Welcome to uvote.com

My celebration of the potential of

innovation to enhance American prosperity

My personal philosophy embodied in my efforts
and the efforts of my company

Two prosperity enhancing innovation opportunities:

1: Political process innovation (i.e. reform) enhanced through internet voting on political issues and their candidate solutions ( UwsaVOTE) to hopefully reduce the dysfunctionality of our political system and lead to the resolution of festering political issues thus promoting enhanced American economic and social prosperity and

2: Technical innovation in recreational skiing by providing control surfaces to snow skis ( Ski Control System) making recreational skiing I believe easier to learn and safer to enjoy. I believe this will both enhance the well being of the American people through broader individual and especially family participation in recreational skiing and promote the economic well being of rural communities that depend on recreational skiing as well as ski resorts and ski equipment suppliers.

Both these activities are works in progress with their potential yet to be realized. I invite you to review these opportunities by clicking on the underlined chapter titles above.

John M. Humphrey
April 25, 2014

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2014 Introduction and Welcome to UwsaVOTE

Summary: UwsaVOTE is now an historical museum documenting a successful internet demonstration of citizen proposals and their unofficial voting on 163 different political issues and their potential solutions conducted in the 1996-2001 time frame. An example annotated voting result (updated every time a vote was cast) is presented below. While the voter's choices were not retained (only that they did vote on an issue or solution so they couldn't vote twice), the current totals were open for viewing by anyone visiting the site whether or not they had registered as a UwsaVoter.

I encourage first time readers to review the rest of this 2014 introduction, but you can also go directly to the 1996-2001 UwsaVote website material by clicking on the link below. However before you go as an historical note, please ignore the extensive use of CAPITAL LETTERS in this material. Prior to the internet and the extensive use of email, most presentations were all in capital letters whereas now capital letters are considered to be shouting and lower case letters are used instead.

Go directly to 1996-2001 UwsaVote website material.

1996 UwsaVote Motivation:

UWSA and the third party movements of the 1990s were in response to the increasing dysfunctionality of the American political system, specifically our inability to address and find political solutions to some of America's pressing social and economic problems and the perception that government was increasingly serving special interests and not the best interests of the country as a whole.

In 1996 I believed (and still believe) that the increasing dysfunctionality of the American political system was not a reflection of the failure of the democratic vision of our Declaration of Independence but a reflection of the increasing inability of our republican implementation of that vision to deliver that democratic vision in the face of the challenges of our modern world. These challenges include: the complexity of modern society, the rapid changes in modern society, the diversity of American society, the increasing role of government in our American society and economy, the resulting proliferation and power of special interest groups in American society, the resulting polarization of America's main political parities to the far right and the far left making political compromise difficult or impossible, and finally beginning in the 1960's the vast sums required to run an effective campaign in the TV age which together with the disappointing unwillingness of individual American citizens to fund these campaigns ($10 a voter/campaign would suffice) with "clean money" that has enabled special interests to predominanatly fund election campaigns and overly influence our elected representatives' implementation of the American political process.

Mitigating two important disconnects in the republican implementation of democracy are I believe essential to improving the function of American government. These two republican implementation disconnects are 1) letting American citizens clearly know what we want politically and 2) enabling American citizens to obtain what we want politically through government actions. In a democracy citizens know what the majority wants because they vote on every issue and the citizens also get what the majority wants because they vote on every issue.

The republican implementation of democracy attempts to achieve the democratic vision while addressing the impracticality of a pure democracy by electing representatives to carry out their constituents political directions, but republican government suffers from the two disconnects presented above. Firstly there is no clear way for either the citizens or their representatives to know what the citizens want. Town hall meetings, letters to congressmen or the newspaper or polls are all imprecise and sometimes ambiguous expressions of citizens' desired political direction. Secondly even if the representatives are reasonably clear on the wishes of the majority of their constituents, the first failing gives the representatives cover to do otherwise because some special interest campaign contributor or vocal group of constituents opposes the will of the majority.

