Date: October 28th, 2023
Version: 2.0 (draft)
directdemocracy.vote aims at establishing world-wide direct democracy from the bottom-up in order to bring peace, safety and prosperity to humanity, including saving the climate and the biodiversity. It relies on the Internet, decentralization and cryptography to guarantee a fair voting system. The principle is that people become citizens by getting trusted by others. Citizens can vote and propose referendums regardless of any official acknowledgement. Referendum with a low participation could be ignored or considered as simple survey results. Referendum with a large participation will become significant from a democratic point of view. This will increase the pressure on governments to respect the democratic choices expressed by their people. Eventually, governments will officially recognize and contribute to directdemocracy.vote. The system can be applied locally at the municipal level, or more globally at regional, national or international levels. Ultimately this bottom-up initiative will enforce direct democracy everywhere in the world, giving the political power to the people. This paper describes directdemocracy.vote from a conceptual, strategical and technical point of view.
As a grand-father, one day my grandchildren will ask me: "What did you do grandpa to save the world?". I will answer them: directdemocracy.vote.
directdemocracy.vote is a decentralized e-voting app... Wait. Forget this. directdemocracy.vote is the biggest revolution in the history of humanity. And we need it urgently.
Here is my personal view about the governance models in the world and what directdemocracy.vote will bring:
| Governance | democratic | not corrupted | fast | planet impact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| USA | 🟡 | 🟡 | 🟡 | 🟡 |
| China | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🟢 | 🟡 |
| India | 🟡 | 🟠 | 🟠 | 🟡 |
| European Union | 🟡 | 🟠 | 🟠 | 🟡 |
| Russia | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🟢 | 🟠 |
| Germany | 🟡 | 🟡 | 🟡 | 🟠 |
| Switzerland | 🟢 | 🟡 | 🟠 | 🔴 |
| United Nations | 🟠 | 🟠 | 🔴 | 🟢 |
| directdemocracy.vote | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 |
I believe that direct democracy is the best political system to address the challenges that the humanity is facing: global warming, biodiversity, overpopulation, human rights, peace and prosperity. In this political system, any citizen can propose a referendum for a law that will enter in force if a majority of citizens approves it. Direct democracy is implemented in a few countries, like Switzerland, where it has proved efficient to address local challenges. However, many decisions, in particular with respect to ecology and peace, cannot simply be taken at the level of a single country. Instead they should be taken globally.
directdemocracy.vote relies on the Internet, decentralization and cryptography to enforce direct democracy from the bottom up to the whole world. It doesn't require the approval of any government or other official entity to get started. It can emerge simply from the will of a human beings and impose itself to the world. It is inspired by the Municipalism and Communalism theories. Basically, referendum decisions passed at a higher level (e.g., country) prevail over referendum decisions passed at a lower level (e.g., municipality), thus forming a federal political structure with several levels, which should scale-up to the whole world.
This paper describes how this goal could be achieved today from a technical and strategical point of view.
This section describes the key concepts of directdemocracy.vote without entering the technical details.
Internet has proven to be a wonderful tool for democracy, in particular regarding the freedom of speech. Although companies and states are attempting to censor it, the freedom of speech on the Internet is permanently defended by activists, such as Cypherpunks, who introduce technologies based on decentralization and cryptography, allowing people to work around censorship. directdemocracy.vote leverages on the Internet, decentralization and state-of-the-art cryptography to implement an emerging voting system aiming at the whole humanity.
directdemocracy.vote relies on public-key cryptography. Each citizen owns a pair of cryptographic keys: a private key which is held secret and a public key which is published online. To implement an electronic voting system or a petition signing system, each citizen must have a unique key pair recognized by the system. To ensure this uniqueness, a web of trust is implemented by judges with the help of citizens.
A judge is a web service which attributes a reputation each public key supposed to represent uniquely a citizen or a web service. Anyone can run a judge, regardless of any official acknowledgement. Judges also have a reputation which is given by other judges with the help of citizens. Hence, judges form a community of web services which permanently evaluate the reputation of public keys for citizens and other web services.
