data.bythebay.io: Matt Mahan, Let's Build Civic Tech to Scale Democracy for a Better Future
So, if you get sleepy and um start tuning out, I'm just going to flash this guy up here to wake you all up. You knew I had to reference Trump today, right? So, um stay awake or he comes back up. Okay. Um, so my uh my my name again is Matt Mayan. I'm the co-founder and the CEO of Brigade. We're um based here in San Francisco. We're not too far from here, about a 10-minute walk down toward the ballpark. And um just really excited to be here today
And and I'm, you know, personally, my background is in community organizing, political campaigning. I've worked in government. I've worked for for candidates. Um, I grew up here in the Bay Area, worked in, uh, county government down in Santa Clara County when I was in high school. Um, I've been involved in organizing for a long time. uh having grown up here in the Bay Area and then also having been at Harvard and in the same dorm with the guys who started Facebook, I always felt in life like technology was this sort of parallel path that I was just kind of watching very interested in. But but my passion was always around politics and and how we empower people to act collectively to make their world a better place. And so I got an opportunity um a while back to join a company called Causes, which was an early Facebook application
And that was the first time that I really in a deep way got to combine my passion for organizing people and for political change with a proper technology company that was building new tools and new ways for people to access information, share information, and um communicate and take action together. Um and then about two years ago, we some of us who were involved in causes then decided to start Brigade to really go directly at the problem of what I would consider to be our broken democracy, which is what I'm going to talk about today. I'm going to talk a little bit about why I think our political system is broken, the way in which it's broken, and why um and try to describe that problem pretty thoroughly because I think as all of us who build tools and technologies know, the better you can understand and describe the problem, the uh the better the solution ultimately ends up being. And so I want to focus a bit on that and then toward the end I'll talk a little bit about how I think we can leverage technology and not even crazy rocket sciency stuff. I think in a lot of ways it's it's fairly basic information and communication technology that's been applied in a lot of other sectors, but really we've we've underinvested in when it comes to government and uh and democracy. And so I'm going to speak a little bit about how I think we can leverage those technologies to change the world. And I'm going to hope to end by inspiring you all to to take up this challenge. So thank you again for having me
Really um really a pleasure to be here and excited to speak a little bit together this morning. And we should have a little time at the end to do Q&A if uh if people have questions. Great. Okay. So, let's let's jump into it. Um so, my my first line here appropriately is that uh you I think our democracy is broken and we can't blame Donald Trump for it. As convenient as that might be for those of us living in this liberal bubble of San Francisco, I don't think we can blame Donald Trump for what's what's wrong with our political system. If anything, I think that this political uh I'm sorry, this primary season should remind us, it's a very important reminder that many Americans are disillusioned with our political system
They're angry. They feel disenfranchised and they're angry with the media as well that is meant to hold our political system accountable. I think we're witnessing the culmination of many decades of popular fear that our political institutions and our systems don't work for ordinary people anymore. They're no longer willing or able to be responsive to the needs of most people. And so stepping back and looking at the system rather than blame immigrants or demagogues or corporations or big government or the the boogeyman of your choice. Um, I think this crisis of democracy stems from a much more mundane problem and a problem that those of us in technology are pretty uniquely positioned to address. And that problem is the failure to scale our political system. Um, those the systems of voting, of representation, of decisionm uh in tandem with growth in our society
And this chart really understates the increase in population is one thing. And I think actually it's the increase as you'll see in a moment in the complexity of our society that has made it really difficult for ordinary people to plug into that political system. So as the as the US has increased in size and complexity over our history of over 200 years now the political system which was originally designed for a much smaller world has become less accessible, less transparent and less accountable to voters than I think our founders originally intended it to be. We've um you know the good news is we've eliminated a lot not all but most legal barriers to participation. Women, ethnic and racial minorities, people without property if you go all the way back to the beginning are all able to vote today uh fairly freely. And that's a huge advance. But I'd argue that as society's gotten bigger, more people are participating, things have gotten more complex, um, and our political system has tried to scale with the complexity of society, I'd argue that the depth and the quality of our participation has actually declined over time. And I think we I think we must innovate to solve this problem
And I I don't think I'm going to get a lot of push back uh here from this group that that's that that's right. But before we get into that, I I really want to talk a bit more about how and why the average voter got pushed to the sidelines of our system because I think that context is really important for understanding our problems today and how we can fix them. So when when America was founded, the world was a relatively small and intimate place. At the time, the largest colonial city was Philadelphia with a grand total of 28,000 people. the entire country, everyone in the country was smaller than the population of present day Phoenix, Arizona, believe it or not. And in 1790, each member of the House of Representatives only had about 30,000 constituents. And because of some of the limitations I was just referencing a moment ago, only 6,000 of those constituents were even eligible to vote. So the constituency of the average member of the House of Representatives only really was representing and had to be aware of and in communication with about 6,000 people
