Liquid representation

About

Liquid representation is an alternative to weighted proxy voting which might be more widely acceptable. Many people seem to automatically reject anything that looks like direct democracy as being fundamentally unworkable. While this proposal should work out to creating much the same distribution of power, it starts with a scenario that looks more like a standard (and therefore "safe") representative democracy.

Rules

1. If I vote for someone, they are my representative -- regardless of how few votes they received.

2. The weight of my representative's vote in the assembly (whether that be US Congress, a state Congress, or some smaller body) is directly proportional to the number of people who voted for them.

3. If we end up with too many representatives for any kind of reasonable discussion to take place, then we can consolidate further by any of several methods:

3a. Each voter could rank their preferred representatives in order. If their first choice doesn't get enough votes, then they get their second choice... and so on. OR...

3b. Representatives with fewer than X votes (determined by some kind of percentile ranking, perhaps) need to get together and choose a smaller number of super-representatives (to be the actual representative in assembly). Each sub-representative can then decide whether to actively represent their voters (possibly without adequate financial compensation), or whether to simply hand off their voters to the super-representative.

3c. Any representative who doesn't get enough votes doesn't go to the Assembly, and their voters are left unrepresented -- but can quickly switch to any other sitting representative (see Rule 4).

4. Any voter should ideally be able to switch allegiance at any time, but we may need some way to reduce churn if this causes issues.

Links

• 2012-05-26 original proposal on G+