Description

Currently, it is considered impossible to ask all citizens on every question that arises. Consequently, in order to perform democracy, citizens choose “representatives”. These representatives have to:

• represent them (towards outer bodies, like UN for a President)
• make the choices in place of them (for example the level of taxes for a major

The representative democracy is without any contest a progress with respect to previous situations. There is not any existing system in which citizens have as much possibilities to express themselves and weight on the choices of the society. However, the representative democracy has a lot of problems. Among them some are due to its own structure:

• Few people voting (due to the legitimate feeling that citizens do not weight on the decisions regarding them)
• Corporate favoritism/clientelism (encouraged by the strategies of access to power)
• Corruption (due to the lack of control on the highest levels of the pyramid)

Entitled the “Democratic Experience” our project consists in providing tools allowing to implement a form of direct democracy at a large scale. At the moment, we make the hypothesis that maybe the conditions are met to allow asking every citizens on all of the subjects that regards them The Democratic Experience is based on three principles:

• Allow of the expression of all citizens thanks to the Internet tools that make possible for each to submit a vote, propose other answers and to vote
• Turn this expression into decision, with the help of a voting method allowing to “reveal” at best the position of a group of people
• Apply this decision

The Democratic Experience project is based on a client-server architecture on the Internet. The client is a software owned by every member of the Democratic Experience, and that makes possible to submit a question (under the form of a vote), to propose answers, and to vote. The server is a computer concentrating the votes, count the votes and keeps the results in a database.

The kind of election method used is Condorcet’s method, invented by this mathematician and philosopher of 18th century. In this kind of election, the voters sort their candidate choices by order of preference. A simple mathematical method for the count of votes allows to determine the winner candidate. Example

Every people involved in the democratic experience can propose a question thanks to its client software. The question may be for example:

The question is sent to the server that dispatches it to all citizens of the Democratic Experience.

Anybody can add a proposition of answer to this vote. Thus, on the following figures, seven answers have been progressively added:

Any people involved in the Democratic Experience can vote at any time. Moreover, as the vote is always open, if any person changes its mind, it can change its vote (the new vote replaces the previous one).

The Condorcet method needs that every citizen sorts the candidates answers, by order of preference. Thus on the above question, let’s suppose that four voters had voted with the following votes:

It is a mathematical method that is simple to use but too long to be explained here (for more details on the Condorcet voting method, see this site ). The essential aspect of the Condorcet method is that the counting ensures that the elected answer is the one that would win a duel against any other answer. Therefore, in our example, it is the answer “Raise taxes by 1 point” that wins. For example, let’s compare what would give the duel “Raise taxes by 1 point” against “work 42 years”. We see in the sorting made by the four citizens that the vote “Raise taxes by 1 point” is three times before “work 42 years” and once after. Consequently, “Raise taxes by 1 point” would win against “work 42 years”. We can easily check (it takes some time but with a computer it is immediate!) that the answer “Raise taxes by 1 point” would win every possible duel with any other possible answer. We can also check (still with the help of a computer) that it is the only answer in this case (all other answers have at least one lost duel). Consequently, the answer “Raise taxes by 1 point” is the winner of the Condorcet election:

The Condorcet method has mainly two strengths. First it takes a good “snapshot” of the most consensual position among voters. Let’s take an example. During the french presidential contest of 2002, candidate Le Pen arrived “second”. But it is an easy bet that in a Condorcet election about 20% of voters would put Le Pen first in their list and 80% last. Consequently, the “average sorting” of Le Pen is to be a the end of the list, about at its fourth fifth. This is representative of the real wishes of the french voters by taking into account what the voters want and what they do not want. Second, the Condorcet method prevents any problem of vote dispersion. Actually, if several candidate answers are close (like “work 41 years” and “work 42 years”), the voters will naturally group them in their sorting. Let’s take again the french presidential contest of 2002. It is clear that the dispersion of left-wing votes has contributed to the eviction of candidate Jospin at second round. With the Condorcet method, the left-wing voters would probably have put at the top a group including Jospin, Mamère, Taubira, Besancenot... Therefore, there is not any “loss” for the Jospin candidate of the participation of the Besancenot candidate, for example.