In 1996 I felt the internet provided an ideal medium for flexible, fast and open "unofficial" voting on political issues and candidate solutions for promoting the following three democracy enhancing objectives: (note: whereas official votes are for making decisions (electing representatives, passing propositions etc.), the objective of unofficial votes is collecting and displaying information on citizens' political preferences.)

1: Provide the American people a clear and timely understanding of their political will:

Since American citizens can propose any topic for fellow citizens' review and voting and since the vote totals are immediately and openly displayed, the American people can much more completely express and more clearly and timely understand their own priorities on political issues and preferences for political solutions. As political debate continues and new information emerges, new solutions can be proposed and existing solutions modified and the various issues and their candidate solutions can be revoted to provide further clear and timely understanding of the people's evolving political will.

2: Provide elected officials with a clear and timely understanding of their constituents political will:

Because of the limited scope of UwsaVote, we did not sort votes by the voter's state or congressional district. However a larger scale and current technology internet voting system could present results both nationally and by state and congressional district so elected officials could know specifically how their constituents felt on political issues and candidate solutions. This process could be extended to local issues with separate web sites devoted to individual state or even county/city political issues and solutions. Anyone could view these results but only voters in those states, cities etc could vote on their local issues.

3: Provide elected officials additional backbone to exercise the will of their constituents in the face of opposing special interest pressure:

The clear, broad, open and timely expression of constituents' political will achieved through internet voting would give the media, majority supported advocacy groups and the citizens themselves a much more powerful voice to advocate for democracy. Where internet voting produced a strong supermajority favoring the importance of an issue and/or the effectiveness of a proposed solution, elected officials would be in a much stronger position to explain to opposing special interests that he/she needed to respond to the will of the people or face the people's retribution at the next election.

UwsaVOTE Operational History 1996-2001:

With these motivations and with the encouragement of my fellow UWSA members in the Santa Clara County, California chapter of UWSA, I created this UwsaVote internet voting system on political issues and candidate solutions. The site was fully operational from 1996 through I recall most of 2001. My fellow UWSA members both locally and across the country contributed political issues and candidate solutions and then voted and commented on the importance of the issues and the effectiveness of the solutions. Following the evolution of the non-partisan UWSA movement into the Reform Party, the UwsaVote site was much less active and the cgi code was deactivated (no additional voting or even vote result access) in 2001, but the html pages have remained continuously visible on the internet.

UwsaVote provided an initial successful demonstration of a non-partisan internet voting system allowing American citizens to propose issues they were concerned about and solutions that they felt would help resolve those issues and then have other American citizens vote on the importance (1 to 10) of each issue and the effectiveness (1 to 10) of each candidate solutions with the votes totals presented in a totally open manner.

Since votes are the key output of UwsaVOTE, in 1997 I added software to provide a suite of powerful vote summaries that you can access under Top Level Vote Summaries in the 1996-2001 UwsaVote website material below. In ascending order of complexity, you can review the votes: on each individual issue and solution (as presented above), on each family of issue and related solutions together, on each category of issues and solutions and

(what I was most proud of ) a top ten summary of a) the 10 issues voted highest priority, the 10 solutions voted most effective AND the 10 combinations of Issues and solutions whose product of importance and effectiveness ranked highest. This last summary demonstrates the capability of this process to review a large number of political issues and proposed solutions (163 in this case) and extract the issue, solutions and combinations voted most important. The plot below illustrates this process.

Of the three example issue/solution combinations presented in the plot above, Issue #207 Excessive Government Regulation was voted the most important at 9.67 average. Solution #207.4 No Unfunded Federal Mandates was deemed to be a very effective solution to this issue at 9.75. This issue/solution combination achieved a very high 0.943 combined vote (product of 9.67/10 x 9.75/10) giving it a very high priority for attention. Issue #504 Excessive Welfare at 8.83 just slightly beat out Issue 101 Excessive National Debt at 8.75 in importance. However Solution 504.7 Active Father Identification achieved a very high deemed effectiveness of 9.78 giving this combination (504/504.7) an 0.864 combined priority. Solution 101.1 Balanced Budget Amendment only achieved a 7.85 effectiveness vote so the combination of 101/101.1 achieved an 0.687 priority which is high but considerably lower than the other two issue/solution combinations presented on this plot. These other two issue/solutions also received fewer votes than 101/101.1 which is clearly visible in the vote totals. In a broader based internet voting system, these results would focus attention and discussion on the leading issue/solution combinations followed by revoting. I believe that the issue/solution combinations that survive this scrutiny of initial voting results followed by revoting and still emerge with a high combined issue/solution priority represent a strong statement of popular will for governmental action.

