# The Aligned Election Commission

[![Your politicians are funded by the people they’re supposed to regulate. Wishonia replaces campaign finance with a single alignment score.](../../assets/infographics/knowledge/solution/aligned-election-commission-infographic-bw-academic.jpg)](../../assets/infographics/knowledge/solution/aligned-election-commission-infographic-bw-academic.jpg)

Your politicians are funded by the people they’re supposed to regulate. Wishonia replaces campaign finance with a single alignment score.

## Bribery With Extra Steps

Your politicians are funded by the people they’re supposed to regulate. You call this “campaign finance.” On my planet, we call it bribery with extra steps.

The 2024 US election cycle cost over \$15 billion in total spending. Direct contributions to candidates and PACs alone topped \$4.7 billion. Annual lobbying expenditures run another \$3.7 billion. The Federal Election Commission has 6 commissioners, and they deadlock on purpose. 0.01% of the population provides the majority of campaign funds. Campaign donors get a 760% return on their lobbying investments. You, the citizen, get a form letter and the sensation of having participated.

The system is working perfectly. Just not for you. I checked who it’s working for. It’s working for the 0.01%.

## The Alignment Score

Wishonia replaces the entire campaign finance apparatus with one number per politician: the Citizen Alignment Score.

How closely do their votes match what citizens actually want? The score is public, immutable, updated in real time, and cannot be lobbied.

``` solidity
function allocate(bytes32 jurisdiction, bytes32[] leaves,
    bytes32[][] proofs, uint256[] scores) external {
    for (uint256 i = 0; i < leaves.length; i++) {
        bool valid = oracle.verifyScore(jurisdiction, leaves[i], proofs[i]);
        if (!valid || scores[i] < minimumAlignmentScore) continue;
        uint256 weight = scores[i] - minimumAlignmentScore;
        uint256 share = (balance * weight) / totalWeight;
        stablecoin.safeTransfer(politician.campaignWallet, share);
    }
}
```

Represent citizens well, get funded. Represent donors well, get nothing.

## The 67% Problem

Since Citizens United, undisclosed political spending has increased 67%. Your Supreme Court ruled that money is speech. This means people with more money have more speech. Your founders fought a revolution over the principle that all men are created equal, and then your highest court decided that some men’s speech is 4.7 billion dollars more equal. I read the ruling. The logic was very sophisticated. The result was very obvious.

The FEC was designed to prevent this. It has 6 commissioners. They tie 3-3 on every consequential vote. This is not a malfunction. This is the design. A regulator that cannot regulate is the best regulator money can buy. I have seen better governance in ant colonies. The ants at least agree on which direction is food.

## What Changes

Under the Aligned Election Commission:

- No donors. No PACs. No dark money. Just math measuring representation.
- Politicians funded proportional to how well they represent citizens, not how well they please donors.
- Below minimum alignment? \$0. Above it? Funded proportionally.
- Every citizen can verify the score. Every vote is on the record. The algorithm shows its work.

The \$8.4 billion currently spent on campaign finance and lobbying (\$4.7B + \$3.7B) is eliminated. Running the replacement costs \$7 million (95% CI: \$2 million-\$20 million) a year, all-in, sized as a small data operation doing arithmetic the NRA already does with interns. We tried to make the estimate larger and could not. More importantly, the incentive for politicians to serve donors instead of citizens is eliminated. That second part is worth considerably more than \$8.4 billion.

Your current system is a vending machine where lobbyists insert money and legislation comes out. The replacement is a scoreboard where citizens insert preferences and representation comes out. The technology exists. The math is trivial. The obstacle is that the people who would need to approve the change are the same people who benefit from the current system. This is why the [1% Treaty](https://manual.warondisease.org/knowledge/solution/1-percent-treaty.html)^([1](../references.llms.md#ref-1-percent-treaty-paper-2025)) ^([2](../references.llms.md#ref-1-pct-treaty-impact-paper-2025)) works around them instead of through them.

To be precise about which part of corruption this module kills, because the machine has three blades.

The [Loving Takeover](https://manual.warondisease.org/knowledge/appendix/loving-takeover.html) buys the supply side: the companies whose lobbying budgets write your laws get new boards and new instructions. This commission removes the demand side: a politician funded by alignment scores has nothing left to sell a donor. And the [Decentralized Congress](../../knowledge/solution/decentralized-congress.llms.md) removes the product itself, because you cannot lobby a legislature that consists of everyone.

