What is Liquid Voting?

Voting is an integral part of how human societies have scaled power structures. Whenever a decision involves more than one stakeholder, there is a vote. Each stakeholder is asked to record their decision — a choice out of a number of alternatives — at a given time, and then the votes are tallied to come to an agreement on which alternative is to be chosen. The way we conduct voting in any context is essentially a pulse-based system. We compress our evaluation of the alternatives into one moment in time and cast our vote. This may be ideal for certain circumstances such as choosing whether tonight’s dinner should be pizza or tacos. However it is far from ideal when we need to choose someone who will rule over us with absolute power for half a decade.

When the stakes of an election are high, and the gap between successive elections is high, the influence of disinformation on the voting outcome is tremendous, more so if the disinformation is hitting a sensitive spot in the public conscience. For such a problem, it would be convenient if:

1. Not all voters were voting at the same time. It would be impossible to time the disinformation. Attempting to run disinformation for a prolonged period of time would prove prohibitively costly and ineffective due to desensitization.
2. Voters could change their vote. A large part of the success of disinformation campaigns is owed to the fact that any realization of truth after casting the vote is useless.

A voting model where voting happens across a prolonged period of time and allows the voters to change or revoke their vote, is disruptive in this context because it completely changes the game of elections from that of achieving consent, to achieving sustained consent. Also, it is not enough to simply allow vote flexibility — the tallying of votes must also adapt in order to make this scheme effective. Most organizations which allow vote changing over a particular periods will count the final vote, ie. the state of the vote at the final instant. This system is still susceptible to disinformation, because it only takes an emotional wave near the end of the period to win over all votes. To make the system truly disruptive, the counting of votes must be done proportional to voting duration accrued. This, is what liquid voting is.

Liquid voting also finds its place when it comes to coercion resistance. In a lot of elections taking place within developing countries, it is very common for a poor voter to sell his vote for a small sum of money, or to vote in favor of someone who can intimidate them. However in a paradigm of liquid voting, it may be equally easy to acquire the vote through intimidation or bribing, but it is prohibitively difficult to retain that vote. Since a voter can now change their vote anytime, they do not have any incentive to refrain from switching away their vote from the coercer. Added with the effectiveness of more engaging elections because of liquid voting — owing to the fact that you can vote, unvote and change vote whenever you want, and in response to the establishment disappointing you — the coercion resistance aspect of liquid voting makes it a very empowering mechanism, giving real power to each voter.

Liquid voting is easier to explain using a small demonstration than by simply using words or mathematical symbols, so while I will write down the mathematical symbols in another document meant for other people, i will just leave this video here.

Liquid voting schemes can be used in almost all voting situations, by adjusting the total voting period(TVP) to suit the needs. For example a small referendum being held to decide whether pet dogs should or should not be allowed in the lawns of a cooperative housing society should not need any more than a weeks time for TVP. However when the number of participants scale, it is usually beneficial to have a longer TVP, because having a short voting period may result in a lot of people forgetting to vote, or simply not caring enough to vote. Usually this is what happens when you ask millions of people to assemble on one particular day to vote. They don’t. There is no bigger deterrent to a high voter turn out than the restriction of elections to a single day. The problem with conventional electoral systems is that they have no choice. They cannot extend voting periods, because it would be prohibitively expensive for them.

Not only is liquid voting outside the scope of modern conventional elections, but even a larger time frame for elections is impossible if one has to use classic EVMs, and provide them with high security. It is a completely different story that all sorts of cheating will take place despite the presence of heavy security. During Brexit, the population of Great Britain was 65 million, and only 35 million of these people voted in the referendum. The decision to leave the EU won over by a margin of 52–48. So if now, we were to wonder, what category those 18 million people fell into, who didnt vote(based on 12 million people being underage) — were they angry people who wanted UK to leave the EU, or were they the people who wanted to stay, but found it too cumbersome to vote for a referendum, which the media was telling them they would win anyway — we realize the kind of impact a low voter turnout can have. Most elections simply leave out elderly people who do not want to leave the comfort of their home and stand in queues. Public holidays are declared in the name of election, just to increase turnout, causing losses of over millions of man-hours in any large scale elections.

In an alternate universe where the Brexit Referendum happens on your mobile phone, using a simple application with tamper-proof technology behind it, where you can vote at any time you want, within a period of say, a month, the results might have been a little different from that of our universe. Oh — and it would cost a lot less.

Also, this happened:

For those who have not played the video, there was a bioterror attack launched in Oregon, by the followers of a certain cult before the day of the election, in order to sway the results by decreasing the turnout from the supporters from their opposition. Would this have been possible if elections were being done from homes, over a span of one month? You tell me.

Let me now come to the biggest reason why I came up with liquid voting. A lot of people live their lives thinking that this doesn’t happen. But watch this:

Again, for those who did not watch the video, re-iterating that it is very easy to swoop in before the election dates and buy votes for cash or liquor. The fact that this epidemic can go on without being exposed, makes me believe that this happens way more often than we hear about it. Liquid voting hits the nail right on the head when it comes to vote buying. There is not much you can do as a vote buyer when the election system allows the voter to change their vote as soon as you have walked out of the door.

Is there any criticism of liquid voting whatsoever? Yes, there is. The introduction of liquid voting into large scale elections may introduce a wave of populist measures being implemented in order to sustain the crowds favor. Admittedly, this is not the best idea for a large establishment looking for long term betterment of the electorate. However, I contend this argument with the following responses:

• There will always be a loud opposition reminding the masses that too much populism is bad for the electorate in the long run.
• People get desensitized to petty rewards in the long run, and will turn punitive when the intent behind the rewards come forth.
• While the critique is true for larger federal structures, populism is not a bad step for local governance models.
• It is possible to implement recency curves into a liquid voting platform which assigns more weight to vote duration accrued towards the end of the voting period.

To summarize, liquid voting ensures the following:

1. Higher voter turnout because wider time-frame for voting.
2. The vote becomes a more sophisticated political tool.
3. Introduces coercion resistance into elections.

And comes with the following drawback:

1. It may result in over-implementation of populist short term measures.