Today we have high schools in this country with more than 6,000 students. So we are talking about a system that has that is orders of magnitude larger than it than it was when it was originally designed. So in the early days of American democracy, voters and again voters were a limited subset of the population, but those who could vote felt really directly connected to the political issues of the day and decision-making processes and who their representatives were. Even a hundred years, more than 100 years after the founding of the country in the 1880s and 1890s, presidential candidates would win the White House by running what were called front porch campaigns, literally. So this is William McKinley and in 1896 in his campaign for President McKinley spoke over the course of about a year leading up to the election he spoke to over 700,000 people from his front porch in Canton, Ohio. And that ended up being more than 10% of the total number of votes that he actually got. So he spoke, he actually literally from his front porch addressed and and had a back and forth with with groups of people that that in total was over 10% of all the people who actually cast a vote for him. Uh kind of kind of shocking really
Um so during this first century of American democracy, voting rates of the eligible population consistently reached over 80 90%. And for those who were fully included in public life, politics was deeply culturally embedded in it maybe in the way that sports or television shows are for us today. It was the entertainment of the day. It was the topic of conversation. It was what people followed and participated in. And it really it meant something. And people believed these two core things that I think we've we've lost today. So one was that our politics could actually help us make decisions and make life better
And the other really importantly was that your individual participation actually mattered that you you had a responsibility and that by participating it actually had an influence and an impact. And I think I think we've lost I think we've lost those things. Um and of course at the time those beliefs were validated socially by peers by your friends and neighbors who also participated and were aware of issues and talked about the issues of the day and talked about what their representatives were doing. um and they were validated by what I think was actually a fairly functional government. There were a lot of projects over the first century and a half of of our country from universal education to the railroads and canals to westward expansion where we had this growing country where government facilitated a lot of positive change and opportunity for people. And I think you know today we've lost those beliefs that really underpin popular participation and engagement. We, you know, this will probably bore you because you're so aware of of these stats, but there there are countless statistics that demonstrate our modern sense of alienation from our political system. And I just kind of I picked a few, but pretty much every chart you want to look at kind of goes down and to the right rather than what you'd normally want to see
So from trust in government to confidence in Congress to participation. Interestingly, voting for president hasn't declined as much as most other stats. And and I think that's because it's still relatively saturated from a media standpoint. You can't help but be aware of the presidential race. And um and I think it's something that people see as important and it's a very clear decision to make. It's pretty simple. And so the simplicity of the presidential choice every four years is something that has actually kept a majority of um American citizens engaged. But when you get to things like primaries um and in fact this chart is before um the the the last couple of cycles it's actually declined further
In fact just to cherrypick one kind of shocking stat. Does anyone know the turnout rate of millennial voters? So, 18 to 32 year old voters in California in our in our last midterm here. Does anybody have any idea what that stat what that was? We want to throw out a wild guess just to make sure you're still awake. Close. It was 8%. And then if you look at um particular demographics who are less well represented, the share of the Latino vote overall I believe was actually less than I think it was about 6%. And again, we're in a representative democracy where the the ultimately the people who participate end up being uh the people who are best represented in the system. And I'm going to talk a little more about that in a moment
Um so primaries, midterms, if you look locally, these are um New York City does its mayor's races like a lot of cities offcycle. So they don't do it during the normal two and four year two-year cycles of uh the federal government. And so those offcycle elections, we do the same thing here in San Francisco. turnout has declined dramatically. So when you look at primaries, midterms, offcycle elections, what you see is that turnout ends up actually being often almost always less than about 25% of the eligible population. It tends to be a much older demographic, a much wider demographic um who have a very particular set of concerns. Um that's probably why social security and medic Medicare are large programs and untouchable third rails and so many other issues actually get kind of ignored. Um I think you know this again is sort of cherrypicking a little bit but I I do think that there's a really interesting connection
