Continuous Cascaded Voting

I suggest a new implementation of democracy. I call it “Continuous Cascaded Voting” because it is a change in the voting system with two main aspects:

  • Voting becomes continuous: every voter can vote or change their vote at any time. No more election campaigns.

  • Voting becomes cascaded : citizens are called to vote for people they know personally, independently of whether that person is a candidate for the voted seat. If the person you voted for doesn’t get selected, their voice will count twice when they vote on their turn.

Explanations

The system is not limited to national politics. It can also be used for municipalities, congregations, associations or local scout groups. For any small group with some kind of board of elected deciders.

The system uses a website where you simply sign in, select some citizen as getting your voice, and hit submit. There may be websites that host multiple boards, so it is possible that you have multiple election forms.

Voting remains private, every vote is considered confidential data. You cannot see who voted for you, but you can see how many people voted for you. When you see that 1000 people voted for you, you know that your own vote will have a weight of 1001 voices.

There are no “candidates” and no “election campaigns”. Every member of the group is a potential candidate.

If you want to work as a board member, you can ask your friends to vote for you. Electoral campaigns will become useless, you will rather focus continuously on your personal relationships and what you say to other people.

Those who have a certain number of voices, are asked whether they agree to take a seat in the board. If you have enough voices but do not want to actually work as a board member, you simply elect some other member.

As a board member you can potentially get notified at any moment that you lost your seat because some other member has collected more voices than you and will therefore replace you. The replacement itself will become effective only after a configurable amount of time in order to avoid excessive fluctuation. For example, a parliament seat could be configured to last at least two years, and even after these two years you would still have a notice period of three months. And if you are lucky, your voices would even recover before the end of your notice period.

Advantages

This system reduces the risk of having public opinion manipulated by lobby work, sponsoring, publicity or propaganda because citizens are encouraged to vote for people they know personally.

This system brings a natural solution to situations where a board of deciders is locked because of a lack of consensus, e.g. when a controversial question splits opinions into to camps. As soon as the lock becomes tangible, people will start to discuss in public, think, and change their mind about who gets their voice, which will lead to changes in the composition of the board of deciders.

Limitation

A friend commented “My problem with politics is that it raises people with a thick skin into leadership. I don’t want to give my voice to people with a thick skin”. Continued Cascaded Voting does not fix this problem. A thick skin is the “ability to keep from getting upset or offended by the things other people say and do” (merriam-webster).

Another friend complains that politicians tend to please the rich.

What’s next?

The system could be tested in all kinds of associations if there would be a website where they can configure their situation and register their members.

Estonia might be a pioneer for developing this idea because the country is relatively small and has relatively good IT infrastructure.