Does My Vote Forward replace elected officials?

No. My Vote Forward produces advisory information about what participants think deserves attention; elected officials keep every power they hold, including the power to disagree. Legislating requires bargaining, budgeting, legal drafting, and accountability at elections, none of which a ranking can do. Comparable programs, such as Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly and East Belgium’s permanent citizens’ dialogue, send recommendations to elected bodies rather than replacing them, and the framework follows that pattern.

The objection in its strongest form

The objection to My Vote Forward here is that it changes the job of representatives even without changing the law. When officials can see a running measure of public priorities, the safest course is to follow it, and following becomes the job. Representatives stop exercising the judgment that elections were supposed to entrust to them and become relays for whatever the measurement shows. That erodes the things representatives do that aggregated input cannot: weighing tradeoffs across many issues at once, making unpopular decisions that are right in the long run, compromising with opponents, and protecting groups too small to win any ranking.

The critic also raises accountability. When an official follows a published ranking and the result is bad, who answers for it? The official can blame “the people,” and the people cannot be voted out. Diffusing responsibility weakens the one mechanism, elections, that makes representatives answerable.

Why the objection matters

The objection matters for My Vote Forward because the framework’s purpose is to improve the connection between people and institutions between elections. If that connection replaces judgment with measurement, it could produce worse decisions and weaker accountability. It also matters because skeptics of the framework may assume it is a step toward eliminating representatives, which would make it a partisan or anti-institutional project rather than a civic one.

Defined terms

• Representative: a person elected to act on behalf of constituents.
• Delegate model: a representative should follow constituents’ expressed wishes.⁠²
• Trustee model: a representative should exercise independent judgment on constituents’ behalf.⁠²
• Accountability: the capacity of voters to reward or remove officials based on their conduct.
• Advisory body: a body, such as a citizens’ assembly, whose recommendations go to a decision-making authority without binding it. See citizens’ assembly.

Evidence

The classic statement of the trustee view is Edmund Burke’s speech to the electors of Bristol on November 3, 1774: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment,” and “Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests”.⁠¹ James Madison’s Federalist No. 10 made a related case for representation as a way “to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens”.⁠³

Political theory has not settled the debate. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on political representation describes the “mandate-independence controversy” between delegates who follow constituents’ preferences and trustees who follow their own judgment, and reports Hanna Pitkin’s conclusion that “both sides are right”.⁠² The entry also summarizes Jane Mansbridge’s forms of representation, including “anticipatory” representation, in which representatives act on what they expect voters to reward at the next election, and “gyroscopic” representation, in which they look to their own commitments.⁠² A tool that makes public priorities more visible would most plausibly affect anticipatory behavior.

Existing programs connect citizen bodies to elected ones rather than replacing them. Ireland’s 2016 to 2018 Citizens’ Assembly was established by resolution of both Houses of the Oireachtas, with 99 members selected at random, and its conclusions were “submitted to the Houses of the Oireachtas for further debate by our elected representatives”.⁠⁴ In East Belgium, the German-speaking Community’s permanent citizens’ dialogue includes citizens’ assemblies of 25 to 50 people chosen by lot and a permanent citizens’ council of 24 members, and its organizers state that the community’s Parliament and Government are responsible for implementing the recommendations.⁠⁵ The governing decree, as amended in 2024, provides that each assembly’s recommendations are sent to the Parliament, which sets its own procedure for considering them, and that the citizens’ council follows up on the recommendations to be implemented on the basis of the Parliament’s position.⁠⁶ In both cases, elected bodies remain the decision-makers. See the Ireland case and the Ostbelgien case.

How comparable systems have handled it

The comparable systems share a structure: citizens recommend, elected bodies decide, and the connection between them is defined.

• Referral to the legislature. Ireland’s assembly reported to the Oireachtas.⁠⁴
• Defined follow-up. East Belgium’s arrangement sends recommendations to Parliament under a procedure Parliament sets, and gives a citizens’ council the job of following implementation.⁠^5,6
• Bounded allocation. Participatory budgeting gives residents control over a defined portion of a budget, set by elected officials. See participatory budgeting.

None of these programs removes an elected office. They change the information and obligations around it.

Competing interpretations

One interpretation, drawing on Burke, holds that more visible public input will pressure representatives to follow rather than lead, and that this is harmful.

A second interpretation holds that representatives already respond to public signals, but to skewed ones: donors, organized groups, and the constituents who contact them most. Research by David Broockman and Christopher Skovron found that state legislators in both parties overestimated their constituents’ support for conservative policies.⁠⁷ On this view, a structured, documented signal makes anticipatory representation more accurate rather than more pliant.

A third interpretation holds that the framework changes nothing about representation because officials can ignore it, as they ignore many polls. On this view, the worry and the hope are both overstated.

What the framework answers

My Vote Forward’s position:

• Officials keep authority and judgment. Releases are information, not instructions. See can an institution ignore a result?.
• Accountability stays at elections. The framework does not offer officials a way to transfer responsibility; a release states what participants said, not what should be done.
• Priorities, not mandates. Because the framework measures attention rather than positions, officials remain responsible for choosing policies. See priorities.
• Defined connections in any real deployment. A pilot with a public body would state in advance what the body commits to, such as a written response, and nothing more. See governance.

Hypothetical example. A school board agrees before a pilot to publish a written response to the release within 60 days. The release shows that participating parents ranked facilities maintenance above new programs. The board responds that it will prioritize two repairs and explains why it will not delay a reading program. The board decided; the release informed the decision and the response made the reasoning public.

Where the objection still wins

The objection wins on behavior. The framework cannot control whether officials treat releases as cover for decisions they wanted to make anyway, or as pressure to follow participants rather than exercise judgment. It also cannot guarantee that a written response is more than a formality. And the framework has no evidence on how officials would actually use releases, because none has.

Unresolved questions

• Does visible public input improve representation by correcting skewed signals, or degrade it by encouraging followership?
• What commitment from a public body is strong enough to make participation meaningful but weak enough to preserve judgment?
• Should the framework publish how officials responded, and would that create pressure that amounts to a mandate?
• How should results be presented so that they cannot easily be used to shift responsibility?

Related

• Is this direct democracy?
• Why not just call your representative?
• Representation gap
• Governance
• Hard questions