Any one blade can be dodged. The three together leave lobbying with one remaining business model: publishing evidence and hoping eight billion people find it convincing, which is also called arguing in public, and stays legal on every planet.

| Feature | The Other Guys | The Aligned Election Commission |
|----|----|----|
| Who funds campaigns | The 0.01%, expecting delivery | A scoring algorithm, expecting representation |
| Donor return on investment | 760% and climbing | \$0. There is nothing for sale. |
| The regulator | 6 commissioners, deadlocked 3-3 on purpose | A formula, which cannot deadlock |
| Your influence | One bundled vote every two years | Your preferences, scored against every roll call |

## Build Sheet

*Loop role: actuator feedback. Politicians are the machine’s actuators; this wire keeps them pointed at the setpoint instead of at the donors. See the [Theory of Operation](../../knowledge/solution/theory-of-operation.llms.md).*

- **What you are building:** Score computation, public data pipelines, and campaign-fund routing.
- **Parts required:** Public roll-call records. Wishocratic preference data ([Wishocracy](../../knowledge/solution/wishocracy.llms.md)^([3](../references.llms.md#ref-wishocracy-paper-2025))). The NRA scorecard as prior art: remove the guns, keep the fear.
- **Specifications:** Every score recomputable by a high-school student from published data in one afternoon. Funds routed within 24 hours of a scored vote. Full public API. No score adjustable by any human after publication; that feature already exists, and it is called the current system.
- **Testing your installation:** Any citizen recomputes any politician’s score and gets the published number, to the decimal.
- **Parts cost:** \$7 million (95% CI: \$2 million-\$20 million)/year; interval in the tooltip. If your build costs more, you have reinvented the FEC and should stop.
- **First bolt (no permission required):** Score 100 sitting senators from public roll calls and publish the leaderboard. One intern-week. The angriest press release you receive is your proof of concept.
- **Troubleshooting:**

| Symptom | Fix |
|----|----|
| “This is unconstitutional” | It is a private scorecard and private campaign support, the exact legal machinery the NRA has operated for decades. Nothing here amends your constitution. It plagiarizes your gun lobby. |
| “Politicians will game the score” | The score is votes matching constituent preferences. Gaming it means representing your constituents. That is the desired failure mode; please game harder. |

You build it. The math fits on a napkin; if you would rather pay someone, forward the napkin.

1\.

Sinn, M. P. *The 1% Treaty*. <https://manual.warondisease.org/knowledge/solution/1-percent-treaty.html> (2025) doi:[10.5281/zenodo.20076511](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20076511)

*Your governments possess nuclear weapons sufficient to end civilization 122 times but have not cured Alzheimer’s once. This treaty asks them to be 1% more rational.*

2\.

Sinn, M. P. *The 1% Treaty: An Incentive-Compatible Approach to Ending War and Disease*. <https://manual.warondisease.org/knowledge/economics/1-pct-treaty-impact.html> (2025) doi:[10.5281/zenodo.18161560](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18161560)

*6.65 thousand diseases have zero FDA-approved treatments; at current trial capacity, exploring them takes  443 years. Redirecting 1% of military spending scales capacity 12.3x, cutting the timeline to  36 years and preventing 10.7 billion deaths. At \$0.00177/DALY, 50.3kx more cost-effective than the best existing interventions. The result holds across every specified adoption pathway.*

3\.

Sinn, M. P. *Wishocracy: Solving the Democratic Principal-Agent Problem Through Pairwise Preference Aggregation*. <https://manual.warondisease.org/knowledge/appendix/wishocracy-paper.html> (2025) doi:[10.5281/zenodo.18205881](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18205881)

*Representative democracy suffers from an inescapable principal-agent problem where elected officials’ incentives diverge from citizen welfare. Wishocracy introduces RAPPA (Randomized Aggregated Pairwise Preference Allocation), which aggregates citizen preferences through cognitively tractable pairwise comparisons and creates accountability via Citizen Alignment Scores that channel electoral resources toward politicians who actually represent what citizens want.*