Design & Discussion - Voting Mechanisms November 2002, June 2025
Policies can be voted in. There are several kinds of votes.
Nomination
A nomination refers to placing an individuation in a position of accellerated responsibility.
Referendum
A referendum is a proposition that allocates some political weight towards implementation or prohibition of some particular policy that is already in effect. A referendum cannot create something new, it can only accelerate, decelerate, redirect or stop an existing policy. In that way it is a correction, given new facts or new interest on a previously settled policy.
The XR provides several standard Voting mechanisms for the use of Citizens.
They are:
A Call to Consensus is basically a Rodney King maneuver. When people are highly divided over some issue, a C2C allows some basic agreement to take place. A C2C is generally called over a document which has no particular prescriptive value. Instead this document is a simple list of values or points that most people agree on. These may or may not be useful in wonking resolutions. it is essentially a spot check of the pulse of your House.
A Ranking is a simple vote in which individuals are given tokens and a large list of nominated entities upon which to cast their votes. The preferred method for Ranking votes are Borda.
| System | Type | Complexity | Tolerance | Analogy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FPTP | Voting | Low | None | Like Raft’s leader vote (but not robust) |
| Condorcet | Voting | High | Somewhat | Like Paxos: ideal but hard to use |
| Borda | Voting | Medium | Low to medium | Like PBFT: broader consensus |
| Llull | Voting | Medium | Medium | Like a simplified PBFT |
| Raft | Consensus | Medium | Crash fault tolerant | Easy-to-use, “FPTP for computers” |
| Paxos | Consensus | High | Crash fault tolerant | Mathematically rigorous, like Condorcet |
| PBFT | Consensus | Very High | Byzantine tolerant | Aggregates many signals like Borda |