The Circle

automatically registered you to vote?”
Bailey swept his eyes across the room, hesitating again at Mae and her watchers. She
checked her wrist. Goosebumps, one viewer wrote.
“With TruYou, to set up a pro le, you have to be a real person, with a real address,
complete personal info, a real Social Security number, a real and veri able date of birth.
In other words, all the information the government traditionally wants when you register
to vote. In fact, as you all know, we have far more information. So why wouldn’t this be
enough information to allow you to register? Or better yet, why wouldn’t the government
—our government or any government—just consider you registered once you set up a
TruYou profile?”
The forty heads in the room nodded, some out of acknowledgement of a sensible idea,
some clearly having thought of this before, that it was a notion long discussed.
Mae checked her bracelet. The viewer numbers were climbing quicker, ten thousand a
second, and were now over 2,400,000. She had 1,248 messages. Most had come through
in the last ninety seconds. Bailey glanced down at his own tablet, no doubt seeing the
same numbers she was seeing. Smiling, he continued: “There’s no reason. And a lot of
legislators agree with me. Congresswoman Santos does, for one. And I have verbal
commitments from 181 other members of Congress and 32 senators. They’ve all agreed to
push legislation to make your TruYou pro le your automatic path to registration. Not
bad, right?”
There was a brief round of applause.
“Now think,” Bailey said, his voice a whisper of hope and wonder, “think if we can get
closer to full participation in all elections. There would be no more grumbling from the
sidelines from people who had neglected to participate. There would be no more
candidates who had been elected by a fringe, wedge group. As we know here at the
Circle, with full participation comes full knowledge. We know what Circlers want because
we ask, and because they know their answers are necessary to get a full and accurate
picture of the desires of the whole Circle community. So if we observe the same model
nationally, electorally, then we can get very close, I think, to 100 percent participation.
One hundred percent democracy.”
Applause rippled through the room. Bailey smiled broadly, and Stenton stood; it was,
for him at least, apparently the end of the presentation. But an idea had been forming
within Mae’s mind, and she raised her hand, tentatively.
“Yes Mae,” Bailey said, his face still locked into a broad grin of triumph.
“Well, I wonder if we couldn’t take this one step further. I mean … Well, actually, I
don’t think it—”

---

“No, no. Go on, Mae. You started well. I like the words one step further. That’s how this
company was built.”
Mae looked around the room, the faces a mix of encouraging and concerned. Then she
alighted on Annie’s face, and because it was stern, and dissatis ed, and seemed to be
expecting, or wanting, Mae to fail, to embarrass herself, Mae gathered herself, took a
breath, and forged ahead.
“Okay, well, you were saying we could get close to 100 percent participation. And I
wonder why we couldn’t just work backwards from that goal, using all the steps you
outlined. All the tools we already have.”
Mae looked around the room, ready to quit at the rst pair of skeptical eyes, but she
saw only curiosity, the slow collective nodding of a group practiced in pre-emptive
validation.
“Go on,” Bailey said.
“I’m just going to connect some dots,” Mae said. “Well, rst of all, we all agree that
we’d like 100 percent participation, and that everyone would agree that 100 percent