Michael Krumholtz at StartUpBeat: “Amit Thakkar saw first hand how messy and inefficient politics can be from the inside. While working as a political consultant for a decade, Thakkar said he became frustrated with seeing the same old players decide policy with almost no influence from actual constituents or voters.
That’s a large part of why he decided to create LawMaker.io, which bills itself as a revolutionary platform that gives those in the U.S. the chance to create propositions for new laws through crowdsourcing. That allows for support to build for popular ideas that are eventually handed over to legislators to propose them as real laws. Touting itself as a “free lobby for the lobbyless,” Thakkar said its a platform that could very much change the face of U.S. democracy.
“It didn’t make sense to me that such a small group of wealthy and well-connected people had such an outsized influence on the laws that are written and the way our government works,” he told Techli. “I knew there needed to be a free way that all Americans could propose common-sense ideas for laws and influence elected officials in a way that benefitted all Americans instead of just a powerful few.”
Lawmaker.io works by finding ideas at the ground level that can shape politics and then making sure it gets a wider audience after a user proposes a policy idea. It’s then shared widely by the user and suggestions are made for possible amendments to the initial proposal. Support is then gathered until the idea has at least 100 registered supporters and it is eventually sent off to the appropriate legislators.
LawMaker.io recently held its 2nd Lawmaker Challenge to offer up a winning policy proposal to legislators. As the Supreme Court’s Citizen United has become so influential in allowing big money to essentially buy politics, the winning proposal looked to reverse the impacts of the decision and shift back influence to voters over the power of wealthy interests….(More)”.