This is to my my meta point about scaling making it harder to keep everybody engaged and informed and plugged in. If you look at the last uh midterm here in California, there's a pretty interesting uh relationship between the size of a county and the level of turnout and and some smaller counties actually did see turnout up in the in the 60 70% range, which is kind of unheard of for a midterm, but those are really tiny counties. Those are counties with literally 10,000 people. Um some of our bigger counties, uh you see turnout drop right back down to 20 25%. Um so let me let me continue here. So I think you know the summary of that is I think voters increasingly today in contrast from the first century of American democracy no longer believe that our politics can can substantively make our lives better and um and and even less so believe that their personal participation actually matters which I think is a huge huge problem. Um so how did we get here? Let's let's dive a little deeper into the problem. So academics point to a lot of trends
There's a lot of literature out there. Um they they note things like the decline of the parties which used to be a good way of getting candidates and voters engaged in sustaining engagement. Um I think there's a lot of truth to that. They talk about the commercialization and fragmentation of the news media. I think great point as well. The role of big donors, increased competition for people's time. Now you can watch football or play video games or whatever you choose to do. We have a lot more options
Um, and I think all of these trends are are real and they're relevant and they're they're a partial description of the problem. But but I still think at its core that it's scale and really more importantly it's the complexity that comes with scale that is m created a vulnerability in the political system that is being exploited and is making it harder for us to participate. But it's also making us more disillusioned and and leading to a lack of faith and and fundamental belief that the system even works anymore. So I want to consider this complexity from first the perspective of an individual voter who whom I'll call I'll call Maria. So first of all today Maria has as a as a voter in the United States has about 40 elected officials who make decisions on her behalf. They fill a wide range of offices from president down to school and transportation board. Not to mention in a lot of counties roles like coroner and judge which she probably doesn't have a lot of insight into those folks. Um so 40 elected officials at a federal level it's fairly manageable
She has five elected officials president vice president two senators and a member of the house of representatives. Easy enough at a state level over over 10 about a dozen depending on the state. And at a local level often a couple of dozen offices. So this is a org chart for the city and county of San Francisco. These are not all elected offices but quite a few of them are. Um so I think Maria would be hardressed to name much less know anything useful about most of the offices and the current and her and the current their current occupants who are ostensibly making decisions on her behalf. Next, every year or two, Maria is asked to decide if a subset of her representatives have done a good job. If she lived in if she lives in San Francisco, she'd be asked to vote roughly six times every four years between primaries and generals, uh, normal cycle and off cycle
Um, and to make matters worse, when her representatives don't want to make a hard decision, they just ask her to vote directly on it. And so again, if she was in San Francisco here in our last midterm, in addition to weighing in on on about a dozen representative offices, uh she would she would have also been asked to vote on 18 state and local measures. And you've all seen that that paper ballot guide that makes you want to gouge your eyes out as you go through it. It's kind of impossible, right? It reads kind of like the tax code. It's very hard to understand what's actually going on. Um a lot of the wording is is intentionally obuscating. Um, and then finally, you know, some of the the districts. So, sorry I skipped this slide
This is just kind of an interesting survey of all the elected offices in the US. So, there are over half a million elected offices in the US. Um, nobody actually knows exactly how many there are. There's not a single national upto-date database of all of the elected offices in the US, much less who holds those offices when they're eligible for re-election. It's incredibly decentralized and fragmented across 30,000 municipalities um and and 60,000 different county governments and districts. So, it's it's quite overwhelming. um not overwhelming for data geeks like yourselves, but I think for an ordinary person who's disconnected, no offense by the way, I'm a data geek as well, but um for the ordinary person trying to understand their representation in their political system and how to plug into it, uh it's pretty overwhelming. Um, and then the final point from Maria's perspective is that the districts to which she belongs, many of them have gotten so large, up to 700,000 constituents for the House of Representatives
If you're a US senator, you represent nearly 40 million people. Those districts have gotten so large that at least with current communication tools, it's really impractical to find and communicate with other constituents within your political districts, much less to actually communicate with your representative. I'm sure many of you have had the experience of writing a letter, sending an email, filling out a web form, signing a petition, and you never know what happened. You never really get an answer. There's very little highquality feed. There's no high quality feedback or two-way conversation. Um, so taken together, it's not at all surprising that like most Americans, Maria only votes in presidential general elections and then she only votes for the top few offices on the ballot and a few of the ballot props that she feels strongly about. So that means that when you get down ballot, a lot of those local races, if the turnout in the uh midterm local election is 25%, the actual vote for a lot of those offices down at the very bottom of the ballot will be in the low singledigit figures, which means that it's really easy, and this is kind of the point I'm I'm about to drive toward
