In the 2014 Election Cycle, almost 96% of incumbents were re-elected to Congress.
I have a problem with that, and you should, too!
NOTE: The original version of “Voter’s Revenge” was abandoned. The re-imagined version is described here. Outsourcing of the re-imagined app, on an open source basis, and shoestring budget, was attempted, with embarrassing results.
Meanwhile, the need for a tool like Voter’s Revenge was well illustrated by events fighting covid mandates, long after Voter’s Revenge was conceived.
This is a wireframe of the reimagined version:
Reference (Politifact): Congress has 11% approval ratings but 96% incumbent reelection rate, meme says.
Voter’s Revenge (VR) is a new web based tool, which empowers the electorate vs. bad incumbents and candidates, who deserve to be removed from office (or never get there, in the first place). VR is part punitive vote bloc facilitator (users take voteslinger pledges to vote against a candidate or incumbent), and part punitive activism facilitator, which seeks to damage the future political prospects of a candidate or incumbent (users take wrangler pledges against a candidate or incumbent). The organizational unit which facilitates this (beautiful) trouble making is called a posse. Posses define issue-related redlines, the crossing of which triggers the punitive actions of the posse. Posse members can, and should, form lasting ties such that their political strength grows from election cycle to election cycle.
I don’t believe in bringing feather dusters to a gunfight. The government of the United States has been systemically corrupted, in great part due to the legalized bribery system of campaign contributions. The result has been a grossly dysfunctional democracy (the “best that money can buy”), which functions as a plutocracy. Relying on letters to Congress critters, petitions, and strategically inept “lesser of two evils” voting (where the choices are basically between Democratic and Republican candidates, who generally have the seal of approval of the corrupting Democratic and Republic donor bases) just doesn’t work. Not for the public, anyway. The system works well for the plutocracy, as it is intended to do, by the exploiters of the system.
A Day 1 implementation of Voter’s Revenge (VR) is coming very soon. It will be hosted as votersrevenge.org. This website (votersrevenge.info) will initially reprise the ‘historical’ blog posts that I’ve already posted on this subject at the political website correntewire.com. There has been significant design changes as compared to the original conception, well beyond ignoring features that will temporarily be left undone, in the interests of getting a useable “Minimum Viable Product”, out there. So read these historical blog posts with a grain of salt.
My initial hope was that interested parties, who opposed to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), would completely fund the development of VR, and I would donate my time in the role of business user. To this end, I attempted to contact the Sanders and Trump campaigns. There was no response from either party, so I then donned a software architect’s hat, and created many design artifacts to communicate my ideas to fellow programmers. These were released as an open source project on github. (I’m a software developer, not really a software architect.) When that effort was done, I then attempted to solicit support from a far larger number of parties that I though would be interested. However, the result was basically no response, at all. (There were actually 2 responses. It was obvious that one of the respondents hadn’t even read my solicitation. The other, from a talented software architect and developer, that I’ve worked with and for, was positive, but he was “knee deep” in other projects.)
Consequently, I started coding VR, by myself, and started keeping development private. My current thinking is to form a benefit corporation, and seek out private investors (who have a sense of public loyalty.) Ultimately, what matters most is whether or not VR can significantly empower the long-suffering electorate.
N.B.: Long after the original version of Voter’s Revenge was created (now retired), Pam Popper’s activism in reversing covid mandates has validated the effectiveness of the most severe type of activism that Voter’s Revenge supports, viz., credible threats to remove an incumbent from office, via support of a challenger. This belongs to the voteslinger role, in Voter’s Revenge. I quote Popper in A Motivational Overview of Voter’s Revenge. Says Popper:
Look, last time you won your election by a couple of thousand votes. We have almost 20,000 voters in your district, and if you don’t vote to impeach {?}, we’re going to take you out this November, and I brought a list of our registered voters so you can see that I’m serious. We could have had the impeachment done in a week, if we had that kind of thing {i.e., list of registered voters willing to vote incumbents out of office}. WE HAVE TO REALIZE, JUST LIKE WE LEARNED FROM THE LAWSUITS THAT DIDN’T WORK, WE HAVE TO LOOK AT – DECLARATIONS DIDN’T WORK; PETITIONS DON’T WORK; EMAILS DON’T WORK; AND EDUCATING POLITICIANS DOESN’T WORK WITH BIG PACKETS OF INFORMATION ABOUT HEALTH AND ALL THAT STUFF. NONE OF THAT WORKS. YOU KNOW WHAT WORKS? EDUCATION ABOUT TAKING THEM OUT. THAT’S THE LANGUAGE THEY UNDERSTAND. And so, one of the reasons we want to build this database is so that we can start undoing the medical tyranny that exists – these vaccine mandates in places like Oregon, and Washington and California and keep bad things from happening in the future. And unless we’re organized with 10’s of millions of people in our database, we will most certainly end up here, again.