[pp.int.general] Agora Voting System for a Liquid Democracy at FOSDEM

[Eduardo Robles Elvira]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 11:33 PM, Boris Turovskiy <tourovski at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well that idea is exactly the opposite of what any parliamentary system
> is designed to do. For example, §138 of the German Grundgesetz
> (Constitution) specifically states that "a member of Parliament is bound
> only by his conscience" - I'm sure there are similar rulings in most
> democratic states. It implies that neither the party leadership nor
> anyone else is entitled to order a MP how to vote. Of course, if a MP
> votes against what his voters want he probably won't get re-elected.

The statutes of PDI dictate that this is they way their
representatives will vote. If a MEP doesn't obbey the party's
statutes, it will be sanctioned correspondingly.

> Moreover, while Liquid Democracy challenges some postulates of
> representative (parliamentary) democracy, even in a LD system a
> "delegate" exercises his vote by free will (it's just the the process of
> delegation is more fluid and not limited to a ballot once every 4 years,
> and that every participant may choose not to delegate at all but to vote
> directly).
> What you describe is basically direct democracy with a technical proxy.
>
> Best regards,
> Boris

Well I didn't refer in my explanation to a little "detail" in the
proxy implementation: when in my example62% votes YES and 38% voted
NO, that tally result included vote delegation. You can delegate in
public delegates and that (encrypted) vote will also be counted. In
the end of the tally, you will actually have something like this:

YES: X votes
NO: Y Votes
Public delegate 1: Z Votes
Public delegate 2: N Votes
etc

Of course the vote of those Public delegates will be public and known
beforehand. This enters in the details of the implementation.( We can
discuss this of course, but I'm not sure if this is a topic that
should be discussed in this mailing list).

So no, the voting system PDI propossed is not direct democracy, but
liquid democracy. You can either delegate your vote, or vote directly.

Regards,
   Eduardo.