U.S. Citizens' Assembly Operations

3. Member Workforce Requirements

   No one can predict how many source Initiatives will be published, and how the rate of production will vary over time. There will probably be an initial flurry of activity, to which the USCIA should not over-react; subsequently, the rate will probably level off to a fairly uniform level with occasional peaks.

   One reference point is the State Initiatives. In California between 1976 and 1996, there were 106 statewide ballot initiatives, or an average of about ten and a peak of eighteen every two years. Speculation is that there may be on the order of 500 worthwhile proposed Initiatives per year—i.e., excluding those that are duplicative, trivial or disingenuous. Based on five days in Session per month, each USCIA working day about ten new proposed Initiatives will be processed. These will be reduced to about ten Candidate Initiatives placed before the Electorate every two years. By comparison, Congress (House plus Senate) has an average annual workload of about 4,500 bills introduced and 750 bills voted on. This indicates the different nature of the vast quantity of legislation produced in Congress compared with the few Initiatives that should be put to the Electorate.

   The work load of the Members can be adjusted by:

   1. Changing the number of days they work each month.

   2. Changing the number of Members between the minimum to maximum limits.

   3. Managing the backlog and setting priorities to keep the workload within the capabilities of the Members.

   4. Adjusting the minimum size of Citizen Groups that may propose Initiatives. It is initially set on the high-side to reduce the chance of an excessive number of Initiatives shortly after the Assembly first convenes.

   5. Adjusting the Initiative Submittal Fee and the publication Media cost.

   This permits the Assembly to adjust itself to accommodate a wide range of possible future fluctuations and eventualities within its constitutional authorization.

Based on the above, the best starting size of probably 480, with Assembly authority to fine-tune the number up between 300 and 600. 300 is the size of the smallest of the national assemblies listed above. 600 is the size of the largest national assemblies excluding the U.K.

The initial number 480 is:

1. Selected primarily because it is the average of national assemblies in developed countries, so it will be manageable and adequate to represent the People.

2. Slightly larger than the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, but not by much.

3. At the low end but acceptable for a reasonable nationwide poll given the quality of the random sample.

4. Reasonably close to a large deliberative poll®*—e.g., the "National Issues Convention" conducted by the University of Texas January18-21, 1996 and televised by PBS.

5. Very close to the size of the Athenian Council of Five Hundred.

6. If the Assembly continues to use a monthly Member replacement schedule, 480 is divisible by 12 requiring a convenient "round number" of 40 members per month (plus any who have left before their one-year term was complete). Thus, it is unnecessary to round up or down to whole members. Otherwise, 500 members would be an equally acceptable starting size.

Assuming that an Article V Convention of the States decides the final wording of the Amendment, they would have the power to increase the number of Members to 580-600 if they felt all States had to have one Member on average. Of course, they would also have to increase the budget accordingly.

Member Education and Citizen Demographics

The Citizen Assembly is a random sample of the people—an exact transcript of the whole society. By comparison, Congress is overwhelmingly composed of white male lawyers. The education of the USCIA Members will be about:

1. 84 percent of the population 25 years old and over have completed high school.

2. 26 percent have completed 4 or more years of college and 21 percent hold bachelor's degrees.

3. 6 percent hold a master's degree.

4. 2 percent hold a professional degree (e.g., medicine or law) or other doctoral degree.

In the USCIA, the sexes will be equally represented (whereas in Congress, women have only a quarter of their fair share of members):

1. 51 percent Female (vs. about 12.5 percent in Congress).

2. 49 percent Male (vs. about 87.5 percent in Congress).

The USCIA racial representation will be about:

1. 69.1 percent White (vs. about 88.6 percent in Congress).

2. 12.5 percent Hispanic or Latino of any race (vs. about 3.4 percent in Congress).

3. 12.3 percent Black or African American (vs. about 6.9 percent in Congress).

4. 3.6 percent Asian (vs. about 0.9 percent in Congress).

5. 0.9 percent American Indian or Alaska Native (vs. about 0.2 percent in Congress).

6. 0.1 percent Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander (vs. about 0 percent in Congress).

The population under 18 years of age is about 25.7 percent, who are not included in the USCIA. It is not feasible for minors to participate regularly at USCIA meetings. At a minimum, their parents are fairly represented on the USCIA and will represent their children. The USCIA may take the initiative to seek out the views of the minors in some reasonable manner.

The numbers highlight that:

1. Congressional membership is 12.5 percent female and 87.5 percent male; i.e., a compositional sexual bias in which males outnumber females by a factor of seven times.

2. Congressional membership is 11.4 percent non-white, whereas the total non-whites make up 30.9 percent of the U.S. population; i.e., a compositional racial bias in which non-whites are under-represented in Congress by a factor of 2.7 times.

