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Status deregistered
Type 💻 platform
Country 🇦🇺 AU
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Concepts Direct Democracy E Government Representative Democracy

MiVote

MiVote was an Australian civic technology initiative and political party founded by Adam Jacoby. Its core argument was that representative democracy as currently practised is structurally broken: representatives make thousands of decisions over four years based on a single election, party ideology overrides constituent preferences, and citizens are never meaningfully consulted on individual issues. The organisation deregistered around 2019 without achieving its stated goal of electing senators.

The four-destination model

Where most digital democracy platforms ask citizens to vote yes or no on legislation, MiVote framed each issue as a choice between four policy destinations — broad directional positions that citizens could genuinely choose between before legislation was written. The destinations were designed to reflect the real range of considered positions on an issue rather than the binary adversarial framing of parliamentary debate.

For asylum seeker policy, for example, the four destinations were: primarily humanitarian, primarily national security, financially pragmatic, and international diplomacy. Each destination was explained in enough depth that a voter could understand what choosing it would mean in practice.

The rationale: legislation should follow from a known destination, not the other way around. Writing legislation before knowing what outcome citizens want produces policy shaped by whoever drafts the bill rather than by genuine public preference.

The information pipeline

MiVote built a structured process to produce the information presented to voters on each issue:

  1. University research — academic sourcing of data and evidence relevant to the issue
  2. Domain expert working groups — practitioners (public servants, industry specialists, frontline workers) providing ground-level context
  3. Advisory committees — permanent panels of under-represented community voices with a standing seat in every policy conversation: indigenous communities, gender equity, people without internet access, and others
  4. Ethics committee — reviewed all materials before publication to ensure unbiased language and framing; nothing could reach voters without sign-off

The intention was that by the time a voter saw the four destinations and their supporting information, the material had been validated for accuracy and reviewed for ideological tilt. Voters could read a brief summary or cascade down to source documentation.

Platform principles

No ideology. MiVote explicitly rejected left/right framing. The argument was that no single world view has the answer to every challenge, so policy decisions should start from evidence and work toward the best available outcome, not from a fixed ideological position.

No corporate or interest group donations. MiVote's constitution prohibited donations from businesses, unions, or interest groups — individual donors only. By late 2016 the movement had raised close to $1 million from individual contributions.

60% supermajority threshold. A simple majority (51%+1) was considered insufficient. MiVote required 60% agreement on a destination before it became the official position. If fewer than 25% of members voted on an issue, the result went to a run-off process rather than forming policy. Dynamic re-voting was built in: if membership grew by 50% since a vote was taken, the vote had to be re-run.

Mandatory mandate. Elected senators were constitutionally required to vote according to the majority position of MiVote members — no negotiation, no horse-trading. If members had not yet voted on an issue, the senator was required to say so publicly rather than defaulting to an ideological position.

Term limits. Two terms maximum; senators were required to mentor their successors.

2018 goals

At the December 2016 Future Assembly presentation, MiVote set public targets for the 2019 federal election: three senators elected, one million members, and 5,000 volunteers. For context, the combined formal membership of all major Australian parties at the time was approximately 81,000. These goals were not achieved. The Australian party deregistered before the 2019 election.

What came after

The movement and its technology did not end with the Australian party's deregistration. In a 2021 catch-up interview with DOD, founder Adam Jacoby described spinning the in-house voting technology out as a separate company (Horizon State) — a decision he called "the single worst commercial decision I've ever made" — then rebuilding it in-house as MiVote Technologies and relocating to the UK under the government's Entrepreneurs Programme. He also reported that across five or six early Australian votes, the 60% consensus threshold was always reached, which he offers as evidence that multi-choice, well-informed voting can produce consensus even in a polarised environment.

See also