In order to help judges in their duties, citizens are asked to endorse each other and to endorse web services. Endorsing a citizen is the action of publishing a certificate message saying "I certify this public key is unique for this citizen". Endorsing a web service is the action of publishing a certificate message saying "I believe this web service is honest and doing a good job". Judges collect all the endorsements published by the citizens to construct their own web of trust.
Judges evaluate the reputation of all the participants: citizens, notaries, pooling stations and other judges. The reputation is a number. When the reputation of a participant is above a threshold defined by the judge, the judge publishes an endorsement for this partipant. Polling stations query the notaries to check if a citizen was endorsed by the judge of a referendum. Anyone can query a judge to get the reputation of a participant. The judge shall also display publicly the threshold above which it considers that a participant can be trusted. Judges rely on their own algorithms to compute the reputation of participants. These algorithms use endorsements as input and may be inspired by the page rank algorithm. They may also take into account the date of the endorsements and the distance between the endorsing citizen and the endorsed citizen. However, their implementation is totally left to the judge. It is very likely that the endorsements published by different judges will be similar to each other, thus converging towards a consensual web of trust.
Some judges may optionally ask citizens to provide them with some private information, which they should keep private. This information is useful to assess the reputation of citizens, that is one citizen registration corresponds to a single real individual. It may include local voter registration number, phone number, credit card number, ID card number, passport number, social insurance number, etc. Such private information should never be made public. It is managed by judges themselves and is out of the scope of the directdemocracy.vote system. Citizens are free to choose a judge among several for which they feel confident about the management of their private information. Some judges may not require to ask any private information to citizen.
In directdemocracy.vote voting is implemented with the help of polling stations. Polling stations are web services which are responsible for anonymizing the votes of citizens. Like judges and citizens, polling stations have a reputation and citizens can choose freely which polling station they would like to use.
Any citizen may propose a referendum or a petition. Once a referendum is published, the voting process takes place. Citizens use polling stations to cast their vote anonymously and the results are published online. Once a petition is published, the signature process takes place. Citizen can sign the petition and immediately publish online their signature for this petition.
Notaries are web services receiving publications from participants, including other notaries, and making them public to anyone in the world. When a participant publishes something, it means that the participant sends a signed message to a notary and the notary makes it publicly available. Notaries should also communicate with other notaries to gather more publications. A good notary is a notary which publishes all the available publications of directdemocracy.vote. Notaries also provide a web user interface to allow anyone to search and browse the various publications.
This section describes the essential properties of the directdemocracy.vote system necessary to convince people to use it.
The system is aimed at gaining confidence of both technical and non-technical people. The registration, endorsement, referendum vote, petition signature, verification and other processes are easy-to-understand. The smartphone app makes it quickly available.
All the information provided by citizens is public and available to everyone. It is not stored on a private server. This guarantees that this information cannot be retained or sold. Citizens should publish a minimal amount of information about themselves: name, picture and GPS home location. This is necessary to declare to others their existence as a citizen. However, if publishing the picture is a problem for a citizen, it may be possible to publish a blank picture. Similarly, if publishing the GPS home location is a problem, it may be possible to publish the GPS location of the town hall of the city where the citizen lives. Also other publications are needed by the voting process, like the participation of a citizen to a referendum. Such publications are publicly available online and cannot be removed (although they can be revoked by their authors). It is a bit similar to what happens with crypto currencies where the transaction information is publicly stored in a blockchain.
The voting software is freely available to anybody with Internet access from a simple smartphone. There is no special requirement (ID card, phone number, credit card, e-mail address, etc.), except those imposed by the app store of the smartphone. Anyone can install the software for free, register, propose referendums and vote. All the system relies exclusively on open-source specifications and open-source software. The only component of the system which is not free and not fully open-source is the smartphone.
Any citizen can check that their vote was taken into account. Anyone can check whether the voting process went well and nobody cheated.
It is not possible to know what a citizen voted.