Member Skills

Membership will change each month, so there will be constant change in available skill sets. Many skills will be available in small quantity among the Membership. However, essential skills that are unavailable from the Members will be obtained from outside consultants. For example, the design, development and maintenance of the USCIA's computer system will be almost entirely contracted. Similarly, legal advice on the Initiatives and on Citizen Assembly activities will usually have to be contracted. Nevertheless, Initiatives legal issues should usually be modest because the USCIA is expected (but not obliged) to stay away from complex legislation, which is much more the business of Congress.

One of the objections to the USCIA concept is that randomly selected citizens will not be up to the job. The section on the Wisdom of the Assembly shows that there is every reason to believe that it can do the job very well. The fundamental basis of democracy is that the voters can be trusted make reasonable common sense decisions; otherwise they would be better off with some form of dictatorship. Time and time again it is proven that they have a high degree of common sense, even though they may not have the education or prestige of the elite. A jury of twelve routinely decides on matters of life and death or make civil decisions involving huge amounts of money. The USCIA will be forty times a large as a trial jury, and will have access to expert help and advice whenever it wants it. People rise to the occasion, and there is good reason to trust their combined judgment to act in the United States' best interests—arguably more reason than those representatives who have been subject to influence of special interests groups and their lobbyists for their reelection and political careers.

Members who are less able to read, those with various handicaps, and Citizens with English as a second language will serve an additional unique and valuable service by helping to ensure that the Candidate Initiatives are clear and comprehensible to the largest possible proportion of the Electorate.

Deliberative Assembly

The USCIA will operate as a deliberative Assembly for much of its work. The term deliberative here means simply that, as compared with the People as a whole, the Members within the institutional context of the Assembly will become better educated about the issues by information from various sources. They will split into smaller groups (Deliberative Task Forces) to discuss and refine their views, and perhaps modify their opinions if they do not stand up to debate.

The deliberative process has been well studied academically and in polls. After the deliberative process, participants have more thoughtful and wiser views ^{(BCCA, PBS, Fishkin, McCombs & Reynolds, et al)}.

"At the heart of the deliberative conception of democracy is the view that collective decision-making is to proceed deliberatively—by citizens advancing proposals and defending them with considerations that others, who are themselves free and equal, can acknowledge as reasons. ...Citizens...owe one another reasons, and owe attention to one another's reasons." ^{(Cohen and Sabel, p327)}

'Most important, it offers a face-to-face democracy not of elected members of a legislature, but of ordinary citizens who can participate on the same basis of political equality as that offered by the assembly or town meeting. It provides a statistical model of what the electorate would think if, hypothetically, all voters had the same opportunities that are offered to the sample in the deliberative opinion poll..." ^{(Fishkin, p4)}

A deliberative Assembly consisting of a cross-section of ordinary citizens will be able to make value tradeoffs relevant to their lives that would be difficult for Congresspersons to accomplish since they belong to an entirely different socio-economic class. (For example, in the 2002 Congress, 27 of the 63 freshmen—43 percent—declared holdings that exceeded $1 million, compared with 1 percent of the American public ^{(Salant, AP)}. For another example, lawyers comprise about 40 percent of congress, about 100 times more than in the population at large.)

When the Assembly places a Candidate Initiative on the ballot, their views will be attached. The Electorate will find their views to be well considered, and will generally pay them close attention, substantially offsetting mush of the hysteria raised in the Media.

Limits of the Assembly's Capabilities

It can be argued ^{(Leib, Callenbach)} that a randomly selected deliberative Assembly could approve initiatives or enact laws directly, without going to vote by nationwide Electorate. Some advantages are:

1. Such laws would be made by well informed Assembly Members rather than a less informed Electorate.

2. The problem of overburdening the Electorate is avoided, so the Assembly could pass many more laws than in the planned Solution.

There are many reservations to giving such powers to a voter assembly and it is doubtful that such a large step is feasible. For example:

1. It is less consistent with the constitutional framework, where the ultimate authority and source of power to make legitimate final decisions is the People, not a random sample of the People—which is not mentioned in the Constitution.

2. A random sample is small enough that it is possible a few charismatic activists might be able to control the Assembly for long enough to approve an unwise Initiative. The People can correct such error by voting against the Initiative. (Of course, the People may occasionally be similarly influenced. But, if the People make the mistake, it is their right.)

3. The Constitution's Guaranty Clause states that: "The United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union a republican form of government". While adoption of an Initiative by the People is arguably within their purview as the ultimate authority under the Constitution, such a claim is harder to argue for a random sample of the People.

4. The adoption of an Initiative by the Assembly followed by a vote by the nationwide Electorate provides an effective check and balance that is entirely consistent with the Constitution.

