A real lab for liquid democracy

I am a born and raised Brazilian living in the United States for over 10 years now. I came to appreciate the power of the American democracy and how it is often ignored by its own citizens.

In the U.S. “anyone” can run for local offices as an independent. In Brazil, you must be affiliated to a political party. No “average Brazilian” wants to be associated to any of the 30+ political parties in the country. This keeps “average Brazilians” from running even for local offices. The reality in the US is different: several local office positions are occupied by independents.

Besides the obvious benefit of empowering the people in the community, this democratic setup is a perfect laboratory to test new forms of governance.

Los Angeles has so much potential

Fans of liquid democracy should take notice of the unique scenario that the Greater Los Angeles Area (GLAA) is for the development, test and further scaling experiments in new types of governance using novel technologies, in particular with involvement of the community.

A major challenge for decentralized forms of government is scalability and the GLAA offers within a couple hours in traffic a number of cities with different sizes suitable for experiments in democracy.

The dense GLAA has 88 cities with populations ranging from ~3.8 million (Los Angeles) to 112 (Vernon).

Wouldn’t be amazing if this potential could be used to motivate the development of the technology necessary for liquid democracy? Local offices, such as city council, in the GLAA are a particularly interesting target. A collaboration between a pool of developers and local community leaders will be disruptive.

A proposal based in smart contract

This is one way of how this collaboration could help include the community in the process of decision making in city councils.

Let’s say that an elected city councilperson is committed to liquid democracy and want to have the community participating in the votes of individual bills. Let’s also say that a pool of software developers will build a technology based in smart contracts to allow that to happen.

Upon electing the representative, each registered voters receive a unique hash address — think something like this: yuIFhOxRg1QdAKipFkA5E9. Also, two hash address are created: one for yay and one for nay. When a bill is about to be voted, one token for that bill is distributed to each hash address. The token’s expiration date coincides with the date that the bill will be voted. It must be used.

Each owner of a hash address now can do one of the three actions:

1. send the token to yay or nay address: the equivalent of the direct democracy
2. send the token to the elected representative or do nothing with it: the equivalent of the representative democracy.
3. send the token to a neighbor: the innovation in liquid democracy.

Now, the third possible action is the hallmark of liquid democracy. The effect is that the neighbor now has 2 tokens in her address. She can also do one of the three types of actions, however, now it will count as 2.

At the end of the process, the elected official also vote with her tokens (the one she received like everybody else plus the tokens that people might have sent to her) in the “yay” or “nay” address. Finally, the representative votes according to which of the “nay” or “yay” address has the most number of tokens.

If this is the technology to be used or not, if it is robust against malicious attacks and if it is accessible to the population are valid questions that will never be answered unless an experiment like that is unleashed.

There is no other way.

Consequences: Changing roles

In liquid democracy there is a fundamental change in the role of the elected official: Instead of making decisions, the councilperson will be mostly involved in teaching the community about the bills by explaining their importance and even suggesting how to vote. The community will transition from the passive stand of observer to actively and collectively make decisions about each bill.

One of the major problems in local politics is the lack of involvement of the community and of channels for this relationship between the people and politicians to evolve.

At minimum, the gap between community and representatives will remain the same, but it is likely that with the right technology there will be a significant increase in the involvement of the community in city council bills and local politics in general.