The winning answer of the vote becomes the official position of the Democratic Experience on that matter:

This new position is integrated into the Base of Positions which is the database including the results of all the votes at a given time.

The base of position is structure into themes which make browsing easier. Therefore, it is easy to know the position of the Democratic Experience on any given subject. This base may be browser by anybody, member if the Democratic Experience or not.

When the process of “opening of votes - addition of answers - vote counting - integration to the base” repeats itself a large number of times, the database of the positions of the Democratic Experience increases and evolves.

Is the Democratic Experience and its database a kind of large poll? No, for:

• here the polled people are asking the questions and propose the answers
• The process is evolving and the “winning” position may change with time
• what is important is the second step

Once the base of positions has reached some size, our project is to run “representative-candidates” in the elections (city, county, region, states...).

These candidates will of course be nominated by vote through the Democratic Experience. If elected, the will have as a unique mandate:

• to apply the positions in the data basis in the course of the practice of the mandate for which they have been elected
• ask to the Democratic Experience the question raised in the practice of their mandate

Those representative-candidates will not have to perform a campaign in the classical sense, that is they will not go in front of the people saying “I’m right, I know what is good for you, vote for me and everything will go right”. They will just have to explain the principles of the Democratic Experience and give the address of the Internet site.

Who knows? Let’s dream a bit. We can imagine an increase phase during which a non conventional party, the “Democratic Experience” gets some people elected, simply executing the positions expressed in the data base. They are the “voice” of the members of the Democratic Experience, in a strict sense. Then some majority phase may establish in which the system (city, county, country) is really driven by the Democratic Experience, by through its representatives. The system (law, executives, justice) evolves then progressively by integrating the Democratic Experience into the institutions. With respect to the ultimate phase , Very clever who could sketch it today...

We note that the sub-title of the Democratic Experience, “a project of non representative democracy” is actually a counter-sense: it is on the contrary a super- representative as the representatives are referring themselves exclusively to the tool for directly consulting the citizens.

In this chapter, we look at some of the specificities of the Democratic Experience: The democratic debate, the vote delegation, the security, the universality, the existing systems, the main objections.

The Democratic Experience is not taking place of the democratic debate, nor the search for information. In particular, it has no goal to give the means to forge one’s position allowing one to vote. The participants who express their position through a vote have to find by themselves the means to forge their opinion, like in the current democratic system. We only forecast to allow a member who generates a question and to those who suggest answers to add a hyper-link to discussion forums, to Internet sites of argumentation around an answer, technical documents.

If the Democratic Experience increases, the number of questions on which each participant will have to vote may become too large to be handled. It is therefore plan some delegation mechanism. Every member may choose to delegate its vote to any other member, on a question or on a theme defined in the base of positions. The “delegating member” has the possibility to see what is the vote the “delegate” is performing in its name, and he has at any time the possibility to “take control” and to put an end to the delegation in order to perform its vote alone. Thus, as an example, I may choose to delegate any question relevant to death penalty (I am opposed to) to my friend Corentin, great defender of human rights, himself opposed to the death penalty. If one day I discover the Democratic Experience takes a position in favor of death penalty, no doubt I will check what Corentin has voted in my name, and in the case he would have supported this position in favor of death penalty, I could suppress my delegation.

Many parts of the Democratic Experience must be trustful and highly secured. In particular, we must ensure:

• the validation of the subscription of some person to the Democratic Experience
• authentication at connection
• vote uniqueness
• vote secrecy

In general we must guarantee the absolute confidentiality of the interaction of each member with the Democratic Experience. It not possible to detail here all the processes to deploy, let’s just say that:

• the goal is to guarantee at least the same level of security as in the current voting process (knowing that there already exist secure techniques ensuring the ciphering of the data transfered through the network)
• the software of the Democratic Experience will be free software (see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.fr.html ), for which the source code will be accessible (therefore anybody can check precisely how the software are working and thus check how security and anonymity are ensured)

The span of the Democratic Experience is universal. That means simply that any registered members can vote on any topic. This universality supposes to settle some kind of internationalization (the software clients shall run in several languages). This kind of technology already exists in free software (ex: content negotiation by apache and localization files).