It's pretty easy to hack the system if you have a lot of money. It's it's a very vulnerable system when you don't have people participating. Um, so Maria doesn't have the time or energy to do more, nor does the political system offer her the tools or the feedback to help her participate more deeply. Um, and then from the just for a moment I want to talk about we shouldn't feel too bad for the politicians, but from the perspective of a candidate, you know, in reality, the situation really isn't much better. So most voters don't know who you are. They don't know what you've done, and they know almost nothing about the office you're running for. they're busy with more important things and they're generally they've become pretty disaffected with and skeptical of the political system. You can only reach those voters through expensive paid media, things like direct mail, radio, television, and more recently digital ads, but they're not they're not cheap when when you need to reach 700,000 people in your in your congressional district
And then to the extent that anybody else is communicating with your voters, the odds are about even that they're telling them that you spend your free time eating babies. So, it's it's a pretty rough being a candidate for office is pretty rough. Um, and creates a certain set of incentives. So, so how does the system work at all? I mean, it sounds pretty bad, right? Well, you know, as enterprising humans, what we've done is we've found workarounds. So, if you're a voter, you typically throw your lot in with one of the two parties and then you look for a D or an R on the ballot or you base your vote on name recognition or the last negative ad that you saw that you found compelling. And if you're a candidate, you spend literally about twothirds of your time. In fact, here's a slide. This is, believe it or not, this was a slide in a deck that the uh the DLE C, so the Democratic uh Congressional Campaign Committee shared with all of its members of Congress on how they should spend their time
So, 4 hours of call time, what do you think that is? Well, that's calling people who can write you checks back in your district, anywhere really. people who can write checks for your campaign. Constituent visits, that tends to be the folks who can write you checks for your campaign. Uh committee floor work, that's ostensibly real work of elected officials. Strategic outreach, again, people who can write you checks. And then recharge time, which I would also need if I spent 60 70% of my time a day essentially fundraising. Um, so if you're a candidate, you spend up to twothirds of your time fundraising from the wealthiest people you know, usually lobbyists or or essentially pseudo lobbyists, uh, representing very narrow interests in your district, and you spend all the money you've raised on political advertising, most of which doesn't move the needle, and then you pray. And it's a pretty rough I'll give you one other kind of graphic here
Even the Obama campaign, which has been a wonder of grassroots organizing, a lot of grassroots energy, a lot of bottomup energy. And um at the end of the day, when you look at where the money goes, 65% goes to paid media. And it's it's most of that goes to television, the vast majority. Um and then 10 another 10% goes to the cost of fundraising, that money. Another 10% goes to salaries. Another 5% goes to other administrative costs. And before you know it, that's kind of the campaign. The campaign is a big fundraising machine for being able to to pay for top- down direct media, mostly through television to try to sway a few points in the middle
Um, so the bottom line when we look at the system holistically is that we've used proxies to help us scale our participation and to help us navigate a hugely complex system. And frankly, that would that would be okay. The idea that we use these these um proxies to thank you. Uh the idea that we use these proxies to participate is a perfectly reasonable solution if these proxies actually were representative, if they worked for everyone and they actually reflected the views and needs of most people in line with the idea of one person, one vote. But what happens in practice is incredibly different as as we were just seeing here. It's because it's so expensive to reach voters who are generally overwhelmed and disengaged. professional lobbyists who can bundle campaign funds and then of course can help draft legislation for you when you're in office have become literally the key central players in the entire political process. Money makes the world go round as I think someone said
Um, in fact, for the small price of $10 billion each election cycle, um, and about half that in non-election years, professional lobbyists and bundlers have the ability to pre-vet and pre-select most candidates. Lawrence Lesig at Harvard Law has written some great stuff on this. Um, and thereby, and and here's where the ROI for them comes in, influence how $7 trillion in annual spending is allocated. and probably even more importantly from the perspective of those lobbyists directly shape legislation that regulates every industry and every area of life. So to summarize, scaling requires proxies. Today the proxies we use are not very representative of the people. um their their power comes from their ability to aggregate dollars for campaigns and the result is a highly unrepresentative and unresponsive political system that breeds cynicism and contempt and opens the door to demagoguery. So, how's that for a hopeful message to kick off data for democracy? Actually though, I think there is a lot of hope and the fact that you're all in this room and that so many as Alexi was saying before that so many technologists and entrepreneurs and data geeks like ourselves are are here talking about this problem and um thinking about solutions is incredibly inspiring
Um, in fact, I think that we're on the brink of a of a potential transformation in the way that our political system works, the way that people get information, the way that people build influence and and participate and hold their representatives accountable and and fundamentally change the incentives in the system. And the reason for that is that in my opinion, the saving grace of democracy is this principle of one person, one vote, which is the kind of fundamentally most democratizing decentralizing way of structuring a system. And you know what that means is that you know as the system works today unfortunately the way it works is that $100 is worth in campaign spending worth somewhere between one and 10 votes depending on how efficient the campaign is. Of course Jeb Bush spent $5,000 a vote in Iowa but that's a different story. Um and and so what that actually means is that money and votes are essentially fungeable. And today that fact has allowed money interests and lobbyists to hack the system to pursue very narrow agendas often at the expense of the average citizen. And people aren't dumb. They feel that
