Delegated voting

Delegated Voting is a proposed solution to the problem of how to combine expertise with grassroot influence in democracy.

In classical democracy professional decision makers surround themselves with experts, in order to be able to make more competent decisions. In less important cases they will delegate the decision to the advisors, important decisions they will make on their own.

In Delegated Voting, a voter chooses an advisor, for example a board member, after which the advisor carries his vote. When the voter does have the time, energy or knowledge to participate actively, he would instead decide to vote directly, and his vote will take precedence over that of the advisor.

The system owner can decide that a certain decision always have to be made by advisors. In that case the advisor who gets most of the members confidence will have a strong input to the decision.

It is possible for the voter to change an advisor for a certain field. It is also possible for advisors to use other advisors. The purpose of this is to maximize the amounts of informed participation in each issue and diminish the risk of unrepresentative decisions due to lack of participation.

The basic concept of delegated voting is also applicable to quality assurance in problem solving and deliberation, where the intensity of debate often is at its peak in the beginning, while the competence increases with time. This normally produces a tendency for high-quality contributions submitted in the end of the discussion process to get low scores because of lack of participation. This problem may be circumvented by use of delegated voting.

The increased administration for delegated voting compared to the current representative systems is proposed to be handled by electronic media and the internet. Citizens with less access to the internet can choose advisors that can defend their viewpoints, even if they cannot participate in all votings.

The delegated voting system has been practised by the local political party demoex, who got their first seat in the local parliament in the city council of Vallentuna, near Stockholm, Sweden in 2002. It is also used by the World Parliament Experiment.

The first years of activity in Demoex have been evaluated by the Mitthögskolan University in Sweden in a paper called Flexible representation by use of delegated voting - a case study of practical use by Karin Ottesen in 2003.

An International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences paper noted that delegated voting might be particularly useful in situations in which votes are cast as the discussion is ongoing (rather than at the end of a period of discussion).

See also

• Demoex - Democracy Experiment
• Liquid democracy
• Proxy voting