German Pirate Party Federal Congress, 2012. Demotix/ Gregor Fischer. All rights reserved.Whereas a growing amount of decision-making software is currently in use in the political arena, LiquidFeedback's distinctive feature is the possibility for users to delegate their vote to other users by topic. Rather than assuming that all participants are equally knowledgeable and equally invested in every political issue, Liquid Feedback (LF) lets them decide whom to delegate on specific initiatives. Those who hold proxy votes can in turn transfer them to other delegates, facilitating the emergence of networks of trust. Such trust, however, is not a blank check as proxies can be revoked at any given moment. The fluidity of the delegation process implemented by LF is an emerging political protocol, whose roots lie in the decentralized nature of the Internet. As we will see in the following interview, the authors of LF see their software as a concrete instantiation of the idea of liquid democracy, which allows individual constituents to retain their prerogatives without compromising effective decision-making.
Another far-reaching property of LF is that the platform does not allow for the use of secret ballots. In order to ensure transparency and protect against electronic frauds LF implements a voting system that is recorded and verifiable by anybody. The public nature of voting, however, comes at a cost. Because in modern democracies the privacy and anonymity of voting are considered essential to protect individual autonomy and freedom of choice LF is not suitable for consultations where secret voting is desired or required. Yet this limitation has not prevented the German counties of Friesland and Rothenburg and the cities of Wunstorf and Seelze from adopting the software to consult their citizens on a wide range of issues.
For the LF developers, the transparent and public nature of Internet voting is a necessary condition for implementing a system that can be trusted. Even though a country like Estonia has already adopted Internet voting in binding elections, security experts have voiced significant concerns over the trustworthiness of e-voting systems. This does not mean that voting over the Internet does not have its uses. Provided the public and verifiable nature of voting, LF's authors believe that their platform can be adopted to empower political party members, improve internal decision-making in parties and CSOs, and thrust issues rather than leaders into the center of the political process.
