Votorola

Peer-to-Peer Voting

• Voters nominate their own candidates by voting for them. No candidates are pre-declared.
• Votes cascade. When one candidate votes for another, the votes of the first flow to the second.
• Voters are free to shift their votes, at any time.

Distributed Drafting

• Drafters are free to choose their own media for legislative, plan and policy proposals. Proposals may be composed in any format and posted anywhere at all, online or offline.
• A pollwiki is provided as a default drafting medium. Voters may directly edit candidate proposals, subject to the editorial oversight of the drafter.
• Anybody may copy an existing proposal, modify it, and repost it as an alternative proposal. Voters may then shift their votes to the alternative, if they wish.
• Text cascades too. As contributions of text are pushed and pulled from draft to draft, the best tend to follow the shifting cascade of votes, and flow toward consensus drafts.

Authenticated Voters and Verified Results

• A voter register is part of the standard deployment. Flexible scripts allow for any configuration of electoral districts and eligibility criteria.
• The voter lists are authenticated by a trust network in which local residents vouch for each other. Polls are thus protected from sock puppets and bots.
• Voter registrations and votes are public. The public may verify for themselves the authenticity of the voter lists and the accuracy of the vote counts.
• The design is compatible with the addition of a private voting facility, in which voters will have the choice of a secret ballot option. In tandem with this, viewers of the results will have the option of filtering the votes according to various criteria of their own choosing.
• A single registration suffices for all jurisdictional levels. Voter lists for regional, national and global polls are compiled as aggregates of the local lists.

Other Features

• Deployment is both localized and globally scalable. Each city or region has its own pollsite, independently maintained by local volunteers. Super-sites provide pan-regional and global polls, based on composite voter lists.
• Web and email interfaces are provided for voters.
• A command-line interface is provided for administrators.
• Polls run continuously and never close. Even after the winning candidate enters office, for example, or the winning amendment enters the law books, the poll remains open for voting. The purpose of voting is to decide the issue of the next election, or the form of the next amendment, and so forth.