PAPA'S OPERATIONAL ELEMENTS - Advisory Voting

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Advisory Voting (AV) is a simplified and streamlined means for constituents to communicate with their legislators, advising them to vote 'yea' or 'nay' on current bills, resolutions, or other business. The methodology offered through the Political Advisory Panel of America will not only help citizens better perform their civic responsibilities in their government, but also will provide transparency tools to enable constituents to better judge their elected officials.

1. A constituent successfully registers on the PAPA website to gain access to the PAPA application to participate in Advisory Voting as a Verified and Registered (VAR) Participant. 
2. The constituent with VAR Participant status enters the Advisory Voting section of the application and identifies his or her bill of interest. The PAPA application clarifies the bill, identifies the most recent version (providing an optional link to read the bill), and the constituent confirms the bill to be addressed. 
3. With the exception of three fields, the application automatically populates all fields in a pre-addressed and pre-formatted Advisory Vote email. The constituent confirms pre-filled data fields (including their contact information) and enters his or her Advisory Vote into the first of three blank fields - the ‘Advisory Vote’ field.  A yea is entered to advise to pass the bill.  A nay is entered to advise to reject the bill.  The Advisory Voter may also enter an “abstain” Advisory Vote (see more abstain details below).  
4. The next two empty fields are optional ‘Comment’ fields.  These permit the Advisory Voter to highlight their preferred provisions to include in the bill (first comment field) or exclude from the bill (second comment field).  
5. An abstain vote along with the two comment fields also enables early input on a bill that is still in committee.  See also Step 10 for additional information concerning a vote to abstain. 
6. Following completion of the Advisory Vote (and any optional comments),  the application is ready to run security protocols prior to sending the Advisory Vote emails. The PAPA application uses data collected during Registration to confirm who are the Advisory Voter’s legislators and to confirm the Advisory Voter is indeed the individual submitting the Advisory Vote.    
7. In this part of PAPA's validation protocols, the application sends a verification email to the Advisory Voter’s email address of record.  In the email, the constituent is thanked for participating on the named bill (but no Advisory Vote is included) and is presented in the email with a code to enter on the PAPA website to complete the Advisory Voting process.  The email also contains a list of actions to take if the constituent did NOT just submit an Advisory Vote.    
8. Once the Advisory Voter enters the emailed validation code and the PAPA application successfully uses the code to confirm the Advisory Voter is valid, the constituent can send the Advisory Vote email to his/her legislators.  The federal Political Advisory Panel of America application default is to send an Advisory Vote to the constituent’s U.S. Representative, to each of his or her two U.S. Senators, and to the President (a total of four emails).   ALL of these officials can be advised at once of the voter’s directive regardless if the bill is a House or Senate bill – after all, a bill in one chamber will eventually have an impact on a related bill in the other chamber.  Knowing voter directives can help both chambers craft their own bills in a more expeditious fashion.  Additionally, by tracking voter directives the President can make a better informed decision to sign or veto the final bill.     
9. An option is also available before a vote is taken in Congress  for an Advisory Voter to rescind an Advisory Vote and/or cast a reverse Advisory Vote (e.g.:  if an offensive amendment is added to a bill, or a desired provision is removed).  These scenarios may be common for bills that have a lot of interest by voters and/or a lot of contention within Congress – as amendments may more likely be added or deleted.   
10. An “abstain” Advisory Vote is NOT included in Advisory Voting Metrics. But when an abstain vote is changed to a yea or nay Advisory Vote, Advisory Voting Metrics are updated and legislators are informed (updates are also provided when a yea or nay Advisory Vote is reversed).  

In all cases, each Advisory Voter is permitted only one Advisory Vote at a time in the Advisory Voting Metrics for each bill.
 

Advisory Voting Analogy  -  Verification and Validation

To better understand the process of Advisory Voting, think of the PAPA Advisory Voting process as a combination of the best parts of social media and a specialized ‘post office’ that only manages the equivalent to registered mail.  Registered mail provides a trail of verification and validation, but at times can be slow.  Social media provide almost instant communications but lacks validation of the underlying sources – allowing potentially hundreds of thousands of ‘fake’ accounts, including those of foreign origin, to spread ‘fake’ influence.  This contrasts to PAPA’s registration process, which must be successfully completed to participate in Advisory Voting.  PAPA’s registration uses data stored in multiple government databases to screen for consistency and validity of Advisory Voter registration input, resulting in permitting participation only by verified citizens that are registered to vote, and then only permitting them to communicate with their elected legislators from their district and state. PAPA will then provide recipients (i.e.:  legislators) with the sender’s (Advisory Voter's) contact information for follow-up if necessary, but will not reveal contact information to the public. 

