Democracy, Participation, and Mechanisms: What to do when participation is unrepresentative?

Unrepresentative participation in voting and crowdsourcing systems distorts results because active participants do not always reflect the entire community. Traditional methods, such as demographically weighted votes, help, but often fail to address the problem due to the difficulty of identifying and accounting for those who do not participate. A study of complaints in New York City found that uneven participation leads to systemic inequities in service, and the author calls for rethinking who we really consider a community and whether voting is a fair governance mechanism.