5. When an Initiative is passed by the nationwide Electorate, it psychologically and morally binds the entire Electorate to make their decision work, whereas passage by the Assembly has far less psychological and moral force and cannot expect the same public commitment.

6. The voter assembly members are not as qualified as professional congresspersons to formulate the mass of complex legislation needed to run the country. However, they are far better qualified to ensure that the People's interests are properly protected by means of the relatively small amount of initiative legislation that nationwide voters can assimilate.

7. The initiatives are generated by both U.S. citizen groups and U.S. organizations. They will vary greatly in scope and quality. Many will be quickly eliminated from further consideration while others will be of professional quality and importance equal to any produced by government. The Assembly will obtain whatever information and advice it deems necessary and will advance those in the best interests of the People.

8. It is an even larger step than the Planned Solution, and would be even harder to achieve.

Consequently, this Amendment Solution limits the Assembly to managing only the choosing of the Initiatives, and the People make the decision to approve them or not.

Duty of Members and Compensation

For jury duty, even though this is usually of short duration and does not involve being away from home for protracted periods, it is common for high-salary people to employ a lawyer to have them excused. Easy avoidance of duty is unacceptable for Citizen Assembly Members, because they are chosen to be a representative sample of the Electorate. For example, excusing someone with a doctoral degree would mean that there is only one chance in 50 that a new randomly selected person would have similar qualifications. USCIA duty must be regarded more in line with a conscript military duty, where absence without leave is punishable by time in prison. Therefore, excessive hardship must be proven in court to be excused USCIA duty.

Members will experience some discomforts and impositions. They will probably have little free time during USCIA sessions. They will have to take leave of absence from their jobs for a part of every month for one year. They will not receive privileges such as college tuition for military service or veterans benefits. Consequently, they must receive a high enough compensation that the large majority of Members will not find it an unreasonable imposition.

There is another important compensation—prestige and achievement. When the records are made public, if the Member wishes, a Members' service will be acknowledged in the USCIA records along with the accomplishments of that particular USCIA period. A USCIA culture will evolve to define and encourage this. Moreover, the USCIA will offer to repeal this constitutional Amendment so the achievements of these years will be the early Members' legacy to the nation.

Frequency of Votes by Electorate

Voting on Initiatives will occur on every even year, concurrently with the federal election. This is the easiest and most economical frequency. However, if the people find Initiatives to be an important improvement to their democracy and if future technological advances make elections less expensive, it is possible that an annual vote will be more appropriate. One of the factors that will enter into the evaluation is the turnout of the voters. It may be that the Initiatives alone increase the turnout, or it may be that eventually some form of tax or other incentive will compensate those who take the time and trouble to fulfill their citizens duty to vote, and possibly penalize those who do not. After a thorough evaluation of the costs and impacts, the Citizen Assembly has the authority to place a Direct Initiative before the Electorate to change the frequency.

Information Technologies and Automation

Two Initiative databases linked only by key(s) will be developed and maintained to track all proposed Initiatives and Citizens' feedback through their progress. This will be needed urgently from the start.

1. The external Initiative database will be public information readable from the Internet and conveniently organized. Publishers that have committed to publishing and reporting on proposed Initiatives will accept only the USCIA standard forms, will publish them in that form, and will concurrently provide their data in electronic form to the Assembly to build the external database.

2. The internal Initiative database will be confidential, updateable and accessible only to the Assembly. However, it must be kept simple to use, as many Members will not be computer literate and will need help. It should use software with which the majority of those Members who are computer literate are familiar. A help desk should be provided and the more experienced Members will generally help others.

An off-the-shelf SQL database engine should be able to provide basic storage and data entry capabilities in a few months if highly competent consultants are employed; refinements can be added later. If the newspaper(s) will provide their Initiatives sections in electronic form, which should be possible to arrange, this will help populate the database. The status of each Initiative should be tracked, and the drafts kept from the time of original communication through the various stages of rejection or to final ratification. The Initiatives must be given key words and phrases. They should be identified by primary index and search indices etc. A complete text search should be provided. Needless to say, reliability, backup, security, virus Trojans, worms, protection, prevention of DOS attack, etc. are all important considerations, and at least one off-site backup is mandatory.

The Assembly's web site should be placed with a large Internet Service Provider offering 24x7 service with redundancies and large Internet channel capacity. Only publicly published data such as the publicly-visible portion of the proposed initiative database should be housed there. It will contain Proposed Initiatives, Revisions, Comments, and other forms to enable citizens to propose initiatives in a standard format that can be automatically added to the database (but not submitted to the Assembly except via the Publishers).

