Reading up on delegative democracy aka liquid democracy. It’s essentially selecting someone to vote on your behalf in referendums, but where your selected proxy voter can also transfer their delegated votes to another proxy voter, and so on, while you can also take your vote back, override your proxy voter, and review your proxy voter’s voting record.
This is meant to essentially replace legislatures and make voting in referendums easier, quicker and more affordable.
To break down #LiquidDemocracy:
Imagine having a vote on a ballot measure, a referendum. Unlike many, you may not have the time to do research on the proposed law or vote on it.
So what can you do?
In #DelegativeDemocracy or Liquid Democracy, you can select someone – say, a friend who is more knowledgeable about the proposed law on the ballot – to cast your vote on your behalf. You might trust this person – Person A – to have more knowledge and be more responsible with your vote than you are. Person A is your proxy voter.
But what if Person A who you select knows someone else – Person B – who has even more knowledge about the proposed law and has publicly announced that they’ve cast their vote along the same lines as Person A? In Liquid Democracy, Person A can select Person B as their proxy voter, and can delegate Person B to cast your vote, Person A’s vote and the votes of others who’ve delegated their votes to that person.
In short, Liquid Democracy is a third way of passing laws, alongside representative democracy and direct democracy. It blends the two and moves us away from both the cost of direct democracy and the isolation of representative democracy.
The issue I have is this:
- can this function without dependency upon the Internet to facilitate the voting process?
- Also, what are the means by which this process can account for disadvantaged groups in a population or suspect classes whose rights may be targeted by referendum?
- This may rid us of the need for gerrymandering and of competitive elections, but what will it do for minorities?
