San José State University Develops New Voting Technology To Enfranchise Non-Human Species

Confronting simultaneous crises is American democracy and global ecology, a new laboratory at San José State University has invented technologies to fundamentally alter elections and governance. Under the direction of experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats, and with participation of faculty and students across multiple disciplines, the Future Democracies Laboratory has developed methods for involving all species in politics to better represent the interests of the environment. The lab has also prototyped software to make laws reflecting the will of a taxonomically diverse electorate without the need for human politicians.

“People constantly gripe about the partisanship and corruption of elected officials, and the inadequacy of their policies.” says Keats, who is currently a visiting scholar at SJSU. “It’s hard for me to disagree, given the degree of discontentment with the world in which we live. Our lab is dedicated to exploring root causes of dysfunction and investigating alternatives by fearlessly asking what if?”

After several years of internal research, the laboratory has prototyped a voting system and legislative platform that radically rethink centuries of political dogma. “Our work originated with a simple thought experiment,” says Keats. “What if we re-engineered our political system to operate without people at the helm?” The lab replaced politicians with random number generators weighted to represent the will of the majority frequently but not always, providing a crucial check on the tyranny of the masses. These random number generators, one for each member of Congress, were configured into a circuit emulating the legislative process.

The researchers realized that the thresholds of random number generators could be adjusted continuously, but also that people wouldn’t want to spend their whole lives inside a voting booth. “Instead of requiring citizens to register their preferences by punching holes in cardboard, we reasoned that we could simply monitor changes in their stress level with a biomedical device,” explains Keats. “The system can measure physiological changes such as heart rate variability in realtime, automatically increasing the probability that random number generators will vote for change as variability increases. For even greater accuracy, we can measure changes to the stress hormone cortisol”

Humans are not the only animals to use cortisol as a stress hormone. The voting system therefore can also include input from mammals ranging from orangutans to chipmunks. Other organisms manifest stress with other hormones that are no less measurable. For instance, stressed plants emit a volatile called ethylene. The Future Democracies Laboratory is collaborating with Earth Law Center to integrate all of these inputs into democratic decision-making.

“In terms of biomass, our species constitutes less than one percent of life on Earth,” says Keats, who also serves as Earth Law Center’s consulting philosopher. “We’re oblivious to most of what happens on our planet, and our human neurobiology limits our thinking. To ignore the perspectives of other species is reckless and also deeply unfair to them. Environmental justice depends on more holistic governance.”

Keats emphasizes that the lab’s stress-based voting protocol and automated congressional platform are still untested in the wild and may not achieve their desired goals. “They could turn out to be catastrophic,” Keats admits. “As a research laboratory, we’re investigating possible futures to assess how they might impact society before they’re enacted. Equally important, by presenting our speculative technologies to the public and allowing people to interact with them, we’re engaging the community in the process of deciding collectively what’s in our best interest: democratizing how we conceptualize democracy.” 

For more information about the Future Democracies Laboratory, see: https://projects.cadre.sjsu.edu/democracyproject/