Participation without voting fatigue.
Ethica should not require people to become full-time democrats. The participation premium recognises democratic time, the four-year cooldown spreads benefits across more people, and randomly selected civic service brings a broad cross-section of citizens into oversight of the system itself.
Tax-free under the Ethica proposal through specific legislation. The premium rewards participation — never the content of the vote.
SEK 80,000/month taxable gross salary for time-limited work in citizen and oversight councils.
A primary job-prize winner may choose the service role or SEK 100,000 cash — without having to explain their life situation.
Every eligible participant should have the same first-order inclusion probability in each draw.
In the base scenario, accepting any Ethica premium creates a four-year cooldown from both cash and service premiums. Declining or not responding creates no cooldown.
Geographic balance and equal chance can coexist — but not with arbitrary hard quotas.
For county r: let N_r be the number of participants in the county, N the national participant population and k the number of winners. The county's proportional expectation is q_r = k·N_r/N.
If the system also requires at least m winners from that county in every possible draw, then K_r ≥ m ⇒ E[K_r] ≥ m. Exactly equal individual chance requires E[K_r] = q_r. Therefore the two requirements are mathematically incompatible whenever q_r < m.
However: if q_r ≥ m for every county, a minimum is not automatically a problem. Randomised proportional rounding can then provide geographic balance while preserving exactly equal marginal chance.
The simulator below makes the conflict visible and lets you stress-test the model. The default population is an illustrative demo, not official Swedish electoral statistics.
Change population, prizes and quotas — and see what the mathematics permits.
Outcome by county
Balanced mode shows one integer realisation around each county's proportional target. Forced-quota mode shows how individual probability diverges when the minimum is incompatible with equal chance.
| County | N | Share | Expected q | Realised K | Individual chance | K/q |
|---|
Four-year cooldown · the premium should circulate
This is a long-run spread projection. In production, eligibility is determined person by person from an auditable, privacy-protected register of accepted premiums.
Premium budget · base scenario
The calculation shows the direct base and uses the selected cash-alternative assumption. Pension, insurance, travel, training, systems and audit remain outside this demo, as in the main work's base scenario.
What happens after the winner notification?
Auditable demo result
The configuration and calculation can be exported as JSON for reproducible analysis.
Accepting a premium creates a four-year cooldown — but never changes voting rights.
In the base scenario the same cooldown applies to the SEK 100,000 cash premium, six months of civic service and the cash alternative for a primary service-prize winner. A person who declines or does not respond receives no benefit and therefore enters no cooldown.
hᵢ(t)=1 when the person has accepted no premium in [t−W,t). Eligible participants then have P(i selected)=kₜ/Nₜ; a person still inside the cooldown temporarily has zero prize probability.
W = 4 years is not sacred.
The cooldown may be changed through an action package, but only for future draws. The package must show how, for example, 2, 4 or 6 years affect unique recipients, cost, representation and individual probability.
See how citizen councils operate →The same principle can be repeated for age and gender without making votes worth different amounts.
Country
k places, N participants.
County
Randomised proportional quota.
Age
Same rule conditional on the county's K.
Gender
Same rule again; small cells require privacy protection.
If every rounding step is unbiased, the law of iterated expectations preserves the individual's final marginal probability k/N. Categories balance the selection — they never weight the vote itself.
Mathematics is only one of three proofs.
The rule is fair
The algorithm needs a public specification and machine-testable invariants: seat total, positive probability, correct expectation and equal marginal chance.
The randomness could not be chosen afterwards
Production needs a frozen participant population, cryptographic commitment and public randomness. The local simulator uses only a reproducible demo seed.
The right code ran on the right population
Seed, commitment, versioned code, parameters and outcome proof are published so independent parties can reproduce the draw.
The premium system may know that you participated — never how you voted.
Identity, voting and premium services should be separate trust domains. A winning token is linked back to identity only when payment or a time-limited employment process actually needs to happen.
Constitutional rule
Participation may be rewarded. Opinion may never be rewarded.
An explicit “abstain” on a policy question should also be able to satisfy the participation requirement.
Employment responsibility after acceptance.
Once the winner chooses the job, the premium becomes a real six-month employment. A separate model then governs illness, voluntary resignation, misconduct, security incidents and fraud.
See how the parts connect in one lifecycle.
Run a fictional participant from secret ballot and participation token through premium, 72-hour choice and four-year cooldown into a six-month citizen council and verifiable handover.