The voting challenges in e-cognocracy

Abstract

e-Cognocracy[MP03, MP05, Ker03] is a new democratic system that focuses on the creation and social diffusion of the knowledge related with the scientific resolution of high complexity problems associated with public decision making. Using multicriteria decision making techniques as the methodological aid, the democratic system as a catalyst for the learning that guides the cognitive process distinctive of living beings, and the Internet as a communication support, e-cognocracy resolves some of the limitations of traditional democracy and provides room for greater involvement of the citizenry in their own government. In this sense, e-voting is not limited to the choice of a given political party, but to the extraction of the relevant knowledge. Even though e-voting systems have already been widely studied, there are still some situations not covered yet by classical bibliography, and then it becomes necessary to introduce interesting variations to the main schema. In this paper, we will present one of such occurrences (that associated with e-cognocracy), and will study the modifications needed in the traditional e-voting processes as well as the implications they have.