Proxy Voting - Delegated Voting

In delegated voting, also known as liquid democracy, the proxy is transitive and the transfer is recursive. Put simply, the vote can be further delegated to the proxy's proxy, and so on.

Delegated voting is also called transitive proxy, delegable proxy, asset voting, delegate cascade, or (in application) Liquid Democracy, and Augmented Democracy. An early proposal of delegate voting was that of Lewis Carroll in 1884. More recent proposals are by Mikael Nordfors, Bryan Ford, James Green-Armytage and Michael Allan.

Delegate voting is used by the Swedish local political party Demoex. Demoex won their first seat in the city council of Vallentuna, Sweden, in 2002. The first years of activity in the party have been evaluated by Mitthögskolan University in a paper by Karin Ottesen in 2003. In Demoex, a voter can also vote directly, even if she has delegated her vote to a proxy; the direct vote overrules the proxy vote. It is also possible to change the proxy at any time.

In 2005, in a pilot study in Pakistan, Structural Deep Democracy, SD2 was used for leadership selection in a sustainable agriculture group called Contact Youth. SD2 uses PageRank for the processing of the transitive proxy votes, with the additional constraints of mandating at least two initial proxies per voter, and all voters are proxy candidates. More complex variants can be built on top of SD2, such as adding specialist proxies and direct votes for specific issues, but SD2 as the underlying umbrella system, mandates that generalist proxies should always be used.

Delegated voting is also used in the World Parliament Experiment. In 2012, the Dutch Pirate Party adopted the LiquidFeedback Interactive Democracy software.