Liquid Vote

June 2025 · liquidvote.app

Liquid Vote is a place for a community to make decisions together, using liquid democracy.

Try the demo at liquidvote.app. It's set up as the hackerspace from the movie Hackers, so Zero Cool and Acid Burn are already voting on what to buy next.

What is liquid democracy?

In a direct democracy, everyone votes on everything. That's fair, but nobody has time to understand every question. In a representative democracy, you pick someone to vote for you, and you're stuck with them until the next election.

Liquid democracy sits in between:

• Vote yourself, on the questions you care about.
• Hand your vote to someone you trust: a friend, or someone who knows the subject. They carry your vote along with their own.
• Take your vote back whenever you like.

So power stays with the voters, and the people who know a topic still get heard.

How Liquid Vote works

• Every vote comes with a reason. You vote by writing a comment for or against a proposal. If someone already said what you think, you join their comment instead of writing your own.
• Delegation follows your delegate. Your vote goes the way your delegate's latest vote does, and the totals update as they change their mind.
• Issues close on a date. Each proposal has a vote date. After it, the result stands.
• Everything is recorded. Every vote, comment and delegation goes into a log, so each decision has a full history.
• Many communities, one site. Each community gets its own space and its own address.

How it's built

A Python (FastAPI) backend with a React frontend, hosted on Fly.io.