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Comment by mike_hearn | Hacker News Reader

Why be so unambitious? We have the technology these days to make every change in the law a referendum, with a form of automated delegation in place to ensure people can focus only on the areas that matter to them or they have expertise in.

The tricky part, technologically, is finding a design that preserves all the qualities you might want in a voting system whilst still having the new features. For example being able to delegate your vote by topic in a treelike structure is attractive, but this is somehow opposed to the notion of a secret ballot.

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Normally called Liquid Democracy, FWIW http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy

How do you decide who has expertise in an area? That seems to be very open to gerrymandering.

People themselves do. E.g. I might delegate my vote on financial matters to my accountant, foreign policy to a friend of mine I trust on the matter, rural affairs to the politician nominated by some political party I trust as an expert, and keep votes on issues affecting the tech sector to myself.

How do you stop people from using their delegated votes in their own self interest? I would think that a proposition for providing tax breaks to programmers would be popular amongst people on HN for example. Is there transparency so that others can see how I voted? If so , how do you prevent people from being bribed or intimidated into voting a certain way?

Can votes be re-delegated? Is this process transparent? For example if I collect a large number of "tech" votes , what is to stop me from selling them all to Microsoft?

Delegated voting is just a way to vote on decisions, it doesn't say how those decisions get put in front of the system itself. E.g. they could still be made by politicians or a Swiss-style system in which a number of signatures must be gathered.

I'd always imagined that the way you voted is visible only to your delegees. Thus buying votes at scale doesn't work because to verify someone voted the way they said they would, you need another voter to delegate to them. You gain visibility into one vote but it costs you one vote, so there's no benefit to be had by attempting to purchase. Of course you can try and purchase the votes of trusted figures to whom many people have delegated their vote, but this is no different to the existing system where you could try and bribe MPs.

Your accountant is not going to vote for simpler tax laws.

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