The future of Democracy will be decentralized : A call for a grass-root movement!
Intro : What will democracy look like in 200 years?
While solid, the foundations of our democracies were conceived 200 years ago with smaller nations in mind (2.5M people living in 1776 in the US Colonies / 9M voters in France in 1848 / 21.4M voters in 1914 in England)
It is obvious that 200 years later with 9 billion people on the horizon we need to think on how to upgrade this operating system.
A case for a decentralized digital democracy and why it has little to do with technology.
Gilles Mentré and the electis.io team of which i’m a founding member (and you can too) have been conducting interviews in the past couple of months with students, formal government officials and people who developed and supported electronic voting systems.
Most of the researchers building these voting systems voiced their skepticism (if not more) about blockchain; indeed everything works well and faster with centralized and crypto heavy systems. While we have all these great systems it is obvious they are still poorly adopted (very few nations implemented electronic voting) Decentralization make sense in the context of a system you would not trust and this is the key here lies into the Byzantin resistance of the blockchain protocol.
As a result two irrational property, linked to trust emerge from blockchain and similar protocols:
1. Centralized system works well only if people trust their governments, they are potentially a single point of failure vs a decentralized and open one.
2. While technically possible with a centralized system many political related applications would be practically impossible due to the lack of trust in such systems by the general population.
Specifically in the case of the Estonian government and more generally when constituent trust their governments, a centralized voting system makes a lot of sense of course. It allows for a faster experience (think of blockchain as a really heavy and slow database) even if there always are risks related to technology like faulty ID cards it is usually fine and fairly fraud resistant. But centralization often goes with hidden and proprietary code, while the system can log everything and access is heavily restricted it leaves a lot of room for data manipulation even with open source. Here are some core examples of the limits of electronic voting systems : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
1. Centralized or Decentralized: it’s all about trust
If you think about how voting works in modern democracies it is really a decentralized process: each voices matters. We don’t walk to one booth for the all nation! But we need centralization to count and verify voting.
As we discussed previously decentralized solutions like blockchain are doing poorly when compared to centralized architectures but are progressing fast implementing some of the technologies used in centralized electronic systems. The truth is we don’t know what system or combination of system will be winning this natural selection phase, but we are convinced that decentralized solution have a better chance, especially since they allow bottom up experiments.
The grassroot movement of thousands of developers and few researchers supporting and developing the next generations of decentralized trustable protocols is making progress on a daily basis, but has still a lot of challenges to crack to be able to compete with centralized systems.
So why are we talking about blockchain and decentralization applied to democracy now? Well because as we illustrated it, Decentralized trust applies perfectly to a voting process as it is more likely to win the public support. We do know that the information carried by a blockchain is incorruptible (under certain conditions) it is therefore trustable in an understandable manner by all, it also eliminates the need of a centralized authority. We are talking here of mathematically trustable entity; therefore an incorruptible one. The code becomes the Law and the Law can guarantee that a fair democratic process will prevail.
There are and will be many more decentralized trust protocol all having different architectures but they are all sharing this important property of being a Truth machine to paraphrase Michael J. Casey.
The democratic process is nothing more than a transfer of power to someone known from all by a majority of people. Having this mathematical trust also opens the door to push democracy anywhere: Wether it is a desert of trust or the worst dictatorship in the world you can build a legitimate democratic government thanks to blockchain or other decentralized trust protocols, this is a fundamental change for mankind.
To demonstrate why we need a decentralized democracy let’s use Dr. Cathy Mulligan model / from the World Economic Forum:
You can go through the 11 questions, but the general reason that emerge of preferring a decentralized solution to a centralized one lies in that losing trust of a key actor of the democratic process can fail democracies and is therefore a stronger solution than a centralized one.
The core reason also lies into how irrational Humans are as often studied in behavioral economics. We share a lot more with our chimpanzee cousins than we think (cf chimpanzee politics) . That is at the core of why electronic centralized system will always have some distrust left in them, even if the systems are solid and the people running it honest: People will always be suspicious of what they can’t see or touch.
2. From Analog Democracy to decentralized Democracy 3.0
We can simplify the voting process in 3 main phases, the first one might be the most challenging one at the moment: the identity check, we need an entire population of millions of people to be able to legally identify themselves. the second phase is the actual voting process, we need to know someone voted only once, while guaranteeing anonymity and preventing any kind of intimidation/corruption. Finally the audit double check that the counting was made correctly and is often ran by multi-partisan auditors.
