In-depth room · about 12 minutes
How voting works, from start to finish
The main page introduced the formula and one vote. Here is the full journey: who raises an issue, where options come from, who costs them, how your voting weight is calculated, why voting happens in stages, when it ends, who implements the decision and why participation can earn you income for years. A separate rule for local matters explains who decides about someone else’s street and who can only advise.
Prerequisites
Three things that must exist before anyone votes
Your IPI profile
Knowledge percentages in each field, practically verified skills and an ethics level from 1.00 to 0.00. Without these, the system has nothing with which to weight a vote.
See how an IPI is built →Tree of Knowledge
The portal’s topic channels mirror the Tree’s branches. A wastewater treatment issue reaches people with relevant expertise, not everyone at once.
Enter the Tree of Knowledge room →Transparent finances
The balances of your street, neighbourhood, city, region and country—always visible, not available only on request. Without this, voting on spending is a choice made in the dark.
See the Infornation Portal →The complete journey
Seventeen steps from idea to payment
Select each step or use the arrows. This is the complete lifecycle of one issue, with nothing skipped.
The core
The formula, using your own profile
This is not a textbook example. The calculator uses the same profile you built on the main page. Adjust the sliders to see how your influence changes in this particular decision.
Your profile in the fields relevant to this issue
Your profile stays in this browser and survives a refresh. It is not sent anywhere.
Two features do the work. Squaring knowledge makes an expert’s influence several times greater, not just slightly greater: 90% gives 8,100; 30% gives 900. Ethics multiplies the entire result, reducing influence across every issue at once.
Try it yourself
One issue, three stages, with your vote included
Lublin’s wastewater treatment plant is 34 years old. See why winning one stage is not a final solution, and what happens when no option has a decisive lead. Vote, let others vote and change your mind along the way.
A real vote of this scale lasts three months. Here it is compressed into seconds so you can follow the entire process.
The first four questions
What people ask before they are convinced
Can people see how someone voted?
In the Judicial Portal, anonymity works both ways. You judge under a judicial identifier: you do not see whom you are judging, and they do not see you. Anyone may choose to reveal their identity. No one is required to, but you may take named responsibility for your judgement.
What if the experts do not show up?
That question assumes voting is a favour. In Infocracy, it is work. Contributing to a decision that is adopted and produces real value creates a micropayment stream. Expert contributions increase your share in the benefits. The proposal relies on the same incentive that attracts people to well-paid work.
“Expert” does not mean a media commentator. It means someone whose verified knowledge and skills genuinely match the issue.
Can I change my mind?
Until the stage ends, yes. You may move your vote or withdraw it. Your understanding evolves: hearing someone with deeper knowledge can change what you believed days ago. That is the purpose of political media here—not winning campaigns, but persuading people to change their votes while a decision remains open.
Who checks the cost estimates?
No single authority. Anyone may prepare an estimate, often without an upfront fee in exchange for micropayments generated by its use. Every estimate is public. Once several exist, specialists can identify and improve the strongest. Payments flow through the roots, from the original estimate to each improvement. Understating costs does not pay, because identifying an understatement is rewarded too.
The mechanism is the same as for an Infocratic Patent, applied to numbers. A cost estimate is another fruit on the Tree.
The most common misunderstanding
Winning a stage is not the same as solving the issue
People usually imagine one ballot listing projects, with the largest vote total winning. This works differently, to address the familiar problem of similar options splitting their supporters’ votes.
A stage chooses a direction, not every detail
A winning option means specialists consider it the best of those available. It does not mean its precise form is settled. That is decided at the next level.
Thirty per cent is the decisive-lead threshold
If one option has a 30% lead, the result is treated as clear and the process moves to the next level of detail. Without that lead, the decision needs further resolution.
Why this matters. In conventional elections, two similar good ideas may split their supporters and lose to a weaker alternative. Staged voting aims to prevent this: a direction wins first, then its variants are compared.
A separate rule
For local matters, the community whose money it is decides
The process above covers shared matters such as energy, medicines or a national road. But many decisions are local: a park bench, community centre or pedestrian crossing. These need an additional rule so a street is not governed by people who have never seen it.
The rule in one sentence: knowledge has no borders; collective choice does. “What is true?” and “What do we want?” are different questions. Anyone with expertise can answer the first, even from a thousand kilometres away. No one can answer the second on your behalf.
A circle is a shared budget, not a line on a map
A street receives part of the neighbourhood budget and decides how to spend it. Neighbourhoods receive city funds; cities receive regional funds. A circle may be a street, municipality, region, country or eventually a continent. Everyone belongs somewhere, and that membership determines where they have a deciding vote.
No one calculates “who is affected”
Such a calculation would itself create authority and invite a dispute in every case. Membership and joining dates are public, so eight sudden arrivals before a major vote would be visible. The proposal relies on transparency rather than a ban.
The rest of the world advises; it does not decide
Non-members may suggest options, raise warnings, contribute missing knowledge and cast visible advisory votes. A lack of local expertise never enlarges the deciding electorate: it brings in knowledge, not additional deciding votes.
Advisory votes are shown as shares
Never as headcounts. “Three million people disagree” is a crowd at the fence, not advice; “61% of knowledgeable respondents disagree” is information. Results are separated into nearby residents, subject specialists and everyone else, because a neighbouring street’s view differs from one across the country.
