Seminar guide

This guide is for teachers, reading groups, and anyone running a discussion about democracy and civic technology. It is built for use away from this website: in a classroom, a library, or a meeting room. This site has no comments or discussion board on purpose, so the discussion belongs to you.

The guide treats the My Vote Forward framework as a case to examine, not a position to adopt. Students should leave able to explain the framework and to state its strongest objections in their own words.

Defined terms

The glossary defines every term used here. Four matter most for these sessions: priority, opinion, ballot, and secrecy.

Learning objectives

By the end of the sessions, a participant should be able to:

1. Distinguish a priority, an opinion, and a ballot, and explain why each has different sharing rules.
2. Explain why secret ballots were introduced and what they protect against.
3. Show with an example how question wording or order can change survey answers.
4. State at least one result from social choice theory that limits what any aggregate of preferences can mean.
5. Separate authentication, identity proofing, and eligibility, and explain why a biometric settles none of the legal questions.
6. Describe what a risk-limiting audit checks and what it does not.
7. Make the strongest case against the framework, then the strongest reply.

Readings

All readings below are real, published works. Bibliographic details were checked against publisher, library, or author pages on the review date. Assign excerpts as suited to the level of the class.

Voting rights and the secret ballot

• International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 25 (1966). One paragraph that sets out the right to vote by secret ballot in international law ¹.
• Australian Electoral Commission, "Voting history." A short official account of the "Australian ballot" and the intimidation and coercion that open voting allowed ².
• Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, revised edition (Basic Books, 2009) ³.
• U.S. National Archives, "Voting Rights Act (1965)." The Act was signed on August 6, 1965 and banned literacy tests and other discriminatory practices ⁴.

Aggregation and representation

• Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (first published 1951; third edition, Yale University Press, 2012) ⁵.
• Hanna F. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (University of California Press) ⁶.
• Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists (Princeton University Press) ⁷.
• Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, "Testing Theories of American Politics," Perspectives on Politics, 2014 ⁸.

Participation between elections

• Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (Verso, 2003). Case studies include participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, grass-roots governance in Chicago, habitat conservation planning, and decentralization in Kerala ⁹.
• James S. Fishkin, When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation (Oxford University Press, 2009) ¹⁰.

Measurement

• Pew Research Center, "Writing Survey Questions." A practical guide to wording, order, double-barreled questions, and social desirability ¹¹.

Election security and audits

• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy (2018) ¹².
• Mark Lindeman and Philip B. Stark, "A Gentle Introduction to Risk-limiting Audits," IEEE Security and Privacy (2012) ¹³.
• NIST, SP 800-63-4, Digital Identity Guidelines. Read the sections on authenticators and biometrics ¹⁴.

Argument exercises

Exercise 1: Rewrite the question. Take one priority question from the demo or write a hypothetical one. In pairs, write two versions designed to push answers in opposite directions without stating anything false. Then write the most neutral version you can. Use the Pew guide ¹¹. Discuss: can any wording be fully neutral?

Exercise 2: Build the aggregate. Hypothetical example: three students each rank three subjects. Student A ranks housing, transport, health. Student B ranks transport, health, housing. Student C ranks health, housing, transport. Ask the class to name the group's top priority. Compare pairwise majorities: two of three prefer housing to transport, two prefer transport to health, and two prefer health to housing. Discuss what this cycle means for any claim that "the public's top priority" exists. Connect to Arrow ⁵ and to Collective priorities.

Exercise 3: Separate the checks. Give each group a scenario: a person unlocks a phone with a fingerprint and signs in to a voting app. List every question that event does not answer: who the person is in law, whether they are eligible, whether someone is watching, whether the vote is recorded correctly. Use NIST ¹⁴ and Identity and registration.

Exercise 4: Argue the opposite. Assign half the room to argue that collecting public priorities between elections improves representation, and half to argue it weakens it, for example by rewarding the loudest participants. Draw on Fishkin ¹⁰, Achen and Bartels ⁷, and Representation.

Exercise 5: Write the release. Using only labeled synthetic numbers, draft a one-page published release. It must state the denominator, who took part, how missing answers were handled, and what the numbers do not show. Compare with Published releases.

Counterexamples

Use these to test any claim in the framework. Each is a known limit, not a rebuttal invented for the exercise.

• The preference cycle. As in Exercise 2, majority rule over three or more options can produce no stable winner. A published "top priority" can depend on the method used ⁵.
• The wording effect. Pew reports that small wording differences can substantially change survey answers ¹¹. A priority list is only as good as its questions.
• The opt-in crowd. People who choose to take part can differ from those who do not. A large number of participants does not make a sample representative. See Measurement.
• The watched voter. A secret ballot protects against observation at a polling place. A remote voter at home may have no such protection. See Intimidation.
• The excluded voter. Formal rules such as literacy tests were used to exclude eligible people, which is why the Voting Rights Act banned them ⁴. A new system that adds identity hurdles can repeat that pattern even with good intentions. See Access and exclusion.
• The advisory result. Most consultation has no legal force. A clear public priority can be ignored lawfully. See Participation between elections.

Discussion prompts

1. Is it ever acceptable for an opinion to be public while the vote stays secret? What could go wrong for the person who shares?
2. Who should choose the list of subjects people are asked to rank? What would a fair process look like in your community?
3. If participation between elections is mostly by people with free time, does collecting it make representation better or worse?
4. Should a representative who changes position be praised, punished, or asked to explain? Does it depend on why?
5. What evidence would you need before trusting an election result you could not check yourself?
6. Can any technology protect a voter from pressure inside their own home?
7. Which of the hard questions do you think the framework answers worst? What would a better answer require?

Evidence

Each reading and counterexample above is cited to a source checked on the review date. The exercises use hypothetical numbers only, labeled as such.

Competing interpretations

The readings disagree with one another on purpose. Fishkin argues that informed deliberation can improve public judgment; Achen and Bartels argue that voters' choices are driven largely by group identities and partisan loyalties ⁷. Teachers should present both, and let students judge.

Application to this framework

The framework's separation of priority, opinion, and vote is a design choice. These sessions ask whether that separation holds up against social choice theory, survey research, the history of exclusion, and the security of remote voting.

Unresolved questions

• What should students be able to do after these sessions that they could not do before? This guide sets objectives but has no measured results from classroom use.
• Should the guide include comparative cases outside the United States and Australia in more depth? See Cases.