The Humbler
A few years ago, participation in US elections were at an all-time low. Though many corrupt individuals wanted to become politicians, very few citizens were willing to vote for them. This lead to the "Real People" bill, which stipulated that elections were only valid if over 50% of the constituent population voted in them. If an election received less than its required quota, a new election would be made with potentially new candidates.
This lead the the 2032 election crisis where the US was unable to elect an appropriate president as no one was willing to vote for either party. It was then that congress realized a fatal flaw in the bill: there was no stipulation for what would happen if a presidential election was deemed invalid. This meant that the president at the time was kicked out of office unceremoniously, leaving the US without a head to the executive branch.
A secondary election was held and similarly failed. Desperate, congress began incentivizing the public to self-organize and provide additional candidates outside of the two-party system. The idea was that the Republican and Democratic party would provide the same candidates as before, but the people could also propose their own candidates without any party primaries. All candidates above a specified threshold of support would be given a base level of federal funding for their campaign and a new election would be held at the end of March.
Congress thought this project would be mutually beneficial. They needed more people to vote and there was no chance that a third party candidate could win against established parties. Their hope was that the US population would propose a huge number of different candidates all competing against each other, leading to the eventual victory of established choices.
Surprisingly, the US population was extremely organized. A particularly strong candidate by the name Taylor Spitzer made themselves known first on Reddit, then youtube, tiktok, facebook, and every other social media platform. They did not promise much, except that they would "shake things up" and "follow the experts" on every decision that came their way. After only a week, Taylor was the preferred candidate of the people. In the mid-March primaries, they won against other candidates by fact-checking literally everything they said.
To the surprise of the established parties, Spitzer won the election.
This lead to a new political movement: the Cite-seers. These individuals did everything they could to ensure that politicians were accurate in the information they provided to the public. They also strove to clean up the media landscape so that all publicly funded news organizations were required by law to provide proper citations for every claim they made. Through proper organization online, they effectively crowd-sourced the 2034 midterm election as well which lead to the mass exodus of established politicians, creating a non-binary political system for the first time since George Washington's era.
In 2035, a new bill was proposed by Cite-seeing candidates: "the Humble Servant." This would require every politician to be shadowed an individual that was tongue-in-cheek referred to as a "Humbler" to fact check everything they said. These Humblers would be provided from a non-partisan pool of individuals created from established parties, including the Cite-seers. Humblers also could not be from the same party as the candidate, themselves.
At that time, many established politicians quit their job, leading to yet another exodus within congress. The remaining members of congress held special elections to fill all vacancies and since then, the US government has been much more in tune with what their population actually wants.