Demoex
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Demoex is short for democracy experiment. More precisely a political hybrid which uses e-democracy to create an injection of direct democracy into a system of representative democracy.
A party named Demoex won a mandatory in the municipality Vallentuna, Sweden, in the local election 2002. It was founded the 6th of March 2002. The goal was to develop local democracy through "opening up" politics and make it available. Anyone should be able to participate in the local government without wasting time.
The Demoex vision is to open up the entire political process. All registered voters can indicate their views on a particular issue via polling on the internet; voters do not have to cast a vote on all issues. It then follows that the fewer votes on an issue, the more weight each individual vote carries. To prevent low participation a user can chose an adviser if she/he doesn't feel engaged in a certain subject.
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[edit] Ideology
Although Demoex stands for no defined policy, it has a clear ideology: To extend the degree of democracy in society. They claim that technological solutions have surpassed the political. With the help of information technology Demoex wants to create liquid democracy.
What's the extent of democracy?
A simple measure: The number of democratic decisions multiplied with the number of voters. In Vallentuna 20.000 persons votes in the local election every fourth year and 41 persons (representants in the local government) votes another 100 times/year in different point at issues. Together it becomes about 9000 votes/year. With Demoex in power the extent of democracy will increase. Suppose that 60 issues a year leads to votation in Demoex and 1500 users vote in every issue. Then we will have another 90.000 votings a year, ten times as much!
Open society
The ideology is based on the thoughts from Karl Popper and Henri Bergson about open society; the vision of a society built on the principle of public access to official records. Demoex strives for increased access and parttaking in the politics.
Statistical distribution
Demoex uses statistical distribution. It means that Demoex representatives in the local parliament make their voting statistically like the users on the internet. The representantives purpose is to reflex the members opinion. If Demoex should have had five Mandate and 60% of the users votes for a proposal, then three of the representatives should vote "yes" to that proposal. The round off is according to mathematical principles. If it becomes impossible to reflex the members opinion fairly in one question, then one representative give a blank vote. Statistical distribution is used because it gains democrazy. In every question there should be only one democratic election. Many sub-elections in the same issue can easily put the majority principle aside.
[edit] History
[edit] A grass-root initiative
It all begun at Vallentuna upper secondary school October 3rd 2000. The municipality organized a theme day on "IT and democracy" and the question why so few young persons are politically active emerged. Some students answered that they did not approve to choosing between ideologies. They expressed that their point of views were impossible to place on a political right-left scale. Other students were pessimistic about the aspects of political influence. "Decisions are made from above" they argued. Others answered they had no time to involve in politics. Others again thought of politics boring, tiering and insignificant.
After an internet debate an oral discussion with local politicians followed. The evaluation showed that students appreciated the speed and the structure offered by the electronic debate-system but they felt run over by the traditional oral debate.
From this experience a handful of students discussed with their philosophy teacher Per Norbäck about possibilities of developing democracy. They decided to register a party and candidate for the local government in September 2002 with only one promise: To inject Direct Democracy in the representative system.
In January 2002 they started to work on the project. Soon after they contacted Mikael Nordfors, a pioneer within e-democracy in Sweden. Already in the early 1990s Mikael founded a party with a similar ideology. Mikael offered Demoex to use the software he had implemented through his company. The made an Internet site, and started to sketch on the workflow.
Demoex tried to find a way to adopt direct democracy into the existing representative system. The Demoex model became a theestep-solution:
- Thinning out
- debate
- cast ballot
- Thinning out means that they're taking the irrelevant questions away. In the thinning out progress all the public affairs that the local parliament are dealing with is presented. The musers report (scale 1-5) what affairs they want to discuss and vote for. If an affair gets higher average report than 3.00, there will be a debate and a vote.
- In the debates people argue for or against different political proposals. The debates are the base for the democratically votes. The debate is necessary in order to compare the pros and cons of the proposals. Any participant can contribute arguments to try and convince the other members of the "right" opinion.
- The ballots' deadline is one day before the meeting of the local parliament. The result of the ballots are transformed into mandates according to statistical distribution. To fulfil the process Demoex "politician" needed to sign a contract with the promise to represent this distribution in the local parliament.
[edit] Rules and advertising
They also made rules for the participants to follow. The rules are necessary to avoid anarchy. When the rules were set and they had found out an accurate workflow Demoex had to advertise the concept. They distributed leaflets in the local postboxes, made Demoex t-shirts and borrowed a housevan as base for the electoral campaign. A certain interest from the media gave Demoex some attention. Though the advertising campaign was small and cheap, it was enough to win the first DD mandatory in Europe.
[edit] The election
At the election day the founders gathered together where it all started, in Vallentuna upper secondary school, to watch the summing up on a bigscreen TV. As excitement built, the crowd ran over to the summing up meeting in the house of Municipality. A local journalist concluded that Demoex needed another 90 ballots. Right then the secretary stepped in with the last counted districts. Demoex had unexpectedly few ballots in the largest district, only 35.