And that's why participation goes down. It's why anger goes up. It's why distrust goes up. Um but it also means and this is where I have a lot of hope that we can use technology to turn things around. It also means that the system is hackable in the other direction by ordinary citizens if they have the tools they need to coordinate in new and more scalable ways. And so, you know, as an example, if I can organize a 100 votes, I actually have as much power as someone who can write a $1,000 check. And if a group of us can come together and organize, say, within a congressional district, something like 10,000 votes, we have more power than the largest campaign contributor in the district. This to me is the key to shifting the power dynamic in our politics and putting people back at the center
It's figuring out ways to get voters connected to one another, re-engaged, proactively engaged in building power around their agendas. We need to build citizen lobbies essentially. And and so, you know, how do ordinary people the question to ask is how do ordinary people efficiently share information, make decisions, and take action together in this political context? How do they find the more representative proxies? I think we're still going to have to use proxies. It's not reasonable for any of us to understand everything on our ballot deeply. Um but but the more representative proxies, the highly engaged friend, the the informed neighbor, the great advocacy organization that can help us turn our time, our money, and most importantly, our votes into real power. So at Brigade, we believe the answer is a network. A network of voters and constituents automatically mapped to their political districts, mapped to their representatives and the candidates they're eligible to vote for, connected with each other around issue areas of issue and value alignment, and enabled by great peer-to-peer organizing tools that can be applied to both elections and and legislative advocacy. And if you find this vision inspiring, we are we are hiring
I have to throw that out there. Um, but you may have you may have a better idea. There are a lot of great, this is just a few, but there are a lot of great organizations in this emerging field of civic or political technology that are focused on empowering citizens, not the existing power brokers. Um, some great some really great companies here. And you know, whatever you end up doing with this information, hopefully you'll engage. Ultimately, I think there are sort of two big obstacles we have to help a citizen like Maria overcome. The first is an information problem and the second is an inspiration problem. The the first is really and they're both fundamentally I think data problems
They're about how do we help people navigate and engage with each other in a very complex political system in which they've basically been discarded and pushed to the side and taught to believe that that their involvement doesn't matter. And so the first is really about helping Maria understand her representation, what's on her ballot, what levers she can pull to have an influence. Um, and then and there's a lot more to that obviously. The second is about showing her that she's not alone, that others are working toward the same ends and that through collective action with like-minded people, she can play a role in deter in shaping the elections and the legislation that affects her life. And um, you know, I I showed those 520,000 elected offices. is we did a little research when we were starting the company that that told us that about 40% of those offices are decided by a vote margin of fewer than a thousand votes. So, while it's, you know, we're all focused on the presidential and frankly it's it's probably more disempowering to tell someone, "Yeah, you can go decide who the next president is," the reality is when you get down to school board and transportation board and water district, it's just a black box for everybody. And and incumbents are getting reelected at 90 plus% rates with with low turnout and really small vote margins
And that's that's on a human scale related to issues that really affect our lives. And so, you know, those of us in this room could literally go decide who the next transportation director is if we had access to the the the relevant information about that office, who sits in it, who the candidates are, what the issues are, and ways to coordinate together. Um, these are what what I'm what I'm describing here is is basically the the kinds of problems that information and communication technologies excel at solving. And we've already applied them to a lot of other places whether it's looking for a job or dating, keeping up with family and friends, gaming, mobility. There are all these mean countless consumer applications that use um that use tools to make coordination, aggregation, collective action more efficient. And I think we've just as a as a sector, we have we've really massively underinvested in civic technology in part because politics is messy. It's dirty. It's subjective
But at the end of the day, if if our what I would argue is our most important experiment, the American experiment in democracy, which has now been running for over 200 years, if that experiment fails, I actually don't know that anything else matters. I don't any of the other problems we're working on are going to get solved or that we're going to be in a society in which solving them is going to be such a great thing. And so I I think it's critical that some of us who have these incredible superpowers that you all have think about how we make this system more transparent, more participatory, and ultimately more accountable to ordinary people. So thank you for your time. I hope you'll accept that challenge, and I hope you all have a great day. [Applause]