote to Intent Ratio

The vote to intent ratio is the proportion of total intentional government action that is driven by any voter filling their proportionate share of total government action. If the government can be crassly compared to a corporation, each citizen within that government would be a shareholder with an equal share of equity in the state. While the state is operated from revenue derived from citizens in their role as customers, their separate role as voters connotes some level of directional control. Each citizen is allocated an equal share of government action that they are ideally allotted, and appointed officials within agencies are generously assumed to be downstream of candidates that citizens voted for. If every government action could be clearly linked back to some form of citizen consent given in vote, there would be an extremely high vote to intent ratio. Interestingly, a direct democracy governed by majority vote would not have the highest vote to intent ratio. If 51% of the population wanted something and could erase the effective power of the other 49% of the vote, then at maximum the vote to intent ratio could be 51%. A dictatorship would fail even more dramatically, as only the intent of one citizen would be represented in governmental action. The dictator would maximize their rightful share as one of many millions of citizens, but no other citizen would exercise any of their share leading to an abysmally low vote to intent ratio. Some form of mediated democratic government would get the highest vote to intent ratio in most situations, as it still allows for some amount of the people’s vote while not letting 51% maximize their share to the detriment of the other 49%. Although unorthodox, the vote to intent ratio gets to the heart of an important question: how much of government action is being directed by the people that the government is supposed to serve. …