Thanks for the feedback! I didn’t know liquid democracy was a thing.
My thought process was: “This article is interesting. They suggest using software to enable voters to directly vote on issues rather than voting on representatives. They want to put it on top of existing processes. Here’s a better way of getting to that goal.”
This post doesn’t suggest to change existing political systems, or to implement some software nation-wide. Changing a political system is a highly difficult problem. But forming a political party is easy, and so is implementing software and processes for issue based voting. You can thus then use a proxy political party to bring issue based voting into a democratic process without modifying the democratic process itself or fighting your way through the bureaucracy required to have your software used.
The general problem you have with allowing everyone to vote on anything is that a parliament takes a lot of votes.
Even a senator whose main job is to be a senator needs a staff to make informed decisions on every vote.
You don’t really vote political decisions to be driven by Youtube influencers together with anyone who has the money to run a marketing campaign to frame a given vote.
Liquid Democracy is a way to get people to delegate when they don’t have the time to make informed decisions for a given vote. It’s worth noting that the Pirate Party in Germany used Liquid Democracy for its party decisions. That didn’t stop them when they were in parliament to ofter have half of the Pirate Party parliamentarians when they were in parliament in Berlin vote “yes” and the other half “no”.
The system that Aubrey Tang build in Taiwan is also worth looking in when it comes to the prior art.
Thanks for the feedback! I didn’t know liquid democracy was a thing.
My thought process was: “This article is interesting. They suggest using software to enable voters to directly vote on issues rather than voting on representatives. They want to put it on top of existing processes. Here’s a better way of getting to that goal.”
This post doesn’t suggest to change existing political systems, or to implement some software nation-wide. Changing a political system is a highly difficult problem. But forming a political party is easy, and so is implementing software and processes for issue based voting. You can thus then use a proxy political party to bring issue based voting into a democratic process without modifying the democratic process itself or fighting your way through the bureaucracy required to have your software used.
The general problem you have with allowing everyone to vote on anything is that a parliament takes a lot of votes.
Even a senator whose main job is to be a senator needs a staff to make informed decisions on every vote.
You don’t really vote political decisions to be driven by Youtube influencers together with anyone who has the money to run a marketing campaign to frame a given vote.
Liquid Democracy is a way to get people to delegate when they don’t have the time to make informed decisions for a given vote. It’s worth noting that the Pirate Party in Germany used Liquid Democracy for its party decisions. That didn’t stop them when they were in parliament to ofter have half of the Pirate Party parliamentarians when they were in parliament in Berlin vote “yes” and the other half “no”.
The system that Aubrey Tang build in Taiwan is also worth looking in when it comes to the prior art.