IOV, IN THEORY
How will it work?
Internet of Voters wants to leverage technology, available today, and combine it with some key principles to update our contemporary governance structure. As we enter the digital era, we have an opportunity to restructure one of the most essential base layer institutions we have. Democracy may be thousands of years old but its hardware has not had an update since it started. Compute power and programming are evolving rapidly opening up endless opportunity for our lives to be enhanced, facilitated, and simplified. We have the capacity to communicate our preferences to anyone, or everyone, everywhere, so lets utilize it. All we need is the will and want to modify the decrepit dinosaur we call democracy.
Dynamic Democracy.
A conventional vote is alive for the seconds it takes to tick the box, then dies the moment you place your voting paper in the ballot box. It remains a dead entity, entombed in history with no effect upon the ‘democratic’ system whatsoever. There is a void between your vote and the effect it has upon the chosen representatives or the decisions they will make, supposedly on your behalf. Once your vote is cast, your power as a voter stops, dead.
IOV wants to create a dynamic democracy, where the votes will remain alive, always, in real-time. To provide agency in a political system, the vote(s) must carry some kind of valency within the system itself. That value will manifest in the input energy spent in voting.
Enabled Votes
Imagine being able to contribute to any or all governance issues which are of concern to you. Rather than complaining from an unempowered sideline position, you become an active participant in the process of change. In order to achieve this, we need to move from the single dead-vote system, to a realtime multi-vote system.
Distributing Vote Power
Your current one dead-vote each election cycle collates to a tally which nominates your elected official who then centrally controls multiple facets of an administration. How about distributing that concentration of power by having multiple votes? Each issue, each portfolio, each region, each community, and each sector can have its own vote running in realtime, directly governing the items of interest. If you're interested in an issue in your community, region, or state, then participate. If you're not interested, sit it out.
Divisible Votes
Highly divisible votes is an idea taken from Bitcoin, which provides for greater flexibility of voting valency. Rather than a single dead-vote, votes can be (for example) divisible to the third decimal point, i.e. parses down to 1/1000th of a vote. This smallest vote will be spent to agree/disagree, in a thumbs up/down manner. Next 10/1000ths will be spent to comment. 100/1000ths will be spent making a proposal/rejection. A full vote will be spent to support a representative with who you believe aligns sufficiently with your interests.
Participant Energy
The proof of work essential to IOV is 'participant energy'. Taking the time to participate in ones civic affairs will be the bureaucratic currency of IOV. Time spent, which is to say the time one spends donating one's personal time energy, is the work component harnessed by an individual to shape the democratic landscape. Spend your time wisely working with your peers/community/nation and you the individual gain by the forward momentum of your input.
Anonymity
Does anybody need to know where ideas/inputs are coming from, or only that the idea itself is merit worthy? One aspect of the centralised representative democratic structure is that ego and backhanders influence decisions. When the idea must stand on its own merit, irrespective of image, fraternity, or fraud, it is the idea alone which is evaluated.
Permission to Act
Adopting responsibility for the management ones community empowers people to create the best for themselves and their environment. Similarly, open source governance incentivizes representatives to act with the best interests of the mandate given to them by their constituents.
Atomised Interests
If IOT(Internet of Things) can connect every sensory node on the planet, it follows that the data of every human sensory node on the planet should have the capacity to transmit and share their preferences on making the system more efficient. We all have differing needs, something which is smoothed out by society to form the culture we live within. IOV envisages computing tool that collates, organizes and discloses data for civic administration.
What Changes?
IOV is envisaged to work in with existing civic administrations on a bottom up/top down transition into a new system. From the bottom, decision flows can be established demonstrating voter preferences, and from the top down traditional representation can adapt to the new directives structure and adjust to suit.
Why Not?
Could there be anything more disingenuous than our contemporary democracy? IOV is looking backwards from a fully implemented future where it will seem absurd not to have been using compute power to the maximum of its organisational capacity. We are moving into the digital era where organisational tools cam streamline any process imaginable, managing our civic affairs should be top of the list.
IOV Visually
Revenue
Policy
Representatives
Projects
Payment Layer
Vote Forum
Voters
Identification
Revenue - total state revenue gathered from taxes and trade, then distributed as state expenditure.
Policy - applied to the various portfolios funded by state revenue.
Representatives - civic administrators and functionaries carrying our policy, from the grunt work up to executive levels.
Projects - active areas of facilitation as per incumbent democratic process.
Payment Layer - distribution of funds by government to facilitators of various projects.
Vote Forum - the engine room of IOV, where policy meets preference and anybody can have their say.
Voters - the people.
Identification - voter registration, secured with encrypted identity, providing access verification and vote tokens.
(not all voters will want to be identified across all mediums, privacy and anonymity will be optional)
Protest Less
In the modern era, effective forms of protest, against policies generated by wealthy elites controlling governmental policy, are all but toothless. The sheer number of issues being pushed back upon, means there are so many splintered protest groups, that no one group has enough impetus or disruption, to be given a second thought by either the wealthy elites, or the government policy, and any subsequent militarised policing which they direct. The power structures are geared up to crush any leading protest movements with increased punitive measures, either in the form of state violence, or through legislation criminalising those who demonstrate discontent against the direction in which governmental policy is heading. The days of effective protest in the streets are over, there are simply too many problems to be addressed, so the likelihood of successful mobilisation to a common cause is increasingly unlikely.
We are moving into the digital era, and so too must our capacity to push back against exploitative governmental policies. IOV intends to offer policy decisions to the individual, radically altering the landscape of self-centred rent seeking behaviour, by wealth interests and their puppets. To that end, protesting is a peaceful process, carried out as a function of positive input to the network of civic administration. In effect, the protesting will be done online, individually and collectively, without having to rub up against state violence.