Following delivery of the Advisory Vote, PAPA’s communication processes will publicly track all constituent directives that it delivered to legislators with the speed approaching that of social media. 

In regards to the specialized  ‘post office’ portion of this analogy: 

• The process of recording an Advisory Vote is analogous to a  delivery system   
• The output Advisory Voting Metrics are analogous to a tracking system 
• And the resulting Accountability Scorecards are analogous to a delivery confirmation system.   

The specialized 'post office' is also special in the sense:

1. Rather than postal mail, only email is sent and received.  
2. Only email concerning congressional decisions is handled.  
3. The only participating 'mail' customers are constituents of the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives along with the elected members of these two bodies. 
4. The only deliveries made by this ‘post office’ are to members of the U.S. Senate and members of the House of Representatives (and also the President). 
5. And email is only delivered in one direction – sent from constituents to their legislators. 

• General communications through the PAPA website from legislators to their constituents are ‘delivered’ by posts on the website for all constituents to view.
• Private communications from legislators to individual constituents are conducted through normal office procedures employed by each legislator's office. 

And being such a singularly focused ‘post office’, the emails passing through this ‘post office’ all have identical formats (i.e.: they all have the same types of data - or data fields - and the data fields in every email are arranged in the same format).  

And since one of the goals of this PAPA ‘post office’ is to shed transparency on the input legislators receive from constituents, before each email is delivered to the recipient legislator(s) by this specialized ‘post office’, with implied consent of sender and recipients, the content of SOME of the data fields on each Advisory Vote email are ‘scanned’ and logged in the 'tracking system' called the Advisory Voting Metrics database.  The scanned data fields and their captured information from each email include the following:

• The date and time that the Advisory Vote email was sent.  
• The elected officials’ names, congressional district number, and/or state to whom the email is sent,
• An identifier of the congressional business being addressed in the email/Advisory Vote (e.g.: the name and number of the bill being addressed, or the name and position of the nominated candidate under consideration by the Senate, etc.), 
• And finally, the recommended Advisory Vote submitted by the Advisory Voter (constituent) to the legislator (i.e.: a recommendation to vote yea or nay on the particular bill) along with any optional comments. 

After the emails are dispatched, the Advisory Voting Metrics database can then use the captured data to publish updated daily tallies of the total number of yea and total number of nay Advisory Votes that each legislator receives through the Political Advisory Panel of America application for a specific bill.  A separate tally is generated for each bill (or other form of congressional business) and for each representative and senator from which detailed metrics are published.  Additionally, cumulative tallies are generated for each bill in the House and Senate for general metrics.  

Because only the intended legislators receive the full Advisory Vote email, only the intended legislators can identify the name and contact information for each Advisory Voter (constituent).  The public tallies of Advisory Votes published via Advisory Voting Metrics do NOT identify the Advisory Voter (constituent) for each Advisory Vote.  In this way, legislators can follow-up with their advising constituents through their office’s normal procedures (if legislators care to do so), and Advisory Voters (constituents) maintain their privacy to the public.   See more details on Advisory Voting Metrics on the next web page.  

ELECTED OFFICIALS receiving Advisory Votes will be able to identify their Advisory Voters / constituents and link them to a specific yes or no Advisory Vote for a specific bill. They are provided this information by pre-filled data in their Advisory Vote emails. Knowing the constituent and their contact information along with their Advisory Vote, permits legislators to properly communicate with their constituents, if they decide to do so.  However, to improve confidentiality and security, these emails are purged from the PAPA email servers shortly after they are sent to their intended recipients.  But for completeness of records, a database entry is made to record that an email Advisory Vote was dispatched at a given time and date to specific recipients, for a specific bill with a specific action – but NO contact information is recorded on this record so that constituent privacy can be more easily maintained.    

Security measures are used throughout the PAPA systems to keep each Advisory Voter's Advisory Vote private.  The Advisory Vote is retained elsewhere in the PAPA systems solely for the case an Advisory Voter wishes to change his or her Advisory Vote. Having the original vote in the records permits a more secure change of vote when requested.