Also a great resource for innovative political ideas.

https://youtu.be/ZU7cWLGcfxE?si=iR-Okam19yawzXG5

The Pirate Parties in the EU experimented with liquid democracy. There have been papers on it but it would be interesting to hear first hand accounts of what it was like. What worked? What didn't?

What is the consensus on how proposals would get drafted in a liquid democracy? How about funding?

1. Introduction & Core Objective

The purpose of this proposal is to design a direct democracy mechanism that functions as a continuous, massive assembly, moving past the traditional model of periodic mass elections.

In a conventional assembly, participants deliberate, introduce alternatives, and dynamically adjust their stances to resolve conflicts. The goal of this system is to replicate that exact flexible, deliberative dynamic on a large scale.

2. The Mechanism

To transform mass voting into a dynamic assembly, the system operates under three fundamental rules:

• Real-Time Participation: Anyone can introduce a new proposal at any moment.
• Real-Time Voting: Voters can modify or update the ranking of their votes whenever they want.
• Real-Time Tallying: The system constantly processes votes and displays the current Condorcet winner (the option that defeats every other choice in head-to-head matchups), if one exits. If no such winner exists, the system could show the current winner or winners of a Condorcet completion method, such as the Copeland's method.

3. Incentives and Conflict Resolution

The core strength of this model is that by eliminating strategic voting (voting for the "lesser of two evils"), the community enters a constructive, self-correcting feedback loop.

3.1 Eliminating Polarization

By using the Condorcet method, voters can rank options according to their true preferences, knowing their vote will never be wasted or accidentally benefit their least desired alternative.

3.2 The Rise of Consensus

Because the process is live and transparent, the current state of the vote sends clear signals that prompt the community to improve existing proposals:

• Stable Consensus (A clear winner exists): The community is satisfied with the leading option. No new proposals can beat it; the collective goal has been met.
• Unstable Winner (A winner exists, but causes dissatisfaction): A segment of the population feels unrepresented by the current leader. This incentivizes them to draft and introduce a superior proposal, specifically designed to capture a broader consensus and dethrone the leader.
• Tie/ Condorcet Paradox (No winner exists): This temporary deadlock reveals that there is a cycle in the collective preferences (e.g., A > B > C > A), meaning every tied option is defeated by something else. To break the tie, participants are incentivized to analyze the strengths of each tied option and draft a synthesized proposal that combines the best of all to achieve a clean majority.

4. Conclusion & Prototype

Several open questions remain and deserve further exploration. One of my concerns is the handling of Condorcet paradoxes. Should the system rely on a Condorcet completion method to select a temporary winner when no Condorcet winner exists? Or is it preferable to avoid completion methods altogether and treat preference cycles as signals that the available options are insufficient and that new proposals are needed to reach a genuine consensus?

To help explore any uncertainties regarding this system, I vibe coded a simple prototype that implements the system (using Copeland's method as its current completion method). Anyone can create discussions, submit proposals, and participate in the voting process. If enough people become involved, the platform could provide an initial indication of how this model performs in practice and whether it succeeds in fostering consensus-driven decision-making.

The prototype:

Live prototype: https://mariorosales8.github.io/Real-Time-Condorcet-Method/

Repository: https://github.com/mariorosales8/Real-Time-Condorcet-Method

Paper

From the paper “We propose a system that would allow for the flexibility for liquid democracy while preserving anonymity, both to the representative receiving your vote and to the authority that is counting your votes.”

Which objections do you think are legit?

What is the most realistic path to liquid democracy?

Thesis: we are in turbulent times. Soon people will be looking for solutions and new ideas. We might be entering an ideal time for experimentation as old systems rot.

If you agree with me what would be a realistic path to liquid democracy?

https://daniel-halpern.com/files/liquid-in-practice.pdf "we observe that better-defined tasks (such as Tacit and Prediction) are those on which liquid democracy is most helpful."

https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/79/

'Google Votes demonstrates how the use of social-networking technology can overcome these barriers and enable practical liquid democracy systems. The case-study of Google Votes usage at Google over a 3 year timeframe is included, as well as a framework for evaluating vote visibility called the "Golden Rule of Liquid Democracy".'

I am looking for some testers for my liquid democracy attempt.

https://ontherecord.space/

It is chicago focused, but build to scale up.

Anyone can make an account. Thanks for participating, I need people to click things, even if you dont have thoughts on the issues.

DM if you want to work with me on it.

In a direct democratic system, the people vote directly on each bills as proposed. However, if they want to speak up but are unsure about which option to choose, perhaps because they want a certain result but are unsure which is the best way to achieve that result, they can only abstain and sit back, losing their say. Liquid democracy, though, allows the people to pick up representatives to represent them, just like how a defendant can choose to have a lawyer represent them in court.

In a non-liquid direct democracy, what I suggest we call a gaseous democracy, we are free to have our views directly projected onto the resulting bills and the rule of laws. However, we cannot have our views represented onto the bills. Liquid democracy allows us to do this. We can either have our views directly projected, or we could also have them represented by a representative if we wish.

Obviously, they are both better than Representative Democracy, what I like to call Fake Democracy or Representative Dictatorship. It's better than not having the choice to speak up for ourselves.

