Pirate Democracy

Basic definition

Permanent direct democracy with proxy voting.

Permanent: 24/7, not restricted to once every 4 years

Direct: citizens have the possibility to propose new law proposals and vote on law proposals by themselves, without the need for an elected representative

Democracy: legislative power of the citizens (citizen sovereignty)

Proxy voting: any citizen may delegate her vote to whom she wishes, change delegate anytime, or vote herself whenever she wants to.

Outstanding questions

Principles

• How about the formation of a government? How about executive power?
• What would be the role of sortition ("tirage au sort") and deliberative democracy?
• Do we need other institutions than just the citizens voting on law proposals (e.g. a judicial committee to write law proposals in judicial language, an "expert" committee to provide advices and opinions on law proposals, etc...).

Technical details

• Should delegation be transitive? i.e. I delegate my vote to X who delegates her vote to Y, who delegates her vote to Z, so I delegate my vote to Z.
  • For: you trusted Y, whatever his decision, so you should trust his decision to delegate as well.
• Should delegates receive a compensation for their work?
  • For: this will provide an incentive for people to invest time in studying law proposals
  • Against: This will leave the door open to professional politician who can abuse the system
• Should there be a limit to the number of votes a delegate can gather?
  • Against: people should have the freedom to vote whatever they want

Axioms for a democratic decision making system

• Nobody has more decision-making power than anybody else
• The threshold to perform any action in the system needs to be as low as possible
• Everybody needs to be able to make and vote any proposal
• The freedom to do what you want with your vote needs to be as unlimited as possible.
• The final result needs to reflect the intentions of the voters as much as possible.
• Nobody can gain more influence on the final result through strategic proposals or voting.
• You have to be able to verify what happend to your vote.
• Every voting needs to be verifiable.
• Everybody has the right to remain anonymous.