Collective Trust

Each voter simply nominates one or more people; each person you nominate receives a share of your vote. Each vote is transitive; by nominating someone, each person they nominate also receives a slightly larger vote, and so on down the chain. People with the most total votes (directly nominated + transitive) are the elected representatives.

The trustees you nominate directly each receive a share of half of your vote. So if you nominate three people, they will each receive a third of that half vote, i.e. 1/6th of your total vote. The people they nominate will receive their share of a quarter of your vote, and the nominees of those people receive a share of 1/8th of your vote, and so on. In this way, all of these contributions throughout the chain of trust sum to 1 - your complete, single vote.
The formula for the fraction of your vote contributed to any given person is described by the formula:

$$\begin{gather} \text{contribution} = \frac{1}{\bar N 2^M} \\\ \text{where $M$ is the degrees of seperation, and} \\\ \bar N = N_1 N_2 N_3 \ldots N_M \\\ \text{where $N$ is the number of nominees} \\\ \text{each person has nominated} \end{gather}$$

Benefits to this system:

• Voting can be based on direct trust of people you know
• The transitive trust reflects the real communities and social networks people live in
• Candidates are not career politicians. This means any person with the trust of their community can be elected, not just those with the socio-economic means to choose politics as a career.
  • Political service is like jury duty. If you’re elected, you have to serve your term.