Blockchain and Politics – 1
There have been many announcements and writings about political parties and public participation in decision-making via the blockchain. (I have not tracked the most recent updates of these.)
From a press release in Oct 2019: “ Æternity, the next-generation, open-source blockchain for building decentralized applications, today announced a collaboration with the Uruguay Digital Party to optimize the participation processes of citizens through the use of blockchain technology in internal voting. This initiative aims to make decisions more transparent, thus building a new system in which citizens, and members of the Digital Party in particular, can participate in a decentralized manner in the political decisions of their community. For that, Æternity will work in two main areas. The first phase of the project will focus on the development of a decentralized application based on the “liquid democracy” model, which operates with tokens using a basic set of smart contracts that the Digital Party will use for its internal governance. A technological solution will also be developed for the collection and validation of adherent identities. This will allow the Digital Party to create a secure and transparent database. In this way, each citizen can vote on proposals and give ideas directly and safely, thanks to encryption techniques that ensure a verifiable process separating the identity of the vote, which is kept secret.”
More on Liquid Democracy from Wikipedia: “Liquid democracy is a form of delegative democracy whereby an electorate engages in collective decision-making through direct participation and dynamic representation. This democratic system utilizes elements of both direct and representative democracy. Voters in a liquid democracy have the right to vote directly on all policy issues à la direct democracy, however, voters also have the option to delegate their votes to someone who will vote on their behalf à la representative democracy. Any individual may be delegated votes (those delegated votes are termed “proxies”) and these proxies may in turn delegate their vote as well as any votes they have been delegated by others resulting in “metadelegation”.” More from Chiara Valsangiacomo: “The core idea behind LD is that, for each issue to be decided, each citizen has a single vote that can be transferred to a trusted person (or ‘proxy’) at will. In other words, citizens can freely decide whether to cast their vote directly or to delegate it, with a given citizen potentially choosing different proxies for different topics. Anyone can become a proxy, meaning that the number of ‘elected’ representatives is potentially unlimited.”
Mariana Todorova: “Liquid democracy gives the opportunity to combine the advantages of direct and representative democracy, while neutralizing to a great extent their disadvantages…DG Agora is a P2P system for providing confidence and organization of power. It may serve not only for the establishment of new social organizations, movements, parties, and cooperatives, but also for democratic structuring and organization of already existing power organizations of private, state or cooperative characters, as well.”
Australia’s Flux: “Flux is a political movement promoting a new system of democracy called ‘Issue Based Direct Democracy’ (IBDD) which enables voters to influence how an elected Flux representative will vote on legislation in Parliament … Flux is a gateway Australians can use, to participate directly in parliament, making the need for trust in elected officials a thing of the past. Elected Flux MPs and Senators give up their autonomy and use their votes in line with the outcomes produced by the Flux ecosystem; an ecosystem comprised of ordinary Aussies…IBDD has three main aspects: Voters get to have a say on any issues they want to, but can abstain from voting if they don’t want to; instead of voting directly, voters can choose to delegate their vote to someone else – like a specialist, politician or just a trusted friend; and voters can assign priority to the issues most important to them.” Flux uses an idea termed as “liquidity tokens.”
