I am currently developing a medium of assent in the form of an electoral system for project Votorola. Its design may enable it to serve as a vector for the transfer of decision-making processes; moving them away from centers of power, and out into the public sphere. This possibility is raised by its peer-to-peer architecture, which is specialized for community-wide consensus building. It consists of several overlay networks that are structurally shaped to match the communities in which they are embedded. My initial work has focused on coding these networks: namely a trust network for the authentication of voter lists, a voting mechanism for the nomination of candidates, and a drafting medium for the proposal of laws and other norms. At the same time, I have been drawing correlations with social theory, in particular with Habermas's theory of communicative action. The next development stage will introduce a measure of practice in a series of beta trials.

The backbone of the medium is a delegate-cascade voting mechanism that is open to recasting. Its basic purpose is to enable the expression of mutual agreement (and disagreement) in formal messages of assent (votes). The initial application is the open and impromptu election of nominee officials, and of normative texts, such as laws and policy documents. The ‘objects of assent’ might be other kinds of text, as well, or other cultural artifacts; suggesting that the medium might be applied, more broadly, as a general support for mutual understanding and consensus. With this in mind, I have been attempting to predict its fit in society.

In a delegate-cascade voting mechanism,^{1, 2, 3} a ‘delegate’ is a participant who both receives votes, like a candidate, and casts a vote of her own, like a voter. But when a delegate casts her vote, it carries with it those received. And so on... Passing from delegate to delegate, the votes flow together and gather in volume — they cascade — like raindrops down the branches of a tree. New voters are not restricted in their choices, but may vote for anyone, their unsolicited votes serving to nominate new candidates and to recruit new participants into the election.

Delegate cascade voting. A snapshot of a small election in which two separate cascades have formed. Vote flow is depicted by arrows, and volume by numbers. The votes flow together until they pool at the bottom, where they are held by the leading candidates. [image SVG source]

Voters are free to withdraw their votes and to recast them. The elections are intended to run continuously, year round, with the votes shifting as new information becomes available to the voters. These novel freedoms — to nominate one's own candidate, to retain control of one's own vote, and to express one's choice year round — may be viewed as competitive advantages over conventional voting facilities. This view suggests the possibility of running an independent electoral system in parallel with the conventional systems of the political parties and the state. To the extent it attracted voters the system would bypass the primary polls in the function of nominating candidates to the ballot. At the same time, being a single system that cuts across party lines, it would offer an increasingly accurate prediction of the eventual winner at the principal polls.

The forseeable problems in realizing an independent electoral system include: authentication of the voter lists, verification of the election results, and administration of the overall system. Votorola's general strategy in dealing with these problems is to open the system to the community and to distribute the workload out to its members. So the voter list is made public, and the tools are provided to enable the voters to cross-authenticate themselves in their own neighbourhoods (reminescent of the days when voter lists were posted on the street). Likewise, the tallied election results are reported in ‘snapshots’, each backed by a snapshot copy of the vote database. Tools are provided for anyone who wishes to re-count the votes from scratch, to verify the results. Finally, the overall system is designed to grow from the bottom up, from a patchwork of independent administrative offices, each staffed by locally elected volunteers. These volunteers will do the remaining work that cannot be distributed out to the users.

In my attempts to predict how this system might fit with society, I have concentrated mainly on its application to normative texts. To understand how this application works, imagine the delegates and candidates (in the figure) are not engaged in running for office, but rather in drafting a normative text (a legislative bill, a plan, or a policy position). And imagine that each of these drafters is composing a somewhat different version of the text; a variant that expresses her own peculiar idea of what the norm should be. Despite these points of difference, the drafters will often be in mutual agreement, and will be sharing useful bits of text amongst themselves (picture their communication lines criss-crossing the diagram). Because this form of composition depends on a ‘population’ of variants, and the cross-transfer of textual snippets, I call it a ‘recombinant text’.³ When a recombinant text is combined with a delegate casacade, the text flow and the vote flow will tend to coordinate, I believe, in a manner that binds the incremental construction of the formal norm (law, plan or policy) to the incremental building of consensus (general agreement). So finely will these increments be interwoven in the creative process, that it will be impossible to disentangle the roles of the drafters and the voters; all will be equally authors of the norm.

Deferring to a public opinion that has since been lost.

If norms can actually be formed in such an open, independent and yet deliberate manner — if we can acquire the means — then it may lead to a structural change in which the political process of decision making is transferred from government to community institutions. Naturally, any community that had managed to agree upon a particular norm would expect it to be executed by the officials in government (to be promulgated as a law, implemented as a plan, or followed as a policy), and they would align their votes accordingly in the open elections for the offices of those same officials. Here the two categories of open election (office and norm) would be mutually reinforcing. The candidates for office would compete to situate their platforms all the more squarely and convincingly on the middle ground of consensus, as formalized in the norm elections. If this political attraction of consensus was sufficient also to draw in the incumbents, then their support would ratify the transfer of the decision-making process. It would move from an administrative medium of power, to a public medium of assent; the communicative reason of the public would then be serving to make the decisions (or some of them), while the power of the state was serving to execute them.⁵ But if this argument seems tenable, that politics might be rationalized in this way by a new medium, then it is hard to control speculation. Other applications are possible. The same medium of assent might be applied, for instance, to the evolution of a text that is broadly cultural, and yet has normative potential. What would it mean, for instance, if people were to begin voting on utopian visions of society? Would an agreement there also be executed?

Votorola is an open source project. Beta trials are planned for this summer, in Toronto. More information on Votorola can be found on the project Web site, at http://zelea.com/project/votorola/home.xht.

Notes and References