Similarly to the Bitcoin and other distributed systems, nobody controls directdemocracy.vote, it simply belongs to its users. Anyone can contribute to directdemocracy.vote by implementing their own web services, such as apps, judges, polling stations or notaries, that will immediately take part in the network and try to gain a good reputation.
The technical concepts used in directdemocracy.vote are fairly simple and easy-to-understand for computer scientists. The architecture is kept as simple as possible to make it easy to review and assess its security. It doesn't aim at being 100% secure, as 100% secure things do not exist in the real world. It favors simplicity over unnecessary complications. It aims at being at least as secure as existing voting systems. The security architecture mainly focuses on being robust against large scale hacking attempts.
Hackers cannot change the results of a vote and cannot sabotage a referendum.
It is very difficult for a voter to prove to someone else what they voted. This is made particularly difficult as voters can change their mind anytime before the referendum deadline and re-vote differently. Only their last vote is taken into account.
There are 6 different types of participants in directdemocracy.vote:
- citizens: they issue their citizen card, endorse other participants, create petitions and referendums, sign and vote.
- smartphone providers: they provide mobile phones used by the citizens (Android, iOS, etc.).
- app providers: they provide mobile apps running on the smartphone of the citizen and allowing them to participate to directdemocracy.vote.
- notaries: they receive publications from all the participants (including other notaries) and make them public on the web.
- judges: they compute and publish a reputation for each participant.
- polling stations: they provide anonymity of vote in referendums.
Each participant has its own cryptographic key pair to allow it to sign its publications. It is a 2048-bit key pairs using the RSA algorithm. The hash algorithm used for signatures is SHA-256. The standard commands to generate a RSA key pair with 2048 bits are:
openssl genpkey -algorithm RSA -out id_rsa -pkeyopt rsa_keygen_bits:2048
openssl rsa -pubout -in id_rsa -out id_rsa.pub
Where id_rsa is the private key and id_rsa.pub is the public key.
These commands can be used for any participant except citizens.
The blind signatures used during the voting process are based on 2048-bit RSA keys. They implement the IETF RFC 9474 norm.
The private key of a citizen is generated, stored and operated by some special hardware of the smartphone, so that it cannot be read by anyone. Smartphone operating systems actually provide a hardware-based API allowing to generate a key pair, sign, encrypt and perform other operations without disclosing the private key. This is implemented in the Android Keystore and Apple iOS Secure Enclave. The app may also generate a password protected revocation message that the participant should save and use if they loose access to their smartphone.
The operating system of the smartphone also provides integrity checks on itself and on the app. These integrity checks guarantee that the genuine app is used on a non-rooted unmodified smartphone. The app integrity check prevents malicious users from using a modified app to cheat or to extract sensitive data. The operating system integrity check prevents malicious users from modifying the behavior of the app at run-time or extracting sensitive data. These features are currently offered by the Android Play Integrity and the Apple iOS DeviceCheck. An integrity check is performed each time a citizen wants to publish a citizen, certificate or registration publication. If the check is successful, the app will also sign the publication on server-side of the app and publish it at the notary indicated by the client-side of the app. This way, the notary has no clue on the IP address of the client.
The app being open-source, it can be rebuild from the source and compared against the signed binary app to ensure that the signed binary app was built from the same unmodified source. This guarantees to the users that the app is not doing anything malicious.
