---
authors:
  - Brian Khuu
  - Claude
ai_assist: drafted
categories:
  - Podcast
  - Democracy Innovations
date: 2020-02-13
summary: "Ben Ballingall of Flux Party explains Issue-Based Direct Democracy — how it differs from citizen juries, why liquid democracy alone isn't enough, and what it would take to get a Flux MP into parliament."
tags:
  - Podcast
  - Flux Party
  - Issue-Based Direct Democracy
  - Liquid Democracy
  - Direct Democracy
---

# Podcast: Talk with Ben Ballingall about Flux Party and Issue-Based Direct Democracy

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Ben Ballingall is a representative of Flux Party's Victorian branch. This conversation with Brian Khuu was recorded on 11 February 2020, a few weeks after DOD's [2020 Primer](2022-02-24-podcast.md) and a few days after a chance encounter at Federation Square with a British expat who had left the UK over Brexit — which became the opening frame for the whole discussion.

A [bonus warm-up recording](2020-02-29-podcast.md) covers additional ground on how Flux itself operates as a party.

## Brexit as the opening frame

The conversation starts from a concrete failure case: the Brexit referendum. Brian and Ben had just spoken with Owen, a British citizen who described leaving the UK after the result. What struck Ben wasn't that the public got it wrong — it was the design of the question. Who wrote it? Why did it take two years to implement? After the vote, the biggest Google search in the UK was *"what is the EU?"* That, Ben argues, is not a failure of the people — it's a failure of the instrument.

> "Is it a true representation of democracy when the people who voted didn't have a clue or didn't even really know what they were voting on?"
> — Ben Ballingall

## What is Issue-Based Direct Democracy?

IBDD combines three elements that each address a separate problem with simple majority voting:

**1. Direct democracy** — citizens vote yes or no on individual issues, not just on parties at election time.

**2. Liquid democracy** — if you don't feel informed enough on a particular issue, you can delegate your vote to someone you trust on that topic. You're not handing them a blank cheque: you can revoke it the moment they act against your interests. Ben flags the weakness in pure liquid democracy (the "hubris" problem — people sticking with one delegate past their useful life) but argues the revocability mechanism keeps it honest.

**3. Issue-based vote sharing** — if none of the options on a given vote are acceptable to you, you can abstain and bank that vote's energy toward an issue you *do* care about. This rewards specialisation and prevents people from being forced into positions they don't hold.

Ben's cable-TV analogy is useful: right now, voting for a party is like being forced to buy a bundle — you get the sports package, but you also get the channels you never wanted. IBDD lets you subscribe only to the sports package and put the savings toward something you care about more.

This conversation is the accessible, human-scale version of IBDD. The deeper theoretical foundation — Flux founders Max Kaye and Nathan Spataro's argument from *selectorate theory* (why corruption is structural, not personal), Popperian *fallibilism* (democracy should be designed to eliminate bad policy, not to enact an authority's will), and the critique of *static majoritarianism* — is laid out on the [Flux Party page in the Democracy Landscape](../../organisations/flux-party.md), along with the full mechanics of the political-capital token economy.

## IBDD vs citizen juries

Brian asks directly: DOD had [Nicholas Gruen present on citizen juries in 2017](2017-08-21-podcast.md) — Gruen's goal was "the well-considered opinion of the population." Why didn't Flux go that route?

Ben's answer is that citizen juries and IBDD diagnose the same problem (poor representation) but make different trade-offs. Juries bring in ordinary people with no skin in the game — which is good for impartiality — but they don't reward people who actually know the subject, and a juror who does excellent work may never be called again. IBDD, by contrast, allows specialists to accumulate political weight in their domain over time.

> "We want masters at everything delivering results confirmed by the people, rather than jacks of all trades."
> — Ben Ballingall

## Corruption resistance

A recurring DOD concern is whether any democratic innovation is resistant to well-funded interest groups. Ben's answer is the blockchain ledger: every vote is publicly visible (anonymised to protect individuals, but verifiable as one-person-one-vote). A Flux MP is committed to one rule — vote how the app says. The moment they deviate, everyone knows immediately. This means money can't buy a quiet backroom vote; it can only buy a public information campaign, which then has to compete with counter-information. Lying becomes expensive.

> "You can't destroy money wanting to affect politics, but you can make a system where it's stupidly expensive to try and lie."
> — Ben Ballingall

## Electoral path

At the time of recording (early 2020), Ben estimated Flux needed around 4% in a federal Senate race to get a seat. More promisingly, WA state election law gave them a realistic shot at a seat with 2–3%, with strong support from micro-party preference flows. The goal at that stage was to get one MP into parliament, prove the model, and release an app allowing any citizen to mirror parliament votes and push results to their local MP.

- Flux Party: [voteflux.org](https://voteflux.org)
- [Flux Party on the DOD Democracy Landscape](../../organisations/flux-party.md)

## See also

- [Talk with Ben Ballingall — bonus content](2020-02-29-podcast.md)
- [Citizens' Democracy: Nicholas Gruen on citizen juries (2017)](2017-08-21-podcast.md)
- [DOD 2020 Primer](2022-02-24-podcast.md)
