The democracy365 app provides a mechanism for the American public to reach a collective agreement on what we think is broken, and how we think it should be fixed, right now.
Users are granted tokens that they can spend to stack-rank issues in a single, comprehensive priority list. By finding consensus between voters (using democracy between elections), we shift the measure of an effective lawmaker from "look how I'm fighting for your values", to "look what I've accomplished through actual lawmaking".
The democracy365 org is non-partisan cooperative, intent on replacing members of Congress who have not pledged to support the democracy365 priority list, with everyday citizens who have.
Liquid democracy and quadratic voting describe two features implemented by democracy365 that are intended to remove self-interested influencers from the legislative process, and elevate solutions that maximize social well-being.
Liquid democracy allows voters to express their preferences between elections, through issue-based voting, eliminating a whole host of problems with our current system, related to the influence of money in politics. You can read more about liquid democracy on Wikipedia.
Quadratic voting increases the price a voter pays for each subsequent vote, allowing widely-supported issues to surface to the top of a priority list that would otherwise be dominated by very active, single-issue voters. You can read more about quadratic voting on Wikipedia, and check out the following paper by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl.
Related:
- How are vote costs calculated?
- Why would I want to delegate my vote?
In order to prevent people (or robots) from creating an unlimited number of democracy365 accounts, and skewing the vote-counts, we require that every democracy365 user submits their USPS mailing address.
Your mailing address will be used for the sole purpose of sending you a 1-time code through the mail, so that we can match 1 voter to 1 mailing address. Your address will never be sold to, shared with, or otherwise made available to any 3rd party entity whatsoever.
Because your friend, co-worker, or cousin might be more invested in the outcomes you want, than the three people who are currently representing you in the House and Senate.
Charlie Munger once said, "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome". Unless your Congress member's re-election depends on their ability to solve x, y, and z problems, they have very little incentive to act on those issues.
If you can participate in the democracy365 process regularly, that's great. If you can't, please support the concept by giving your votes to someone who isn't spending the majority of their time raising money and playing politics.
The cost of any given vote depends on how many previous votes have been cast, and the cost increases quadratically.
cost to the voter = (number of votes)2
Vote #1 = 12, or 1 token.
Vote #2 = 22, or 4 tokens.
Vote #3 = 32, or 9 tokens, etc.
Note, it is not possible to place Vote #3 before Vote #1 and #2, so your total cost to place 3 votes is (1 + 4 + 9) = 14 tokens.
Tying one voter to one household has its drawbacks. It disenfranchises people without homes, and it gives people who have more than one home a chance to game the system.
Verifying that internet users are real people, is a hard problem, but one that may have a different, better solution in the future. Until then, it's the best we can do.
Soon you'll be able to identify everyday citizens who have pledged to support the democracy365 priority list, and are running for office in your district.