A publication is a JSON file including the signature of a participant and published online. It includes the public key and signature of the participant to guarantee that the publication was created by this participant. All publications includes at least the following fields:
schema: [url of the json-schema file]
key: [public key of author]
signature: [signature of author]
published: [date of publication expressed in seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00]The public keys stored in JSON structures are stripped down version of the standard public key. The header and footer line are suppressed as well as the new lines. Moreover the common heading and trailing characters of the 2048-bit RSA public keys are removed. Considering the following public key:
-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEAkoSFvGywo4sb0crZlmDJ
R7iOSSioDS/ujo4dI0ISYezTVSBnuMvdEtCNfjIXUXy5fMbemrCB8GaragdJQf3w
5xCKYjVSHlU2CEglTz0tgKTfm00/eoBPoW0oEaHRovVkwtaMDECvN8DyWBsA0XqV
GXQsSYa3WA9s0CaaWv9+za1N1Lfv6gKxXMItWcMBcBnPqj2mcl3qgbp635maIkSM
k9/ybH80kv8lxkc/VFsAWsLykcMSZdgNWaxWvNXl6zES8ZkNfOnXHYztbIm25Hjr
ixjan50H4C04HkvvLILFXsNylxOz7vZNYauO6Oh2Jn8IkKzTtXuxaLmh7KuzrLSk
1QIDAQAB
-----END PUBLIC KEY-----
The value stored as a string in the JSON structure is:
koSFvGywo4sb0crZlmDJR7iOSSioDS/ujo4dI0ISYezTVSBnuMvdEtCNfjIXUXy5fMbemrCB8GaragdJQf3w5xCKYjVSHlU2CEglTz0tgKTfm00/eoBPoW0oEaHRovVkwtaMDECvN8DyWBsA0XqVGXQsSYa3WA9s0CaaWv9+za1N1Lfv6gKxXMItWcMBcBnPqj2mcl3qgbp635maIkSMk9/ybH80kv8lxkc/VFsAWsLykcMSZdgNWaxWvNXl6zES8ZkNfOnXHYztbIm25Hjrixjan50H4C04HkvvLILFXsNylxOz7vZNYauO6Oh2Jn8IkKzTtXuxaLmh7KuzrLSk1Q
This base64 string translates into a 256-byte binary data chunk.
There are mainly 6 types of publications in directdemocracy.vote:
- citizen (signed by app after integrity check to garantee the private key is inside in the phone keystore by the app)
- certificate (citizen certificates should be signed by app after integrity check to prevent fake certificates)
- area
- proposal (referendum or petition)
- participation (signed by app after integrity check to guarantee the vote encryption key is only known by the client app)
- vote
Becoming a citizen means publishing some information about oneself: name, picture and GPS home location. This information is immediately made public through the notary services. No other information is asked to the user in the registration process. Anyone can register on directdemocracy.vote to publish their own citizen publication, e.g., citizen card. However, this is not sufficient to take part in a referendum, so that their vote is taken into account. Citizen publications must be endorsed by the judge of the referendum so that the corresponding citizen can vote. To get endorsed by the judge, a citizen should acquire a sufficiently high reputation from that judge. To increase their reputation, a citizen should ask other citizens to endorse them. Alternatively, they may also ask some judges to endorse them. Judges compute the reputation of a citizen based on endorsements by citizens and by other judges. If a citizen has a large number of endorsements from citizens and/or judges with a good reputation, their reputation will increase and they will get endorsed by more and more judges.
When a citizen card is published, the app performs an integrity check and if successful, it signs the citizen card. This guarantees that the private key used to create the citizen card originates from the geniune app and is stored in the system keystore. Thus, the private key cannot be read by anyone and the identity of the citizen cannot be usurpated, unless some malicious people physically access their phone and app.
A citizen publication contains the name, picture and GPS home location of a citizen. It is signed by the citizen themself.
Example:
schema: https://directdemocracy.vote/json-schema/2/citizen.schema.json
key: [citizen public key]
signature: [citizen signature]
published: 1590298858
appKey: [public key of the app]
appSignature: [signature of the app after integrity check]
familyName: Smith
givenNames: John
picture: [base64 encoded jpeg picture of 150x200 pixels]
latitude: 40.724723
longitude: -73.993403The certificate of a participant includes the public key and the signature of the participant, a publication signature for which the participant provides the certificate. There are four types of certificates:
- endorse: to provide an endorsement for a participant
- petition: to sign a petition
- report: to report a participant (possibly myself)
- revoke: to revoke an endorsement
In case of the endorsement of a citizen, it claims that the owner of this citizen card is eligible to vote, e.g., the citizen card is owned by an adult person who own a single citizen card. Otherwise, in case of the endorsement of a web service or an app, it means that the web service or app is honest and provides a good quality of service.
A revoke certificate is a special kind of certificate which cancels a previous endorsement.