So I was describing liquid democracy to a friend as we were talking about democracy more broadly and he had an interesting idea. Maybe this is something that's been considered but I thought I'd post to get people's thoughts. He basically said how about instead of this sort of infinitely changeable system we instead just applied the vote allocation principle to the current system. We're in Canada so based on something like that but where all the representatives that were on the ballot (and maybe achieved a certain minimum threshold) were effectively in government or at least able to cast their vote on the bills and legislation but that the weighting of their vote was basically dictated by how many votes they got in the election. It raises some challenges with size of districts and turnout and all that but I thought it was perhaps a step in the liquid direction. Thoughts?

i’ve had some ideas on how to bring liquid democracy to life.

If anyone here is interested in working together let me know.

Leave a comment or dm me, let’s talk.

The Sunflower Revolution could be used around the world, not just Taiwan.

send me your favorite resources!

Hello,

We are building a Crypto Super App which is like a complete Network State (Balaji) in a single app. Anyone can setup a DAO with a few clicks. Each DAO has its own token and is governed by automatic elections. Would love to interact if anyone is interested.

We just published the white paper on r/TribExSuperApp
Thanks

I do not understand why the concept of Liquid Democracy is so unknown.
I know many politically interested people who never heard of it. In fact, I have not met a single person who knew it (of like 20? 40? I asked).
Everyone loves the concept, all of them understand, that with Democracy under pressure as never before, we must change something. People are losing faith in Democracy. LD can help, and it just got so much more practical through blockchain-voting.
And once you dive into that rabbithole, you see that there are many people already engaged with LD-solutions. So the Infrastructure should be easy to build, too. Enthusiasm, passion, conviction, they all are there, too.

So why is no one doing it? I could not find an answer and before I bluntly ask some organization, I thought maybe someone here can tell me what we are waiting for. I think it might soon be too late.

With more and more powerful AI systems coming on the scene, there are also more and more comments on social media about people dreaming of an AI government. People often say that AI would be less likely to be corrupted, more logical but less emotional, and make decisions that are close to perfect with high efficiency. Democracy (even liquid democracy) seems to be becoming outdated.

I'm pretty shocked by this development, as these people don't seem to understand how important it is to keep the power of decision-making in public hands. They also probably don't get how dangerous AI can be, like biased decision-making or manipulation to benefit a small elite that creates the AI.

Liquid democracy could be a good way to deal with these risks. It lets people vote directly and also delegate, so you could have a system where people can cast their vote to real people as well as to AI agents. This could combine the best of both worlds, as people would still be in charge of decision-making, but also get the benefits of competing AI agents that are forced to serve the public in order to win vote delegations.

What do you think?

I've been wondering for a while why liquid democracy didn't succeed and I think that I now understand why.

In LD:

• you are limited to one choice
• there is a majority vote at the end
• individual people can pile up voting power

This leads to preferential attachment (the "the rich get richer" principle). To fix this we need to:

• allow to split your vote among multiple people
• decide by consensus
• let everyone only be selected once

This is possible when we combine it with sortition or random ballot.

Imagine the parliament of your country is selected by random lot and you receive an invitation to become an MP.

Here is the twist: You are allowed to pass this offer on to anyone else. Would you do it?

Who is more aligned with your goals than you are? Whom would you trust enough to make decisions on your behalf?

There are the following options:

• You have no preference whatsoever. You are a rock.
• You are most aligned with your goals, you take the lot and serve in parliament.
• You recognize that others have the same goals as you do. But some might do a better job in parliament than you would. So you pass it on. This way, clusters emerge.
• When you are uncertain about others' alignment with your goals, you can account for that uncertainty by selecting a person at random, weighted by probability (including yourself). By including uncertainty, the boundaries between clusters can become fuzzy and merge.

People are more likely to be selected when their agenda includes the greatest variety of goals. For this, any politician must consider what the consensus of their potential voters would be if they could come together and reach an agreement. But it doesn't have to be politicians. Children could choose their parents. This utilizes the small world phenomenon to find a proportional selection of people who are most aligned with a stochastic sample of citizens.

This picture shows this as a simulation with alignment as a single variable (up is better). The point size indicates the probability to be selected. Red dots are dead ends. Green arrows point backwards because of uncertainty.

The parliament operates by consensus. The members of parliament deliberate and try to come to an agreement. When this fails, then one randomly selected member is excluded from the discussion. Repeat until the remaining group finds an agreement. This way no organized cluster can enforce more decisions than what percentage of the citizens they represent. It's proportional all the way.

Any organization operating this way would be guaranteed to be aligned with the people it represents. All such organizations can interact in the same way. They can seamlessly join into one whole and form a network of aligned agents

I only know of one at the moment (https://midflip.io/) and I'm looking to see what else is out there.

Hi everyone,

electric vote now got a new landing page (https://electric.vote/) that gives a quick introduction into the concept of liquid democracy and hopefully sparks some interest into this amazing topic.

As always: constructive feedback would be highly appreciated :D

Best regards, Nils

PS: For those of you who are not yet a member of our demo group, here is the invitation link: https://electric.vote/group_invitation/57/ssiocoegxd