this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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Votes should be revokable, I've always liked the idea of liquid democracy.
I have an issue with this.
An abuseive family member could coerce you to delegate your vote to them.
With secret ballots you can't find out how someone voted.
But with this "delegation", even if you have secret ballots, they'll say "If I don't get X number of delegated votes, something bad happens". They don't need to know who you delegated to, they just need to know that the number of delegated votes they themselves receives in a tally is equal to the number of people there is in the household.
Hmm, you're right, that is definitely a problem. The best solutions I can think of would be-
Voter coercion laws. If nothing else make it at least illegal to do exactly that, so abusers can be held accountable.
Maybe limit who can receive delegations in some way. Like making the status of being a delegate carry responsibilities, requiring a small curriculum and civil service so that only people who genuinely care about being representatives pursue that path rather than any average asshole who might coerce their peers and family into giving them more personal voting power.
That's a step in the right direction, but ultimately, the best solution would be an imperative mandate. I have no idea how we've let ourselves get gaslit that free mandates (once someone is elected they can do what they want, regardless of voter intention) is somehow more democratic than imperative mandates.
Arguably, Trump IS following an imperative mandate. This is what his voters want. This is what he promised them
Haven't seen this posted in a while. I forgot you can delegate your vote to different people for different issues. How is the "category" of an issue decided though?
Wouldn't that be up to the delagator? Wouldn't they just decide case by case?
Then the delegator has to vote/delegate on every issue-- they don't need expertise themselves like in a direct democracy, but it is still an issue due to sheer vote volume.
Yeah pretty much. You trust your guy until you change your mind or feel that you need to change your vote. Not really seeing a problem with that.
I don't think you're understanding my point. If, as you said, you have to assign a delegate "case by case" for every vote, then you have to vote in every vote. This comes with all the problems of getting people to vote on things now, but 100x as bad because of how many votes there would be.
I love this idea, but the main obstacle this has to overcome is the voter's knowledge of the issues and any given candidate stances on them. If we implemented this in the US, I feel like most people would still simply delegate all their votes to one candidate or all candidates of a particular party. It's a lot of information for a working person to keep track of. Any idea on how to overcome this with paper ballots? Or are computerized ballots with all relevant information embedded within the way to go?
Even if most people just delegate their votes in an uninformed way, a liquid democracy would be more resilient to issues coming from that because people can change their votes after casting them.
I'm not sure what kinds of solutions other people have come up with, but personally what I think could be practical is an institution either like a bank, or possibly even incorporated into banks. They already have mature infrastructure for the secure handling of financial data and systems against fraud.