Exactly, another point this would allow is that this type of structure is easily capable of holding every single employee of the government. You are Employee 154.333.245.745.112
If you can identify each government employee (which should be a basic condition of holding any kind of public office) and condition your proxy vote, on say the termination of a particular bureaucrat, wouldn’t that introduce some accountability into the system?
In more serious terms, this would allow any kind of serious agency head, included deputy directors etc. anyone who in a corporate setting would be seen as an executive, to be vetted and approved by the public.
And going back to my earlier point about needing legislators, it likely would be useful to have territorial bounds, where holding a certain percentage of the resident’s proxies entitles you to an office, some kind of staff, so that you can have the facilities to help you examine and debate the issues of the day.
So say a city would have a 10% rule, so that anyone who holds the proxies of 10% or more of the population would be considered an Alderman, and entitled to use one of the 10 offices in city hall etc. Likely there would never be more than 9 of those offices filled because there are always gonna be certain people who will not delegate and prefer to vote on everything (which is fine and good, then if the delegates try anything those persons can alert the rest of us).
A state might have a 1% rule, where anyone who holds 1% of the proxies of their state can be an assemblyman, and so on for the national level.
Another thought would be that the constitution could only be amended by a special process that would require people to vote directly, it could not be done by delegation.
We could make this more generic by using your layered number system. Layer 1 laws/action/contract can only be voted directly; layer 2 can only be voted by a direct delegate, layer 3 by a second level delegate, etc.
So the brand of pencil used in your town office defined by the number: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.42345, can be voted by a delegate of up to 6 level of delegation, or, again, by you directly if you really care about it.
These number should be able to grow and not be limited to 3 digit. But in order to add a new number you need to respect the layer requirement.
Would that work? Am pretty much thinking out loud, maybe I’m not making any sense, I need to put more thought into this. The delegate concept is pretty solid though.
I think that there is a distinction between a direct vote and a delegated vote of any kind. The point being that it shouldn’t be business as usual and we should require people to get off the couch, log on, and actually vote.
Other than that I don’t know what the layers will do, or if the layers will necessarily line up with people’s “actual” degree of closeness.
From the site:
"The basic idea is a democratic system in which most issues are decided
(or strongly suggested to representatives) by direct referendum.
Considering nobody has enough time and knowledge for every issue, votes
can be dynamically delegated by topic. Delegations are transitive and
can be revoked at any time. Liquid Democracy is sometimes referred to as
»Delegated« or »Proxy Voting« "
Read through Takis Fotopoulis Toward an Inclusive Democracy. He described small groups maybe (if memory serves) 5 people with someone choosen face to face among them to serve at the next tier of five above them repeating this pattern all the way to the top. The command is bottom up. It uses vouchers special and general to limit the power of money. I think Change Labs used this in groups of 12 called it organic and wanted to flatten corporate with it. Taks version is also a bit like Ursula LeGuin’s Dispossesed.
Liquid democracy and other recent efforts look to be about to put decades of academic work into practice. Prior to the space the internet helped create there seemed to be no point of entry. Not suggesting the coders are necessarily paying attention to academics just saying such ideas have been fomenting for a while and at some point the critiques, feedback and conversations will start. Might be the way math precedes physics discoveries. People have been waiting a long time. Progress happens.