The Flux Party of Australia suggests using a Bitcoin-based approach to save democracy from itself. The virtual tokens will be issued to distribute the will of their voters to their elected officials.
The politics of Australia has been in turmoil for some time now. The country has seen five Prime Ministers in and out of the chair in the last 5 years. The Upper House has been deadlocked by a few senators that were elected with less than 1% of the vote, owing to the eccentric electoral system of Australia.
For the Aussies, there couldn’t be a better time for a fresh change in the way their politics work, especially since the elections are just around the corner. The Flux Party has a solution for the country - Blockchains.
Bitcoin Debut in Politics
The Flux Party of Australia says they are utilizing the blockchain technology as a model to revolutionize representative democracy into Democracy 2.0, a streamlined polity better suited for the information age.
Nathan Spataro, Flux Party Co-Founder, is certain the system of representative democracy has become a monster, however useful it had been in having liberated the people from monarchy.
Spataro writes on his twitter:
The #Bitcoin of politics @voteflux offers radical new model for democracy @nathanspataro
— BitScan (@bitscanner) February 8, 2016
https://t.co/cCUsTtH7jR
The party’s idea of this Democracy 2.0 is simple. They are going to use blockchain technology, that is highly complex computerized codes, to calculate and distribute the will of their voters to their elected officials.
Those Flux members and single-issue campaigners who support the party will be allotted virtual tokens, which can be used personally or traded to someone they can trust to vote as their proxy; the tokens are based on the Bitcoin model.
The "vote tokens" can be traded between party members and other participants – which could include rival minor parties. The Flux Party has already gathered more than the 500 members it needs to stand senate candidates in all states of Australia.
The party hopes to have 6 senators elected. The results of the voting will decide whether the party’s elected officials vote in favor or against the bill. For example, if 64% people vote in favor of a bill and 36% against it, then 4 officials will vote in favor of the bill and 2 officials will vote against it.
The idea of the Flux Party is this: the elected senators should be reduced to mere formality as they can be replaced as well by softwares or robots for this task.
Revolution or Farce
Shivdeep Dhaliwal, author, economist, and political commentator, believes that blockchain technology cannot work in political representation:
“A political representative in an elected body is more than just a vote caster, he is a shaper of policy and brings the intent and will of the parliament/senate to the public. He is a voice of his constituents and for that matter the blockchain could work but for the purposes of encouraging political articulation and opinion making, the only way policy can be shaped is by interacting directly with the people that have elected him. You can't replace a senator with a robot.”
Even the blockchain experts don’t think it is a good idea. As per Oleg Khovayko, leading developer at Emercoin, this model which utilizes "allotted virtual tokens", has two significant drawbacks. One, the tokens can be resold. This is a way for just purchasing votes. Two, a token is bound to some individual person, so voting is not anonymous; anyone can review for whom he voted!
David Mondrus said:
“I have believed blockchain was a good idea since 2014. However, the issue with voting systems is not the architecture but that the architecture needs to be different for each jurisdiction. Each country/state has their own laws, and introducing legal changes is very hard and takes time. For example, we are used to the blockchain being (almost) instantly transparent, but in the USA it’s against the law to publish a running total of the vote until the polls have closed; they call it influencing the elections.”