All certificates published by citizens should be signed by the app after integrity check to prevent a citizen to sell their signature for signing petitions or endorsing others.
Example:
schema: https://directdemocracy.vote/json-schema/2/endorsement.schema.json
key: [citizen1 public key]
signature: [citizen1 signature]
published: 1590298858
appKey: [public key of the app]
appSignature: [signature of the app after integrity check]
type: "endorse"
object: [signature of a citizen or petition]An area represents geographic zones defined by a set of polygons and used to delimit the boundaries of a referendum. Polygons are expressed as coordinates in the GeoJSON MultiPolygon format. The name field is used for user information purposes only. It should match the area field of the referendum. It is self-signed.
Example:
schema: https://directdemocracy.vote/json-schema/2/area.schema.json
key: [public key of participant]
signature: [signature of participant]
published: 1574679658
name: |
city=Mâcon
county=Saône-et-Loire
state=Bourgogne-Franche-Comté
country=France
union=European Union
polygons: [[[[ 12.123, 123.121 ], [12.112, 134.113], [12.321. 107.122]]]]A referendum proposal contains a description of the referendum and the question asked to the citizen. It is signed by a judge. Judges should offer the possibility to anyone to submit their own proposal.
Example:
schema: https://directdemocracy.vote/json-schema/2/proposal.schema.json
key: [public key of judge]
signature: [signature of judge]
published: 1574679658
area: [signature of area]
title: my referendum
description: my description
question: do you agree?
answers: |
yes
no
abstain
secret: true
deadline: 1590298858399
website: https://www.myreferendum.netA petition proposal is similar to a referendum proposal, except that it has its secret field set to false and has no question nor answers fields.
A participation is a declaration by a server app that a citizen (client app) is participating to a referendum. It includes the public key of the citizen, the public key of the app, the signature of the referendum and the encrypted vote of the citizen. It is signed by both the citizen and the app.
Example:
schema: https://directdemocracy.vote/json-schema/2/participation.schema.json
key: [public key of the citizen]
signature: [signature of the citizen]
published: 1590298858
appKey: [public key of the app]
appSignature: [signature of the signature by the app]
referendum: [signature of the referendum proposal]
encryptedVote: [encrypted vote of the citizen]A vote is the result of unblinding the encrypted vote included in the registration. It is signed by the polling station and by the app server. The app server sign only the vote contents: referendum signature, vote number, ballot number and answer. The vote number is a random number (between 0 and 255) for the first vote of the citizen and is incremented by a random amount (between 0 and 255) each time the citizen votes again, replacing their previous vote until the deadline. The ballot number is series of random bits generated by the app and guarantying the uniqueness of the vote. The answer value is a text containing the answer to the referendum question.
Example:
schema: https://directdemocracy.vote/json-schema/2/vote.schema.json
key: [public key of participation]
signature: [blind signature of the station]
published: 1590298858
appKey: [public key of the app]
appSignature: [blind signature of vote: referendum, number, ballot and answer by the app]
referendum: [signature of the referendum]
number: [vote counter]
ballot: [unique random ballot number]
answer: [answer to the referendum question]This section describe the full petitioning process in details. Petitioning is way simpler to handle than voting because it doesn't involves anonymity. The petition system of directdemocracy.vote is superior to most Internet-based petitions systems. Such systems rely on e-mail addresses for signature and cannot prevent people from signing several times if they have several e-mail addresses. Moreover, in case of a local petition, such systems cannot prevent people from outside of the geographical area to sign. The petition system of directdemocracy.vote fixes these two shortcomings by relying on the citizen reputation coming from the web of trust and the confirmed citizen location.
A petition is published as a proposal by a participant.
Any citizen located in the area of the petition and approving it can sign it, that is they will publish a certificate for it.
Notaries could display the result of a petition by counting and listing the citizens who signed it, excluding non-trusted citizens and citizens outside of the petition area.
This section describe the full voting process in details.
The voting process is summarized on the following figure:
A referendum with signature R is published by a judge with a public key J.
