Accountability has always been an issue with representative forms of government. How can you keep the representative in check with the opinions of his/her constituency? First off, the question is a bogus one, it is not possible for a single individual to represent the opposing views of everyone in his/her district. (S)He cannot vote yes and no on a bill to truly represent every one of his/her constituents. (S)He will end up voting however (s)he wants to, or the way his/her party tells him/her to vote.

     The theory of representing a constituency relies on a false assumption, that people in the same geographic region share common views. If I cannot even agree with my next-door neighbors, then I certainly am not going to agree with a thousand other people who live around me in the same district.

     But the fact that a person who is supposedly representing my views is taking stands which contradict my views is a very serious concern. It is a concern which has no resolution in modern legislatures: you just have to accept the decision of your representative. This is not a quality of an Ideal Legislature, so let's rectify the situation by talking about a second major quality of the new legislature, citizen ratification.

     As mentioned in the discussion about representation, this is where we start our search for a new synthesis between the two extremes of representational government and direct democracy. This is by far the most difficult part of an Ideal Legislature to implement, but I believe it can be done.

     Here is where we get into the nuts and bolts of how this would work.

     First off, we would reduce that ridiculous ratio of representative to citizen from 1 to 570,000 citizens to something more like 1 to 100 citizens. This not only allows everyone the opportunity to be a representative, but it also provides realistic access between citizens and their representatives. Many of you are probably doing some math in their heads right now, in 1992 the US had roughly 250 million people, and the world had 5.5 billion people. How are we supposed to accommodate 2.5 million legislators, let alone 55 million legislators . . . what a nightmare.

     First, we need to split the function of drafting legislation away from the function of ratification, or passing it into law. There is really no way to increase the number of representatives involved in the drafting of legislation, if millions of representatives all wanted to have their say on a bill before a final draft was completed, everyone would have died of old age before it could be voted on. Even if we limited 2.5 million legislators to 1 minute discussions, with speeches going on 24 hours a day, the debate would still take 5 years!

     However, we can have millions of legislators giving a simple thumbs up or thumbs down to a limited number of proposed bills. It would be possible to have millions of legislators involved in the ratification process. From the millions randomly selected to be representatives in the "ratification pool," 500-600 would be randomly selected from that pool to draft legislation.

     This leads to the second thing needed to accommodate millions of legislators, a secure computer network, and a computer in the home of every citizen. (Actually, this has been a goal of the current US Administration for a while, and was even mentioned in one of Clinton's State of the Union addresses.) Those representatives not selected to draft legislation would continue in their typical jobs, but would be legally required to vote yes or no on the proposed legislation from the capitol. They could do this from their home via computer.

     Now this is where the ratification process becomes even more interesting. Not only do we have millions of randomly selected representatives, which should be more than sufficient to stop lobbyists dead in their tracks, but there is also the possibility of each individual citizen disagreeing with their representative.

     The citizen not selected to be a representative has no obligation to be involved in the legislative process, but they can if they want to be. And if there is an issue that comes up which they feel strongly about (remember the "hot buttons" discussion), they can see how their representative voted on the bill. If they disagree with their representative, they can cast their single vote, then when the representative's vote is tallied into the final sum, it would be registered as 99 for/1 against. In other words, the representative's vote has the power of 1 for his own voice + however many of his 100 constituents who do not vote.

     If you disagree with your representative, you now have the power to take your portion of representation away from him. Or if you have a total aversion to politics, you can completely ignore it and let your representative do his thing. Now, when you are randomly selected to be a representative, like when you are selected for jury duty, you'll just have to "suck it up" and sacrifice a few evenings every week for a year. But that is the cost of a government of the people and by the people, citizen input.

     In order for interest groups to get legislation that benefits them, they have to do more than just appeal to the drafting body, because the drafting body would only have about 2% of the total votes needed to pass the bill into law. There would be no closed-door meetings in this system of legislature. The interest groups, in order to reach millions of legislators and citizens who can vote independently, are going to have to appeal to all of the citizens in order to get a law passed - indeed, the way democracy was meant to run.

     Those representatives in the "ratification pool" would have a limited ability to draft legislation, but it would be a different procedure as in the capitol. If a ratification representative had an idea for legislation (or one of his constituents requested some kind of bill), he would summarize the idea and place it on the Legislature Net in its appropriate category. Then, if enough of the other ratification representatives thought it was an idea worthy of legislation, they could sign their name to it. Then once the idea had, say, 5% of the representatives' signatures, the "drafting pool" at the capitol would be forced to take the issue up and work up some kind of formal bill for consideration.

     The way I see the ratification body and citizen ratification functioning, is that, once the drafting body has drafted a piece of legislation, and half of them have approved it, it is presented to the populace to be voted upon. The leadership of the proposing group and the leadership of the opposing group would both create brief presentations about why the bill should be passed or why it should not be.

     These presentations as well as the text of the bill would be on the Legislature Net for all to see and for all to vote upon. This would be where interest groups could come into play, including their research and reasoning into the presentations - making their case before the people. Both sides would have to be viewed before one could cast a vote.