Overview

Voter speaks up.

Votermedia reforms democracies and corporations to better serve the public interest, by incentivizing media for voters, funded by voters. This empowers us with information loyal to our interests, so that we can hold elected leaders accountable and replace them when needed. If such reforms spread to our largest organizations, we could alleviate global problems such as war, environmental destruction, and inequality.

This website is part of a nonprofit project led by Mark Latham to encourage implementations of votermedia. Likely places to start are in municipal elections (reading #1 below) or a digital goods co-op (reading #4).

Introductory reading on votermedia

1. CANADIAN JOURNALISM POLICY PROPOSAL (5 PAGES; 2016):

Votermedia for democracies: Test implementations in UBC student union elections. Proposal to fund further tests in municipal elections. The economics of why votermedia incentivizes public interest journalism. For a recent initiative based on similar ideas, see Democracy Policy Network – Local News Dollars.

2. PROXY VOTING BRAND COMPETITION (12 PAGES; 2007):

Votermedia for corporations: How individual investors can copy voting decisions of institutional investors with track records of intelligent voting independent of corporate board recommendations. We can increase competition and quality of proxy advisory firms by paying them with investor-directed corporate funds. For a recent initiative based on similar ideas, see Free Proxy Advisor From As You Sow & Iconikapp.

3. PROXY ADVISOR COMPETITION PROPOSAL (1 PAGE; 2013):

Draft rules for implementing votermedia in a large corporation, to incentivize proxy advisors and give all shareowners alternatives to the board’s voting recommendations. This proposal was submitted for a vote of Cisco Systems shareowners at their 2014 AGM. The board recommended voting against it, and it was not approved by a majority of votes. Here’s a list of our votermedia-related corporate shareowner proposals.

4. GLOBAL SOFTWARE USERS’ CO-OP (20 PAGES; 2016):

Proposal to create a new organization based on votermedia: a digital goods co-op. Each member would pay a few dollars per month, to fund cash incentives allocated by member vote to competing digital goods providers. All members would have access to all digital goods provided. This could become a global creative commons, as well as a demo of votermedia for democratic collective action.

5. WE WANT OUR CO-OPS BACK (24 PAGES; 2012):

This study of two large co-ops and a democratic nonprofit organization shows how nominally democratic businesses tend to become less democratic as they grow large. They share this tendency toward oligarchy with governments and corporations. So democratic reforms that help reverse this trend could be tested in one form of organization (e.g. co-ops), then adapted to other forms (governments and corporations).

6. A UNIVERSAL PROXY FORM FOR CONDOMINIUMS (11 PAGES; 2016):

Condominium homeowners associations are small enough (usually less than 300 voters) that one could reasonably expect their democratic governance systems not to degenerate into oligarchy. But voting by proxy opens the door to abuses that can concentrate power in a few hands, as with large corporations. This paper proposes a more open competitive system for proxy solicitation, in the spirit of votermedia, creating competition among sources of voting information.

See also our complete list of publications on votermedia.