Partial 2014 UwsaVote reactivation:

Now over 15 years later I perceive that the American political process has become even more divisive and dysfunctional than it was in the 1990s. The internet was in its infancy in 1996 when UwsaVote was created. Now internet tools are more powerful and internet participation especially with mobile devices is becoming nearly universal. Therefore today in 2014 I believe the need to increase citizen influence over the American political process is even more urgent than it was in 1996 and the opportunity for a broad internet based unofficial political voting system to help provide that increased citizen influence is much more easily achievable.

My motivation in this partial reactivation of UwsaVote is to more clearly showcase what was accomplished, but not to propose the 1996 UwsaVote as a future system. A 2014 UVOTE should draw from the achievements and lessons learned with UwsaVote, but be a complete redo using the latest internet tools and methods to maximize its ability to enable citizens to increase their influence over our American political process. In this UwsaVote partial reactivation I have reactivated the ability to review the current voting results on each of the 163 political issues/solutions from 1996-2001. However all the other commands that were active from 1996-2001 to a) register to vote b) propose new issues/solutions and c) vote and comment on each issue solution remain disabled as I believe any new UVOTE should be a completely new system not a continuation of the 1996-2001 system.

My longer term objective in this UwsaVote partial reactivation is to hopefully inspire some organization to pick up this opportunity to - I believe - significantly enhance the functionality of our American political process (our republican implementation of the democratic vision of our Declaration of Independence) through increased citizen participation and influence through a broad based and open "unofficial" and non-partisan voting system on the internet on political issues and their candidate solutions.

I sincerely believe the enhanced functionality of the American political system that this internet voting system could achieve will yield broad social and economic prosperity benefits to the American people. However the potential benefits are much greater. I believe America's problems with the republican implementation of democracy are mirrored throughout the world in the political dysfunctionality of most of the world's democracies. Therefore enhanced functionality of our American political system will rekindle Liberty's lamp both as an inspiration and a model to the other democratic and non-democratic political systems throughout our world.

Thank you for the opportunity to present this introduction. Please explore the 1996-2001 UwsaVote website material below

OR return to the top level uvote.com welcome

John M. Humphrey
April 25, 2014

-AN ELECTRONIC CITIZENS CONVENTION-

THE SIGNING OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

EMPOWERING AMERICAN CITIZENS TO PROPOSE AND VOTE ON

THE RULES THEY FEEL SHOULD GOVERN AMERICAN SOCIETY

UVOTE CONTAINS

163 POLITICAL ISSUES AND SOLUTIONS

ANYONE CAN

ANY AMERICAN CITIZEN CAN REGISTER AS A UVOTER AND

(all these functions were active 1996-2001, but are now disabled)

YOUR UVOTE OPTIONS

CGI codes are developed by Internet Image, THE WEB DEVELOPER. We design eye-catch homepage and complex cgi codes which perform any function youlike to have at your site. Contact us at:iii@internetimage.com

UVOTE is [was from 1996-2001] an on-going project of
UWSA SANTA CLARA CO., CA Chapter

My Fellow Americans - Welcome to UwsaVOTE

The objective of UVOTE is to help return to the American people control over the rules that govern American society. This political philosophy is more fully explained in the section POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY BEHIND UVOTE. UVOTE is only one small part in this process which will require greater involvement of all American citizens in the political process. We feel that UWSA as a citizens movement uncompromised by alliances to existing power structures offers America an excellent vehicle to achieve our objective. When I was growing up in the 1950's I remember President Eisenhower's appeals to both parties to act in the national interest by practicing "politics above party". Dwight Eisenhower ran as a Republican, but he was first and foremost an American. Unfortunately President Eisenhower's appeals did little to quell the endless party bickering and in the last 40 years the situation has gotten worse - much worse. In the last 40 years the explosive growth of campaign costs primarily due to television advertising has allowed big money interests to exert undue influence over both major political parties and thereby seriously erode the process of representative democracy.