The appeal of on-line democracy should be limited and expectations managed from the beginning to avoid multiplication of risks and potential for overload of Assembly resources. From an early date, the external database should include a capability for Citizens to debate the issues—e.g., to comment on proposed initiatives  or on other Citizen's comments, and to participate in public opinion polls about the proposed initiatives (when this can be done reliably). The information provided in this manner will be used only to advise the Assembly—the Assembly has no obligation to act on or respond to the public debate, though useful information or advise may affect the thinking of some Members. Once the Assembly operations have stabilized, the Members can review the state-of-the-art and add features that can advance Assembly performance and better meet the People's expectations.

Note that the issue of Internet voting on the general election ballots is an entirely separate issue. Moreover, there is currently no proven technology that permits Citizens to be identified uniquely and prevent abuse or to ensure "one-vote per voter". These issues are independent of and not a part of this Planned Solution.

The computer system will probably be a straightforward set of a few local area networks on a single domain with single-point fire-walled broadband Internet access. All email, browsers, and faxes should go through specific recording servers so that any misuse or tampering with the Assembly or other outside influence may be detected or at least evidence gathered after the fact. A standard suite of office functions should be provided using features with which Members are most likely to be familiar. All host computers should be interchangeable (i.e., central logon and profile), and arranged in a few rooms where Members can have easy but secure access to their user and groups' information from any host. It will probably be sufficient to start with the number of host computers equal to about a third of the number of Members.

The computer system must be capable of entire and safe relocation in about a week, since it will probably be moved periodically to new USCIA facilities. Cabling should be kept as unobtrusive as possible without significant structural intrusion or potential hazard. Wireless connections should only be considered if that technology has been used in a similar manner in large financial organizations such as banks and proven truly to be secure without labor-intensive support.

It is anticipated that the USCIA will let a contract for the computer system design, high-level (i.e., minimal hand coding) programming, installation, operation and maintenance. However the contract cannot stay with the same company for a long time to avoid entrenched support personnel or organizations. All aspects of the computer system and software must be off-the-shelf generics and standardized to the maximum degree to minimize the learning curve and facilitate inter-application data transfer. A formal hand-written or printed up-to-date hard-copy ledger will be kept of all changes and complete detailed logs will be kept containing all information necessary for a new contractor immediately to manage the system. All key information kept on-site will be stored in a re-locatable high-quality fire safe for general papers, a security safe, and a magnetic media fire safe.

A single platform should be used for the efficiency and convenience of the Assembly even if this means sole-sourcing all the hardware and software—multiple hardware and software vendors would present onerous complications due to mandated turnover in users, service personnel and locations. The exception to this would be to install a few machines for a small minority of Members who would find the transition to another operating system environment to be an onerous learning curve. However, these exception hosts must only be allowed if they can incorporate applications that enable them to access and write the same data as the other hosts (without any data manipulation or conversion being provided by the Assembly's computer system or not-of-the-shelf software written by the Assembly's consultants). Duplication of data and effort must be avoided.

Behavior of Members

Whenever a group of strangers are gathered together for important business, as with a Jury, their behavior will be variable; that is the way it is in the real world, and the Citizen Assembly is made up of a random sample of us. The USCIA has the responsibility to maintain reasonable standards of behavior. Members' oath of duty imply a substantial level of dignity and civility, this will be reinforced by peer pressure, then controlled by our normal societal means and, in the last resort, by expelling a Member.

Typical USCIA Facilities

In addition to the facility details specified in the constitutional Amendment and Assembly Rules, it is anticipated that the Citizen Assembly will choose hotel/motel facilities that they will negotiate for one year. They will be located in a pleasant geographic area. Members will need reasonable facilities for normal shopping, recreation, entertainment, etc. A pool of automobiles (not marked or distinctive) should be rented for Members' use while the Assembly is in session.

Restaurant facilities will be required. Bedrooms accommodations should each have television and possibly a small kitchen area. Bedrooms will not have Internet access. A year-round pool and gym should be available.

Research, study and computer facilities may be spread through several adjacent rooms. At least 32 rooms will be needed that can seat 15+ persons for small-group deliberation. The fully-equipped main conference room should seat 500+.

For security reasons, the main facilities should be such that they can be guarded and access can be restricted. Access via the lobby will be fully monitored. Accessibility will be from interior hallways, and all exits will have no re-entry. Room telephones will be available for outgoing telephone calls only, and they may be monitored; Members will not be permitted to bring cell or portable phones. No internet connections will be provided in the rooms, nor will Members be allowed to bring their own computers, fax machines, or equivalent communications devices.

When the USCIA is not in Session, the facilities containing their equipment and records will be locked, secured and guarded.

Typical Proposed Initiative Format

There are some requirements that proposed Initiatives should follow. They are set forth in the constitutional Amendment Section 2, and in the Citizen Assembly Rules under Content and Format of Candidate Initiatives and Sources. The following table will provide a suggested layout. When the proposed Initiative is published in a newspaper to communicate it to the USCIA, all the information must be complete including the certification by a Notary Public.