Disagreement triggers nothing automatically. Experts often choose differently from residents. That is normal, not an alarm. If disagreement could overturn the decision, expertise would acquire a hidden veto, and locals would decide only when specialists agreed. The result is information to consider, not a ruling.
The local circle decides preferences, not facts
There is a legitimate concern behind the word “neighbours”. People living next door can be in conflict, and no one should need a hostile neighbour’s permission to build a home on their own land.
The local circle has no such authority, for two reasons. First, the issue has no personal name: the question is “may this street have a workshop without smoke or heavy deliveries?”, not “do we permit this person?”. Applicants use an identifier, as in the Judicial Portal. The rule applies equally to everyone in the same circumstances, including those who voted against it. A spiteful vote therefore constrains the voter too.
Second, and more importantly: the local circle decides only what people want in their own area. It does not decide facts. Whether a fire engine can reach a building, a roof can carry snow or a furnace pollutes the air are questions for people with relevant expertise, wherever they live. Living next door does not confer fire-safety expertise.
An honest limitation: anonymity can work among two hundred people; among eight households, everyone may know whose plot is involved. No technical solution removes that. It is an acknowledged gap, not a hidden one.
Sometimes votes count equally—and that is not a loophole
In a circle of dozens or hundreds, knowledge weighting can fail mathematically. One highly scored person and two hundred unassessed people would mean one decision-maker and two hundred spectators. The formula needs a sufficiently large group to behave sensibly.
The second reason is more important. Choosing where a bench goes is not necessarily a knowledge question. Weighting knowledge where there is no expertise to measure disguises preference as expertise—and weakens the case for weighting where it genuinely matters.
The criterion
Does the issue turn on knowledge or preference? “What do we want?” uses equal votes: no one knows your wishes better than you do. “How do we do it?” uses knowledge weighting, because someone may genuinely know more.
Who sets the mode
The next circle up. A neighbourhood might classify reversible street decisions costing under $5,000 as equal-vote matters. The street cannot set this for itself, or it might disable weighting whenever its only specialist gives an unwelcome answer.
Always in advance
For an entire category of decisions, never an individual proposal. Choosing the mode after seeing the options would let people select whichever method favours their outcome.
The ladder: major decisions cannot be settled in a small room
A proposal costing more than a circle’s shared budget automatically moves up a level. No discretionary decision is needed: it simply does not fit. This provides a defence against collusion: decision-making power is limited by the shared budget, and that budget by the number of people. Twelve residents decide only over resources allocated to twelve residents.
But cost does not measure significance. A cheap stream embankment could flood meadows two villages away. That is where an objectioncomes in: a larger circle may overturn a smaller circle’s decision. Unrestricted, this would consume local autonomy, because the larger group could always win by sheer numbers. Four limits therefore apply.
A specific reason, not merely greater numbers
The objection must identify a violated right, a higher-circle rule or an effect beyond the circle. Mere dislike is insufficient. A stated reason can be checked like any factual claim.
A higher threshold than an ordinary decision
Overturning someone else’s decision about their money must be harder than making your own. The intention is to address serious harm, not mere differences in taste.
It cancels; it does not replace
The larger circle may revoke the decision, but cannot substitute its own. The smaller circle chooses again within the stated limits. Substitution would effectively take its money away.
Public and attributable
Overturning another group’s decision exercises power. Anonymous power would reopen the gap this system seeks to close elsewhere. Unsuccessful objections also remain on record.
And a fifth safeguard: a public count of overturned decisions. Objections work while they remain exceptional. If they became routine, smaller circles’ budgets would be theirs in name only, even though each individual intervention might sound reasonable. Two reversals per hundred decisions describe genuine local authority. Forty describe a street that merely makes suggestions.
You can explore this mechanism in the Administration module: attributed proposals, equal-vote and knowledge-weighted modes, observers’ views and a cost slider that moves the issue up the ladder of circles.
What is deliberately left open
This is not finished legislation. It is a starting point.
Some details remain unsettled by design: the precise decisive-lead threshold, stage duration and share of value returned to voters are parameters, not dogmas. The people concerned set them and revise them when results disappoint.
The entire system is intended as continuous improvement. The mechanism that improves estimates and patents must also improve its own rules. A system unable to revise itself would become exactly what it was created to challenge.
Do not ask whether we can afford to change the system. Ask whether we can afford to keep one that fails us every day.
This room connects to
Where to go next
where your voting weight comes from
Room 02Tree of Knowledgewhere topic channels and fields come from
05Judicial Portalvoting on a person’s fate works differently
06Political mediawhere people persuade others to change their votes
07Informatiumwhere micropayments for useful contributions come from
10Honeybee swarmweighted dances and quorums, millions of years before us
The whole pictureAn ordinary daythe same vote at 18:40, reflected in your daily account
The whole pictureThree systemswho decides the same issue under capitalism and communism
GlossaryAll conceptsone-sentence definitions, a dependency map and a quiz
Sources for this room: the article “Your vote weighs exactly as much as you know”, “Electoral Portal: Decision-Making Center of the Infocratic World”, chapter 8 of “The New Just City”, and the author’s clarifications on staged voting, changing votes, expert remuneration and transparent estimates.