What America needs is issue oriented politics not party oriented politics. In other words America needs more democracy in our republic. UVOTE provides a continuous electronic citizens convention at which citizens can present any issue that concerns them and then propose solutions to that issue or any other issue. Their fellow citizens can briefly comment on these proposals and then VOTE on both the relative importance of issues and the effectiveness of candidate solutions. The Uvote process continually prioritizes all the issues and the solutions based on cummulative citizen votes and also creates a combined importance value based on the priority of each issue and the effectiveness of each solution. For more information on the UVOTE process please refer to UNDERSTANDING UVOTE .

An important objective of UVOTE is to provide our elected representatives with a clearer picture of their constituents views on political issues and candidate solutions. However a more important objective is to let the American people know what we want. Our representatives are politically savy and through polls and other techniques they usually know what their constituents want. Unfortunately representative democracy is becoming a process of minority rule whereby those who control each power center in society (i.e. medicine, law, education etc) exert a controlling interest in defining the rules within their sphere of influence. Human nature being what it is, these rules are designed to benefit the controlling interests not the best interests of the American people. Elected representatives are afraid of loosing both the ballot votes and the wallet votes of special interests. Our ignorance of the true weight of public opinion on these issues actually encourages our representatives to cater to the special interests. Hopefully UVOTE and other similar systems will help provide the American people with a much clearer picture of our wishes for America and a better understanding of how we are often poorly represented on many issues. If I know the American character, that understanding will in the words of Admiral Yamamoto (after his navy attacked Pearl Harbor) ,"AWAKEN A SLEEPING GIANT AND GIVE HIM A TERRIBLE RESOLVE." I am confident that resolve can restore citizen control over the rules of American society. The resulting positive social changes can remove many of the present disfunctions in American society and lead to an American renaissance.

I have presented these thoughts further in a book entitled, "ROADMAP TO AN AMERICAN RENAISSANCE" which is now available in its entirety on the Internet and I would sincerely appreciate your comments. You will return to the top of this home page.

Again I welcome you to UVOTE. Please refer to POLITICAL ISSUES AND THEIR CANDIDATE SOLUTIONS and let us have your opinions and votes on the issues facing American society.

Sincerely,

John M. Humphrey, Secretary
UWSA Santa Clara Co., CA Chapter

Return to top of UVOTE HOME page

WHAT'S NEW IN UwsaVOTE

TOP LEVEL VOTE SUMMARIES
Provides UVOTERs with convenient access to vote results prepared in a variety of summary reports

Uwsa VOTE LOGIC MAP
- A one page map to help you navigate our web site

MORE NEW ISSUES AND SOLUTIONS TO COMMENT AND VOTE ON
- New Topics Since 3/1/96

NEW DEFINED OPTION SOLUTION VOTING METHOD

Most solutions are voted on in terms of effectiveness from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest). However we are now including solutions with a spectrum of defined options so your vote both indicates how you feel about the solution in general AND more specifically WHAT option you feel most closely represents your preference.

DEFINED OPTION SOLUTIONS

NEW LINKS TO ADDITIONAL INTERNET BACKGROUND MATERIAL
- We are adding links from UVOTE issues to other web sites that provide additional background information on that issue. If you wish, you may visit those sites to read up on that issue and then return to UVOTE to cast your vote.

ISSUES AND SOLUTIONS WITH BACKGOUND INFORMATION LINKS ARE FOLLOWED BY (*) IN ISSUE LIST

Go to POLITICAL ISSUES & CANDIDATE SOLUTIONS
and follow the directions to Review, Comment and Vote on specific issues and solutions

OR

Return to top of UVOTE HOME page