Liquid Democracy

When your votes are like water trickling downstream

This post on Best Of A Great Lot is a part of a series on the subject of designing a new form of governance. Each piece aims to stand alone, but fits together on the Table of Contents.

Liquid democracy is an idea that deserves a little more visibility.

Imagine what it feels like to be a citizen without the vote in a country that describes itself as a democracy. To be a woman in the US before 1920. Or if you want to look closer to home, imagine being an adult raised from infancy here in the US but who was snuck in by noncitizens. Or a little more controversially, imagine being a felon in one of the states (Virginia, Kentucky, Iowa) that require the Governor to explicitly grant you the right to vote after you have completed your sentence.

I’d be furious at the hypocrisy of calling a system self-governance but excluding me.

Twist the lens on the words self-governance a little and you can feel that way now. Today, a quarter or more of the citizenry has no voice in the day-to-day operations of the government. Many of them will go their whole life without ever having that voice. Approximately half of our most politically engaged citizens are waiting with bated breath for the next election because they feel that they lost, and are currently on the outs, with no control. They’re hoping that their enemies won’t do too much damage during their time in the seat of power. I’m referring, of course, to

1. All of the people who voted for the party currently out of power.

2. The partisans who live in areas entirely within the political control of the other party.

3. Most radicals of both sides when the other side is in power.

In a country that reveres the right to vote, this might sound strange. After all, those people lost. That’s what democracy seems to mean to many people - the chance to beat your opponents at the ballot box and then legislate against them. But those opponents are our fellow citizens, and if self-governance is intended to be governance by all of us, it’s hard to believe that democracy as we know it fits the bill.

What would society look like if, instead of focusing solely on the right to vote, we guaranteed to every citizen (or as many as we can) a right to a representative of their choosing?

Whether we’re using First Past The Post (FPTP) or the various forms of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), our representative system right now only guarantees us the right to be disappointed by seeing our opponents win the chance to represent us. The average margin of victory in 2020 for Congressional races was 28.8%, so if we multiply that out, we estimate that 35% of the country voted for the loser in their local race. That’s 55 million people. Perhaps some of them are satisfied with the person they didn’t vote for, but it’s equally possible that some of the nearly 100 million eligible voters didn’t vote because there wasn’t anyone they felt would represent them. Perhaps a third of the country feels unrepresented in Congress.

The last few cycles have had an unusually high number of Congressional races decided by single digit margins.

This marks the second straight election cycle when more than 15% of congressional races were decided within that margin. In 2018, 22% were decided by 10 percentage points or fewer. Nine percent and 12% of races were decided by that margin in 2016 and 2014, respectively. 

In other words, more than 80% of Congressional races most cycles aren’t close. A large chunk of those are never close. Partisans on the wrong side of these lopsided districts have no reason to feel like they will ever have a voice in Congress. In many ways they’re much less a part of our great experiment in self-governance than those whose candidates win. Sure, they can organize and try to persuade the person who gets elected, but good luck assuaging women with that argument a hundred years ago.

Disenfranchisement leads to disenchantment, so it's no surprise that Democrats in the rural areas, Republicans in many cities, and all the Libertarians and Greens feel cynical about our politics.

The idea of a right to representation is entirely possible. It's really only a habit of thought that requires us to choose the most popular of candidates, rather than all of them. The concept of liquid democracy ensures near universal enfranchisement - the right to a representative of your preference, not just a vote for one.

Let me lay out a simplified version of it. Imagine in your district, at election time, there are three candidates on the ballot, a Democrat named Dani, a Republican named Ryan, and a Green candidate named Gilfoyle. Dani and Gilfoyle split the left vote, with Dani getting 33, Gilfoyle getting 9, while Ryan gets 41 votes.

In FPTP, our current system, Ryan takes the seat and all the voters for Dani and Gilfoyle lose out entirely. Under RCV, perhaps Dani is the second choice for most of Gilfoyle’s voters, and so Dani wins, while Ryan's voters all lose out entirely.

In a liquid democracy system, Dani, Gilfoyle, and Ryan all go to congress, and when voting on bills, Dani casts 33 votes, Gilfoyle casts 9, and Ryan casts 41. This immediately improves our problem of dilution of representation by tripling the number of representatives. It might even go much farther and make some improvement to bundled governance by fracturing parties and allowing people to get a representative who more closely aligns with their values. Perhaps there’s an equilibrium at ten times as many representatives as we have now, or perhaps we have to have a minimum vote threshold and RCV to ensure your vote goes to someone you wanted. It would also create a novel implicit hierarchy among representatives based on the number of votes they represent.

One enormous challenge of this is various structures of Congress. Do representatives with more votes get more speaking time? More staff? More committee assignments? How many people, or is it votes, should be on a committee anyway?

If we have to have fewer representatives, which we might, we could reduce the number through transitivity. The reason it’s called “liquid” is the metaphor of a raindrop joining a river and flowing to the ocean: if I vote for you, you can pass my vote along to someone downstream who then votes for both of us.

We could imagine making elections hyperlocal. For the purposes of this example, imagine an election per zipcode. There are 41,683 zipcodes in the US. If the population were evenly distributed (or some alternative to zipcodes were distributed by population) that would be about 8,000 people per zipcode. If we imagine more than ten candidates arising in many of these districts, we might end up with 100,000 representatives.

This is obviously too many to send to Congress as it’s currently structured. So we would have a second tier election with some form of RCV: each representative makes a ranked choice list of who they want to be their representative, presumably with themselves first. Candidates who earn at least the threshold (perhaps 100) of votes are sent to Congress. They take with them all of the raindrop votes that have been entrusted with them.

Now we're down to around 1000 representatives, though they'll still have widely varying vote totals backing them. These 1000 people could further pass their votes on by choosing representatives for each Congressional committee. They can run a third tier ranked choice liquid democracy for picking the committee members with only the top dozen candidates being picked. The winners of each committee vote will be able to cast the number of votes that back them.

This is still bundled governance, and it doesn't improve justifiable governance. It's not clear what its effect would be on effective governance. One could argue that with the tiering system in place, it more strongly represents simple RCV than it does single tier liquid democracy. But first tier representatives are likely to be more, well, representative of their population than we have now, and might have a stronger incentive to put real time in to the task of evaluating who makes a great representative than in our current diluted environment.

I want to imagine that we could manage an unbundled version of this, where you select your representative for each congressional committee, which creates a pool of representatives who then use this liquid RCV to select the final committee members. I struggle to believe that most citizens would involve themselves to this level, but perhaps it could work.

The key insight in liquid democracy — that right now many people are effectively disenfranchised — is essential to thinking properly about self-governance. We’re searching for a system that doesn’t disenfranchise people, but without descending into chaos.