Republican House Whip Eric Cantor recently launched an online political campaign, YouCut,
for people to vote on federal budget cuts. According to an interview with Fox News anchor, Gretchen Van Susteren, Cantor promises to propose the budget cut with the most votes for “an up-or-down vote on the House floor the following week.” Cantor’s YouCut website claims that YouCut “allows you to vote, both online and on your cell phone, on spending cuts that you want to see the House enact.” If this is true, then YouCut would be an enormous advancement for participatory budgeting and direct democracy in America. But it’s not true because while YouCut is somewhat participatory, it is not democratic. YouCut is not designed for you to make decisions about what to cut; it’s designed for Eric Cantor and the Republican Party elite to decide what to cut. In other words, YouCut is really TheyCut.

There are two main reasons why YouCut is really TheyCut. Firstly, YouCut does not allow you to propose budget cuts. The agenda is set by Eric Cantor and the Republican Party elite. This means that the majority of Americans – including ordinary Republicans, Independents, Democrats, and others – cannot directly propose budget cut items for the YouCut community to vote on. Instead, budget cut items are privately culled, filtered, and vetted by Cantor and the Republican Party elite, and then put on the website. While many ordinary people may agree with Cantor’s selection of budget cut items on the ballot, the process systematically prevents the inclusion of budget cut items that go against the interests of Cantor and the Republican Party elite. Ordinary Republicans, Independents, Democrats, and others may approve of prudent budget cuts that conflict with the political and economic interests of Eric Cantor and the Republican elite. If Eric Cantor and the Republican elite censor these budget items from the ballot, we would never know it because there is no publicly available data to show rejected proposals. Clearly, Cantor’s YouCut has the potential to provide a very distorted image of American budget cut preferences.

The second main reason why YouCut is really TheyCut is that YouCut is vague and not legally binding. Cantor’s proposals are vague. They do not include the specific language he would propose as legislation. Moreover, even though Cantor promises to propose legislation that addresses a democratically selected budget cut, he is not legally obligated to do so. This wiggle room is afforded by the vagueness of the proposed budget cut item. While he suggests otherwise, Cantor has not entered into a contract with the American people to propose specific legislation because, in part, he is not asking people to vote on specific legislation.

There are other systematic problems with YouCut’s seemingly democratic design. It does not allow people to attach comments to the proposed budget cut items, thereby silencing useful criticism. It is also hosted on a seemingly Republican controlled website, thereby discouraging input from non-Republicans, and potentially biasing the sample of voters to Republican voters.

All of my criticism of YouCut may be written off as a misunderstanding of partisan politics – that I am expecting too much direct democracy from the Republican House Minority Whip. He is a professional partisan politician after all, and one who directly benefits from the status quo of indirect democracy. Some might ask why I am so surprised to discover another partisan ploy to rally political support with populist rhetoric, even sophisticated populist rhetoric, like the use of online voting that pretends to give political power to ordinary people about how to balance the federal budget.

The problem with this line of criticism is not that it assumes a tendency for political corruption, but that it accepts it without considering creative alternatives, alternatives like allowing the public to propose and vote on all proposed budget cut items, or allowing the public to post comments on any proposed budget cut item. These creative alternatives are not that difficult to imagine or implement, but they do move us closer to systematically rejecting political corruption in the legislative process.

On YouCut, Eric Cantor and the Republican elite ask us to “vote on this page today for your priorities and together we can begin to change Washington’s culture of spending into a culture of savings.” I am asking us to seriously re-examine whether YouCut actually allows us to democratically decide on our budget priorities, or whether YouCut allows Eric Cantor and the Republican elite to use us to provide a veneer of democracy for their budget priorities.

Eric Cantor and the Republican Party elite are not only generating media buzz and populist excitement about their campaign, but they also get your email address or phone number, depending on how you vote. You may be thinking that you are merely voting for a budget cut, that government is finally listening to you. Actually, you are adding yourself to a political list that might be used for other partisan purposes.

While YouCut is not designed for democratic decision-making, it demonstrates how easy it would be to design a democratic decision-making website, one that gathers votes from the public and connects those votes to legislative action. Ironically, while YouCut may be designed to manipulate the public for private interests, it gives us reason to think that we could design a website that actually overcomes those private interests by democratically voting on public interests. Currently, YouCut is really TheyCut, but in the not so distant future, we could really have a YouCut.