The number of structures working with direct democracy, one way or an other, is too large for being all cited here. As regards Condorcet voting, it is used is several entities, like for example the Easter Eggs company that uses a free software called Glasnost for collective decision making in companies. An other example is the election of the free software Debian GNU/Linux project leader by Condorcet voting method.

One can argue the Democratic Experience is elitist , because of the need to have an access to the Internet. This problem is real and we are conscious of it. It is obvious such a project that aims at increase the access of citizens to the decision power can only be fully conscious of the lack of access of human beings to the Internet but also to electric power, potable water, security... However it does not prevent to bootstrap the Democratic Experience that wants to be a pioneer experience. If the principle widespreads, why not to consider public access desks allowing to join the Democratic Experience, or specialized terminals (like french Minitel) free distributed to each home.

What happens if the majority is wrong ? One answer is: Are we democratic or not. An other to look at the problem is to consider that if the majority is wrong and takes a wrong decision, it will have to suffer from its consequences and will change its mind. This mechanism of direct regulation should thus replace the current regulation mechanism, in which elected people behave “well” because the wish to be reelected. Of course the reality is most of the time more complex, and it may be possible to consider cases where members of the majority of the Democratic Experience who produce the wrong decision are not the ones that suffer from its consequences. We reach there the main idea of the Democratic Experience: our project needs to consider the average human being as an “adult”, able, at least for some time, to take sensible decisions and who have some sense of general interest. This hypothesis may be challenged, but not to do it would lead to abandon the idea of direct democracy itself, and to accept one for all the “elite” system. The elite system make the hypothesis it is better for the society to be lead by a minority of people with necessary capacities to take the right decision, in the sense of the general interest. If the Democratic Experience leads to a failure, it would give more credit to the idea that the elite system is the best.

An other problem sometimes raised is the reactivity . What happens if there is some urgent decision to take? Is not it too slow to wait for the members of the Democratic Experience to express themselves? It may be answered to that, that when the question is vital, the expression of some position may be very quick. On the other hand the Democratic Experience may decide to settle reactive process (groups of people) to take the decision that can not technically go through the democratic consulting. In other words, the Democratic Experience define itself is range of action and the span of its decisions.

Cannot there be contradictory positions in the database? The answer is of course, and it is wishful such cases arise. Actually, the database is supposed to reflect the position of a group of people, and it is natural such a group carries internal contradictions. It the Democratic Experience “captures” well the mind of the group, then it shall also capture the contradictions. As mentioned above, what matters is that the existing contradictions in the database may at one time or an other by raised by some member and that a vote be submitted to solve it. Most of the problems arising inside the Democratic Experience may be solved by the Democratic Experience.

Lastly, a very common problem raised towards the Democratic Experience is: but then anybody has the right to give its mind on everything ? Yes, of course!

The beginning of our thoughts about the Democratic Experience has started at Autumn 2002. Since then, the concept has been worked on, debated in groups and challenged. We have started to federate volunteers and developped a first simple version of a prototype software including:

• A client software to express new elections, add answers, vote or delegate
• A server software to deal with the votes, the delegations and the database of positions

The first goal of this phase is to validate the global concept of the Democratic Experience (see if “it works”), and at this step it could be better to try it inside small structures (associations...). The second goal of this phase is to push the software towards a robust version, including as much as guaranties with respect to liability and security in order to launch the second phase. It consists in settling the Democratic Experience in public and to send representative candidates to real election as fast as possible.

The goal of the Democratic Experience is to settle the tools allowing to facilitate the expression of every citizens, to turn this expression into decision and to turn this decision into action.

The Democratic Experience is an experience . We wish to verify the concept of democracy by taking it into action the principle: sovereignty comes from the people. It may not work and the conclusion may by “it is better that the society is lead by some elite”. We do not have prejudice on this question, one of the goals of the Democratic Experience being to see up to what point the citizens wish to weight on the decision they are concerned with.