A polling station with a public key S is trusted by the citizen and used as a proxy to anonymize the vote of the citizen. It doesn't know anything about the citizen, except its IP address and vote content. It signs and publishes vote contents after sufficiently votes are casted to prevent the app server from deducing the vote of the citizen using time correlation. The voting station manage a vote buffer with a fixed size (e.g., 100). Each new vote coming from client apps is stored in the buffer. When the vote buffer is full, the station chooses randomly one vote in its buffer, published it and remove it from its buffer, so that it can accept new votes. This guarantees that the app server cannot make any time correlation to deduce the vote of a citizen. When the deadline of the referendum is reached, the stations should not accept new votes from client apps and should publish all the vote contained in their buffer.
A citizen with public key C sends to the app server their signed registration to referendum R using app server public key A and encrypted vote V
The app server ensures the client app is unmodifed thanks to the integrity check.
The client app ensures that C is endorsed by J and is located inside the area of the referendum R.
The client app generates a vote blob V which contains the signature of the referendum R, a vote number, a unique random ballot number and the answer of the citizen to the referendum question.
The answer could be "yes", "no", "abstain" or something else.
The client app encrypts V for RSA blind signature by the app server A as V and send it to the app server in a signed message together with the C key, R signature and A key.
The app server A blind signs V, sign the CRAV message and send this back to the client app.
When the deadline of the referendum is reached, the server app publishes the CRAV signed message to announce that it handled the participation of C to R.
This information will be use to show publicly that C participated to R with app A.
The citizen app sends the clear vote V that includes the unblinded signature of A to the polling station S. It signs the vote and send it back immediately to the client app as a proof of receipt. S wait until a large number of votes for R from A are published (about 100 or so) before publishing V. This guarantees that the app server A cannot deduce the vote of C by time correlation.
The display of the results of R starts as soon as a first vote is published. For each possible answer, all the votes corresponding to this answer are summed up and the final sum is displayed. When the deadline is reached, the app servers publish the list of participants and the result should be considered as final. The number of participants should match the number of votes. Displaying the results in real time during the voting process is uncommon in classical voting processes. It has however the nice property of motivating more citizens to participate, especially if they are not happy with the current preliminary results.
To estimate the participation, we should first estimate the size of the corpus, that is the number of citizens living of the area of the referendum. This information can be obtained from various sources, including OpenStreetMap. The estimated participation is computed from the number of votes divided by the size of the corpus.
A perfect anonymous voting system doesn't exists. The system we propose has a number of minor shortcomings explained in this section. However, such limitations should not affect significantly the democratic process.
Unfortunately, nowadays the vast majority of smartphones run either Google Android or Apple iOS proprietary systems which constitutes a strong dependency on the companies providing these devices. We currently have no other choice than trusting these smartphones with respect to the integrity check and keystore in particular. However, for users who are running their own rooted devices or alternative operating systems, we recommend them to have a spare cheap genuine Android smartphone that they could use only for running the trusted integrity checked directdemocracy.vote apps. In the future, the might be other hardware and software providers offering devices with integrity checks as an alternative to Google and Apple. Unlike Google and Apple, such new systems could be publicly audited from both a hardware and software point of view to guarantee they do not include any backdoor and thus would gain a better reputation.
People without a smartphone are unfortunately unable to vote. However today a large percentage of the adult population has a such a device and it is increasing every day.
Any malicious participant, e.g., citizens, apps, polling stations, notaries or judges, could be spotted by other participants and their reputation will immediately drop, excluding the malicious participant from further participation in directdemocracy.vote.
Citizen can vote as many times as they want until the deadline of a referendum. Only their last vote is taken into account. This allows a citizen to show someone else that they voted one specific answer and some time afterwards they could vote again, but with a different answer. Optionally, apps could include a "final" tickbox when voting that would make that any further voting to the same referendum will be silently ignored. This way, a citizen could vote "yes" and then meet a person close to the deadline of the referendum and show them that they vote "no" and wait that the deadline passes. This "no" will simply be ignored if you ticked the "final" tickbox when you voted "yes". The vote buyer has no way to be aware of this unless they have been controlling your phone from the beginning to the deadline of the referendum, which means several weeks or months. The only way for a citizen to sell their vote is indeed to sell their smartphone to some buyer after they acquired a high reputation. This is however unlikely to happen at large scale without being discovered. Also the sold citizen card could not get nor provide any further fair endorsement which will appear suspect after a while. That includes judge endorsements which may happen on regular time intervals. When discovered, a citizen who sold their smartphone with access to their directdemocracy.vote app, is unlikely to get trusted again in the future.
