Introduction

This document outlines a proposed system for democratic decision-making by requiring participants establish a delegate path within a defined group. In this model all non-voting delegations would pass-through until a vote is registered, having a weight equal to that of the voter and all delegations rolling-up from above the next downstream participant registering a vote.

Background

The proposed system builds on the work of others, including Frogmonkee's Constrained Delegation and Manon Revel's research on Liquid Democracy.

Key Components

The proposed system has two key components:

1. Forced Constrained Delegation in a Liquid Democracy
2. Infinitely Forwardable Delegation Accounting

How the System Works

The proposed system works as follows:

1. Voters delegate their vote to a representative with expertise or knowledge on the issue being voted on.
2. Once all delegations are set, the vote can begin, and voters can abstain to allow their voting power to be expressed by the next confident decider, or register a decision.
3. If a representative is found to be making decisions that do not align with the wishes of the voter they represent, their delegation can be revoked by the initial delegator via that voter registering a differing vote; this would also act as representative for any upward flowing delegations as well.
4. The delegation accounting process would need to be infinitely forwardable (or rather traceable), meaning that multiple abstinent deciders would roll up to an increasingly capitalized decider. Absent vortices of fully abstained voters (which itself would be good system information, and a quorum could still be applied) the mechanism would likely yield a path to 100% of the governance capital available being used to register a decision by those most inclined to do so, supported in confidence by the remainder.

This system ensures that decisions are made by those representatives willing to participate, while also allowing unsure or previously-apathetic voters to have atomic say (veto and correction) in the granular decision-making process. In all instances the voter can remain highly confident in their governing capital being well-utilized on a particular issue with a relatively low epistemic burden; a choice to abstain simply moves the decision and legitimizing vote weighting to the next voter viewed as high-context in every instance.

Feedback welcome. Published cc0 on 2023.02.22 by mel.eth. Parked for self-education purposes. Not advice in any context.