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M. Scholz-Wäckerle, G. Hanappi, B. Rengs:
"Advanced Democracy Design: Enhanced technological possibilities enable sophisticated democracy";
Talk: IADIS International Conference e-Society 2005, Qawra, Malta; 06-27-2005 - 06-30-2005; in: "Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference e-Society 2005 (es2005)", (2005), ISBN: 972-8939-03-5; 524 - 526.

Early forms of democracy were bound to use simple forms of voting mechanisms. Indeed the vision of radical democracy - often assumed to be summarized by a simple majority rule applied to a `one man, one vote´ counting procedure - still implicitly works with a hypothesis of small populations of well-informed voters that decide about well-defined alternatives concerning everyone in a similar manner. With e-democracy at our doorsteps all that has profoundly changed: Populations of voters are approaching global dimensions, information-disinformation power has largely substituted direct coercive power, and the diversity of concerns (e.g. spatial) makes clever design of decision power mandatory. Of course, many of these difficulties could probably be taken care of, at least partially, by formal mechanism design techniques and technological advances in voting mechanisms. This paper explores this issue along four questions: - Which weights should be given to voters due to the fact that they are more or less concerned by the decision to be taken? - Which weights should be given to voters due to their different expertise with respect to the question to be decided? - How and for which items should veto-rights be implemented? - Which role should iterative voting, i.e. learning, play? In particular, the paper will try to clarify the interdependence between possible answers to these questions and technological capabilities of current e-voting technology.