I live in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah.

I love the city. I love the people. I love having the mountains just a stone’s throw away. During the winter months, I go snowboarding every week with six or seven people from my office. We manage to get a solid half-day in on the slopes, and still get back to our desks by 1 PM to finish off the rest of the work day.

But living in Utah has its down-sides. For starters, I consider myself pretty politically liberal, so living in the most conservative of all the fifty states often makes me feel like I’m not really participating in the political process. I have a solid track record, during every single election, of picking the losers.

Of course, I think I’d still be frustrated if I lived somewhere like Massachusetts. My vote still wouldn’t make much difference (though it’d be nice to be on the winning side of an election, for a change).

Instead, I’d much rather be casting my vote in a swing state, like New Hampshire or Florida or Nebraska. I’d rather be helping unseat a vulnerable incumbent than vote helplessly against Utah Senator Orrin Hatch. Again.

For example, if I could re-allocate my congressional votes this fall to any other state in the Union, I might choose Pennsylvania. In that state, Senator Rick Santorum (R) has his job cut out for him. He only has a 36% approval rating, and he only won re-election in 2000 by a slim majority (52%). Or, if I had a choice, I might choose to vote in Rhode Island, where Senator Lincoln Chafee (R) has only a 49% approval rating. Chaffe won the 2000 election with 57% of the votes. Political analysts are currently calling it a tossup, but with enough support from district-hoppers like me, a Democratic candidate might be able to oust Chaffee.

But why should I be able to vote in Pennsylvania or Rhode Island? After all, I have my own representation here in Utah. Shouldn’t I be more concerned with convincing
Senators Hatch and Bennett to better represent my views?

I don’t think so.

The Republican majority is so entrenched in Utah that those senators have no reason to give consideration to opposition opinions. At this point, the only way to have my opinions reach Washington DC would be for me to move to another state.

Or maybe there’s another way.

Elections are won and lost, to a certain extent, with money. The candidates with the biggest campaign budgets tend to win the most elections. And I, for one, would be happy to vote with my wallet, if I thought I could make a difference at the national level.

So my idea is to develop a website where sad, blue, red-state residents like myself could make campaign contributions to unnamed candidates in as-yet-undetermined states. Then, the software would evaluate all available statistics for each district, and each race, using that information to allocate funds to the campaign budgets of highly contested races, making proxy campaign contributions in the names of the original contributors.

“But Wait!!” I can hear you saying. “This isn’t a for-profit business idea. How could this possibly be considered ’starting a software business’?”

And I’ll concede that you’ve got an excellent point there. In order to make this work, I’d publish (very prominently) the fact that I’d retain 3% of the contributions for administration costs. But even with those fees in place (and I don’t think I’d be willing to take more than 3%), it would be difficult for me to earn a living at it. In order for me to meet my regular $250,000 personal gross revenue target, I’d need to oversee $8.3 million in donations, or $160,000 per week.

That’s a lot of cash.

It might be possible to drum up that kind of support in an election year like this one, where there’s so much at stake for Democrats. But it would be much more difficult during a less-intense election year. And it would be damn near impossible during those pesky oddly-numbered years when nobody gets kicked out of congress.

So, even if you could call this a business idea, I’m sure it doesn’t have the consistency or the revenue potential that I’m looking for, personally.

But it sure would be nice. Some of us would like to feel like part of a representative democracy again.

…

This is the nineteenth of 30 business ideas that I’ll be writing about over the course of 30 days. Or maybe it’ll only end up being 19 ideas in 36 days. We’ll see. Either way, one of these ideas will become a product over the next six months, and the foundation of my new software business.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 16th, 2006 at 1:13 pm and is filed under biz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.