Thanks Joachim! The categories are meant as examples only, but I think that when applied to a nation state the various departments might be a good start.

It might seem complicated but I don't think it is, rather I think I am bad at explaining it. Then again, in the words of Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér, "that which is dimly said is dimly thought", so I will try to clear it up!

The main problem, I think, is how to count the votes, i.e. when Alice has delegated her vote to Bob, and Bob votes, and then Alice votes, I think there might be race conditions where people could game the system. So, it might be that you would have to have "voting windows", where people who carry the most voting power has to vote first, for instance.

Don't worry: I understood you just fine.

I'm still not convinced of your category system: if lots of people give their education vote to EducationFirst and their finance vote to NoMoreTaxes, the classification of the "increase teachers' salaries" bill becomes very important. I'm not aware of any current system to classify it under either department; you could let people elect category-sorting representatives, but that is an entirely new set of problems (the NoMoreTaxes representative may plausibly argue that every bill spending money should be in the finance department, for instance - not coincidentally a department where his/her party has lots of power.)

I don't think there's any kind of race condition: Alice just sends the voting office a note "if I don't explicitly vote, I vote the same as Bob" and the voting office can just check whether or not she did when counting the votes (there is no need for a live tally, right?)

I don't know where you get the idea that formations such as EducationFirst or NoMoreTaxes would appear in this system. I think it's more likely that we will see basically the same formations as today; liberals, conservatives, democrats, green and so on.

That said, it's an important feature of the proposed system that it encourages, or even demands, a higher level of engagement with the issues than under today's system. Voters should vote directly in issues that concern them deeply. What the system fixes is rather a problem with direct democracy, where people vote the "wrong" way, or don't vote at all, in issues they don't understand or that don't concern them.

This is done by letting people delegate their voting power to someone they trust - it might be their neighbor, their mother, a colleague or a professional politician. But to mitigate the problem with concentrating power to few, that delegated vote is not to be counted on; someone can change or even retract the vote at any time.

Calling it race condition was probably wrong, what I mean is situations like this:

· Bob delegates his vote to Alice

· Alice votes No

· Bob sees that his vote is currently on No, and he likes that to he doesn't feel the need to change his vote

· In the last minute before the voting closes, Alice changes her vote to Yes

· Alice has gamed Bob, because if Bob had known Alice would vote Yes, he would not have delegated his vote to Alice in this motion.

Of course, the above scenario might not play out simply because it hurts Alice - Bob would surely never delegate his vote to her again. But I think it's a real problem nonetheless.

NoMoreTaxes was inspired by the American Tea Party, and EducationFirst was inspired by the Dutch D66.

Re: race condition: I just assumed that votes would be secret. Are you sure you want to jettison that feature?

I think every voter needs to know where their vote lies, when it's delegated. Someone will only know where the vote of the person they delegated their vote to, currently lies. That is, Bob has delegated to Alice, Alice might have delegated to somebody and so on. Bob sees that his vote is on Yes, and so knows that Alice's vote is on Yes. Alice knows whether she voted for Yes or if she has delegated her vote.

See limmeau's comment here, it turns out that the system exists and is called Liquid Democracy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2485452

As I posted, secret / anonymous votes are essential as long as there is economic or other inequalities within the voting population. Bribery and enforcement are serious problems. For instance, it is well documented, that you can buy the national "mail votes" of Italiens living in Germany for as little as 40 Euros! One might argue, that for the voting system within a party, secrecy is not as important. However, many, many members of the Pirate Party in Germany broke up with the party, exactly because of this missing feature, when Liquid Democracy was introduced.