Mark Batten-Carew
Aug 31, 2018 · 2 min read

I believe fundamentally any voting mechanism change or even real electoral reform is only attacking a symptom. The root cause of the problem is control of the money supply. Any governing system can be controlled by whoever controls the money supply (currently central banks) either by bribing the elected officials (through needing campaign donations) or by controlling the voters through mass media ads.

Liquid democracy doesn’t solve the issue of mass media campaigns. Nor the issue of omnibus bills (in Canada) or adding riders to bills (in the US). There are so many ways uncontrolled money can run roughshod over any governance system.

One other problem with Liquid Democracy specifically…. Given a final vote on a topic in the legislature — how do I know my vote went the way I wanted? That is, how do I know if my delegation was effective? I presume there will be a way to track how my vote ultimately performed. But that means I have to constantly monitor how my vote was used. And if misused, I have to figure out where along the delegation process it went wrong, assuming the delegation hierarchy is more than just one step long. Now you are getting me into spending a lot of time monitoring that I don’t have in a modern world.

I believe that without monetary reform, Proportional Representation is about the best we can do. I do not think giving everyone more fine-grained control over their vote, day by day, helps. People don’t have the time to exercise that sort of control. I can imagine this working well at the small level of an association or community, or at most a city. Nothing larger.

    Mark Batten-Carew

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