Once the community has voted to build the house, how do they decide its style? Of the most popular options used in modern governments, the most effective one is Rank-Choice voting. In this system, voters rank each option in order of preference, and an iterative process is used to whittle down the list to a single answer with the most widespread support. In America’s problematic, winner-take-all system (first past the post), an extreme candidate can win with the highest vote total, even though most voters don’t agree with the result– it’s the primary reason third-party candidates are not viable, as they “spoil” the outcome by “splitting the ticket.” Instead, Rank-Choice’s elimination rounds reallocate the votes for each choice eliminated, and the process repeats as many times over as necessary until one surpasses fifty-percent. Wherever practiced, Rank-Choice moderates extreme divisions in the electorate by highlighting acceptable compromises, and ends the tyranny of the isolated, radical plurality. Candidates are neither rewarded for pandering to the extremes with crazy ideas nor punished for their centrist participation, but instead, incentivized to reach out to the entire electorate with sensible solutions.

In the Novel Universe Cult, both Rank-Choice and Approval voting are acceptable standalone methods for selecting among a group of candidates, with Approval voting being preferred between the pair, as Rank-Choice can be convoluted, time-consuming, and, in certain cases, suffer technical issues with the math’s fairness. Instead of ranking the list of candidates, with Approval voting, the voter simply marks each option they approve of, leaving no mark for those unapproved of. The winner is the one with the most marks– simple, efficient, elegant.

Fitted to our more granular neural-democracy, we’ve developed an alternate version based on Approval voting, with the tweak of Quantum Transience valence (yum-yuck-meh preference) and an additional level to note intensity. For each candidate, the voter marks a thumbs-up or thumbs-down (yum, yuck), leaving those without a preference with no mark (meh). Additionally, the voter may highlight one “love” and one “hate” candidate, reflecting the idea that it’s the one the voter most wants or doesn’t want. Note that voters with fewer marks, who have also used the “love” / “hate” options, have created a more useful ballot, as their preferences have been more clearly expressed.

Once the issue’s participation is met and the Frame’s timer begins to run, the vote enters the evaluation stage, where each thumbs up or down on a ballot is multiplied by the voter’s input bias, with a “love” or “hate” mark doubling the voter’s bias for the single candidate. The votes are summed for each option across all ballots, with thumbs-down votes subtracted from thumbs-up (potentially resulting in negative scores). The candidate with the highest score moves forward first, and will win if it passes a simple evaluation: does it have a positive overall score, and is less than half of its negative score derived from “hate” votes? If the top scoring candidate doesn’t meet this evaluation, the next highest score is evaluated. This repeats until one passes or no more positive scores are left to evaluate, in which case, the vote has failed to pick a viable candidate.

If there is a winner when the timer runs out, the candidate is selected. Should there be no winner, this means none of the candidates met the electorate’s high standards. In such cases, River Sages and those associated with creating the initial proposal are encouraged to poll the voters, dig into the data, and reconfigure the candidates’ details to create ones that might pass. At this point, the proposal‘s creators can either resubmit the proposal as a new issue, or have the Sages create an ISD to reopen the Frame’s countdown with the altered candidate(s) listed.

QT Preference is not designed as a standalone method but as an integral part of our neural-democracy. While being more efficient than Rank-Choice, it also more clearly reflects the electorate’s intent under our unique form of democracy, using two of the foundational elements in constructing human feelings: valence and intensity. Unlike Approval voting, it also has the benefit of establishing a ceiling for the electorate’s “hatred” of any particular candidate.

Although individual voters’ views cannot be publicly assessed, and therefore, directly targeted for lobbying at any point in any voting process, the electorate’s general positions can be assessed, and therefore, influenced. The daily standing of each candidate, including its proportion of “love” and “hate” votes, is publicly updated, but only during the evaluation stage. Because it’s possible to estimate voters’ general positions, it’s possible to move these positions one way or another by addressing their perceived concerns. This can be accomplished through the hard work of tweaking the candidate’s details, while in “dialogue” with the electorate. Dialogue means “listening,” through polling, focus groups, messaging, and the like, while “speaking” means updating, with Sage approval, details of particular candidates based on what was “said.” By evaluating how those implementations seemingly influence the voting numbers, this “indirect lobbying” process allows those interested in a specific candidate the opportunity to adjust its details, possibly increasing its chance to win when the Frame closes by recruiting the “lovers” and reducing the “haters.” This, of course, can only be done by improving said candidate for more voters– the fundamental aim of any effective democracy.

First, read our philosophy to better understand our Creed.