A fully working open-source implementation is provided on https://directdemocracy.vote It includes a minimal working system:
- a smartphone app for both Android and iOS.
- a notary.
- a judge implementing a simple page rank algorithm among citizens to compute their reputation.
- a polling station.
The source code is available at https://github.com/directdemocracy-vote/ This system may be used for testing purposes, or for implementing local referendums (at the municipality level). But it is not yet ready to scale up at a larger levels, mainly due to the capacity of the servers used.
It is easy for any individual computer scientist or organization to deploy their own servers (notaries, judges and stations). By increasing the number of servers, the system will be able to handle a larger number of citizens, and eventually the whole humanity.
The open source software can be forked to create new versions of the app and web services. The resulting new software should respect the specifications to be inter-operable with other implementations. The current sample implementation the app and web services is minimal and could be greatly improved by developers. Improvements include a better user interface of the app, better judges algorithms, better data exchange between notaries, etc.
We aim at getting directdemocracy.vote used by a large number of citizens to increase the pressure on local government and thus contribute to a better, more democratic governance of countries. In order to achieve this goal, we plan to start small with local petitions and/or referendum in small municipalities, like villages. It is likely that there exist many villages in the world where a majority of people disagrees with the local municipality on some topic. Thus a couple of citizens in one of these villages may decide to use directdemocracy.vote to organize a local referendum. The local municipality may decide to ignore the outcome of the referendum. However, the local news may relay the fact that some citizens self-organized a referendum to increase the pressure on the municipality. This will have a side effect to spread the word about directdemocracy.vote and encourage other villages or cities to use it. At some point, citizens will launch a referendum for a whole region, then a whole country. This self-feeding marketing will eventually outreach the whole planet.
In Switzerland, a citizen initiave (e.g., referendum) needs to collect 100'000 signatures from swiss citizens to trigger a nationwide referendum. This number should be compared to the swiss population which is currently nearing 9 million people. In other words, a referendum needs to be approved by roughly 1.1% of the population before a vote is officially organised.
We could consider something similar in directdemocracy.vote. A referendum receiving votes from at least 1% of a local population could be considered as significant. However, this 1% threshold should be reached sufficiently ahead of the deadline so that other people could vote. There should be one month or so, between the time the 1% is reached and the referendum deadline is over.
For example, let's consider a village of 1020 inhabitants. A referendum concerning this village is published on June 30, 2024 with a deadline set to September 30, 2024. On July 15th, 2024, 11 people already voted to this referendum, which is more than 1% of the village population. This happens more than one month ahead of the deadline. Therefore the referendum should be considered as valid and the rest of the population should vote on it.
-
First Municipal Referendum
- Participation Level Greater Than 50%
- Media Coverage
- Results Acknowledged and Applied
-
First Regional Referendum
- Participation Level Greater Than 50%
- Media Coverage
- Results Acknowledged and Applied
-
First National Referendum
- Participation Level Greater Than 50%
- Media Coverage
- Results Acknowledged and Applied
-
First World Referendum
- Participation Level Greater Than 50%
- Media Coverage
- Results Acknowledged and Applied
This project has the capability to have a real positive impact on the future of humanity and Earth. However, its success depends on the people living on this planet. You certainly can help now to achieve such a bright future:
- Spread the word about directdemocracy.vote!
- Propose local referendums or petitions!
- Participate to the democratic debates!
- Endorse others!
- Vote!
- Develop and run a judge, a polling station, a notary or an app!
- Force the rulers to respect the outcome of the referendums!
Your grandchildren will thank you for this.