A case for a hybrid digital / paper based democracy:
Signing a piece of paper can hardly be challenged by a full digital process neither seeing someone in real to be sure they exists! We should leave the door open to partially decentralized solutions in our way to the future, until we have extremely solid technologies that are 100% impossible to hack and accessible to all, like quantum based communication taking advantage of quantum entanglement of voting results similar to what china has implemented for military purpose .
People trust paper more than anything digital and this is actually justifiable, especially when you see the kremlin supporting that idea to protect secret communication from being hacked!
In Estonia first time voters (often younger and accustomed to a digital experience) largely preferred voting in a booth with a piece of paper, it makes voting an experience, more than just a click on your phone or your mouse…
A glimpse of decentralized voting opportunities:
I am always skeptical of critics who sees current democracies as broken because their favorite candidate was not elected. We should respect what has been achieved and think on how to take it to the next level. While we can also recognize that we are reaching some limits in terms of governance, nothing new you would say since Churchill.
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” — Winston Churchill
Liquid Democracy / example with democracy.earth:
Liquid democracy or Delegative Democracy is a form of vesting voting power. It could offer some promising new ways of doing politics. For the mathematician out there, you can think of a population as a dynamic graph where you can pass your vote to someone else.
Hyper Fragmented / small grain Democracy
Imagine the USA having 10,000 states instead of 50. By reducing the grid size we can provide more local and adapted governances. It would be impossible to manage with the current system of physical representative in D.C (imagine 10,000 governors arguing!) .
Cross nation voting
What if asked Israeli and Palestinian to vote on ending war and the vast majority said yes? What if 50M europeans elected a president? These cross nation votes are impossible today either because of a lack of trust or either because you would need to get many governments to agree to it.
Multi layered democracies
We could different governance systems cohabiting: A direct democracy mixed with liquid democracy for example.
Dictatorship proof democracy
Decentralization could allow the people to have direct control over the constitution removing the power to cancel democratic elections.
Virtual State / VR Democracy
We will likely see the emergence of Virtual nations, with their own governance, this notion of Virtual nations was introduced by Peter Diamandis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f3h9oWEpDY
Augmented Democracy
China has been famously implementing a very top down citizen scoring system, we could imagine a more democratic bottom up scoring system. Where each politicians or people participating to the political system could be measured in terms of impact, these system are of course difficult to keep neutral.
Tokenized Democracy: Citizen Karma
Blockchain or other trust protocols often goes with the notion of a Token. Obviously a token can be associated to a vote or a stake in a vote, it could be revoked transferred. We can also imagine a Citizen Karma giving more “points” to whoever is a better citizen… There are millions of variations here, but it will definitely allow for new form of governance to emerge.
Decentralized diplomacy/ UN 3.0 / World bank 3.0
This would be an extension of cross nation voting, we can imagine attaching a more direct democratic process to international institutions, leading to a new form of governance.
Dictatorship Prevention
Decentralized digital voting system can be thought off as an insurance against dictatorship for example in healthy democracy and a way to challenge corruption in less challenged environments.
And many more
Data Driven Democracy, AI Automated vote, Adaptive and experimental democracy, Hyper Local Democracy…
Conclusion :
Our democracies has now reached their limits, the erosion of public trust has accelerated since 2008 with low participation rates and a general distrussed of governments across the OECD.
And to this day paper based vote is still preferred in many countries; but slowly technologies are impacting how we run our voting processes: Cryptography (Estonia), Blockchain (Japan). Later face recognition, quantum based communication and artificial intelligence will change how we vote and govern in a very profound way.
Michel Serres a French philosopher once wrote that to philosophize is the act of anticipating. This is what electis.io is: an act of anticipation.
We will anticipate as a community, partnering with local democratic forces, citizens, developers and academia so 200 years from now, we shall have a free, and global democratic platform that belongs to no one but us: the people.
About the author: You might know me for Startupweekend / Entrepreneurship but few might know that I’ve also been involved on how technology can change democracy since 2009 specifically in France I have pushed the idea of the first crowdsourced voting for French presidential executed by the brilliant Thibauld Favre and his team of laprimaire.org (in French / 140,000 participants) I’m a believer in grassroots lead movement and more specifically what I call Hypertribes (startupweekend.org, up.co, makesense.org, ted.com etc…) I’ve also have been working this past year on building new business models powered by blockchain like technologies (stay tuned) That’s why i’m excited to work on the intersection of both subjects under electis.io a platform to support local communities and governments testing and implementing democracies 3.0 (3.0 is now wildly used to described decentralized systems using technologies like Blockchain)
