The Ballot: one unit of money
for every person in the United States.

Money backed by people, not by promises.

Today, most money is created when banks issue loans. More loans mean more money; fewer loans mean recessions. Debt sits at the center of everything.

The Elastic Republic Ballot Market flips this logic. Instead of money being created from debt, it is created from personhood. Every living person is assigned exactly one Ballot, and the total number of Ballots on the ledger equals the number of people in the system.

When the population grows, supply grows. When people leave the system, supply contracts. There is no central bank dial to twist, and no hidden monetary expansion through leverage.

How the Ballot feels in daily life

• You always have a stake. Your Ballot balance represents your share of the monetary base and your share of sovereignty in the system.
• Idle money slowly moves. Unused balances gradually decay through demurrage. That value is routed entirely to equal per-capita universal basic income (UBI) distributions.
• You choose who represents you. You may delegate your Ballot’s influence to someone you trust, forming a “sovereignty graph” that replaces occasional elections with continuous representation.
• Budgets are transparent. Aggregate flows into infrastructure, social programs, and liquidity support can be seen directly on the ledger.

Debt Money	Ballot System
Created when banks issue loans	Created once per verified person
Supply depends on credit cycles	Supply depends on population
Inflation erodes purchasing power	Demurrage wholly funds UBI
Power concentrates with capital	Power flows back through person-based units

Block-by-block reconciliation

The ledger advances in discrete ticks called blocks. At each block, the protocol:

• Applies all pending transactions
• Applies demurrage to idle balances
• Distributes all demurrage proceeds equally per capita as UBI
• Settles obligations and credit relationships
• Recomputes each account’s sovereignty level
• Normalizes balances so that the sum of all Ballots equals the current population

This normalization fixes a problem seen in floating-point money: over time, tiny rounding errors can accumulate until the system no longer exactly matches its monetary rules. Here, deterministic reconciliation and tie-breaking algorithms ensure that the global sum remains exactly correct at every block.

Demurrage instead of inflation

Rather than eroding everyone’s purchasing power through inflation, the Ballot standard uses demurrage — a small, predictable decay on idle balances.

Under the proposed policy, all demurrage proceeds would be distributed equally per capita as universal basic income (UBI). Demurrage would wholly fund that UBI, with no share retained for administration or directed to other public spending.

Primary policy goals

The Ballot standard is not just a technical protocol; it is a public policy proposal. It aims to:

• Replace debt expansion as the foundation of money creation with a population-pegged monetary base.
• Unify economic exchange and democratic representation on a single, auditable ledger.
• Reduce structural inequality by discouraging idle hoarding via demurrage and distributing all proceeds equally per capita as UBI.
• Provide non-discretionary public finance whose rules are encoded in the protocol rather than in ad hoc monetary interventions.

📘 Download Policy Brief (PDF) 🌐 Read Policy Brief (HTML)

Macroeconomic implications

Area	Effect
Public Debt	ERBM provides an underlying monetary protocol for funding purposes. Demurrage is dedicated entirely to UBI; it is not a general government revenue channel.
Banking System	Shifts credit creation away from reserve multiplication toward transparent, on-ledger contractual lending.
Inequality	Weakens advantages of passive capital accumulation; value is redistributed equally per capita as UBI.
Global Trade	Opens the door to population-based settlement units instead of hegemonic currency dominance.

Legislators can implement the Ballot standard incrementally: first as a regulated pilot, then as a recognized sovereign unit, and ultimately as a core pillar of monetary and democratic infrastructure.

The Ballot Standard Monetary Act

The Ballot Standard Monetary Act is the statutory blueprint for implementing the Ballot as a legal standard money unit. It translates the core ideas of the Elastic Republic Ballot Market into enforceable law: how Ballots are issued, how supply is anchored to population, how demurrage is handled, and how institutions interface with the protocol.

The Act is written in conventional legislative style, with findings, definitions, operational provisions, and transition rules designed to let existing systems migrate toward a population-pegged monetary base without disruption.

• Defines the Ballot as a sovereign standard money unit with supply equal to the number of recognized persons.
• Establishes issuance, demurrage, and reconciliation procedures as rule-based, non-discretionary operations.
• Specifies the role of a Public Credit Authority and its limits.
• Provides transition mechanisms from debt-based systems toward Ballot-based settlement.

Read the full draft

The full text of the Ballot Standard Monetary Act is available as a standalone document for policymakers, legal scholars, and institutional reviewers.

📜 Ballot Standard Monetary Act — Full Legislative Draft (PDF) 🌐 Read Full Act (HTML)
For comments or requests for tailored jurisdictional language: mike@elasticrepublic.com.

Monetary definition

Let N be the number of persons recognized by the system. Each person i has a Ballot balance Bᵢ. By design:

Σ Bᵢ (for i = 1…N) = N

In implementation, each balance is stored as a rational:

Bᵢ = aᵢ / D

where D is a global denominator (e.g., 10¹⁸ or a carefully chosen prime) to eliminate floating-point drift.

Block reconciliation

Each block performs a deterministic pipeline:

• Apply valid transactions Tₜ
• Apply demurrage: Bᵢ ← Bᵢ · (1 − λ)
• Distribute all demurrage proceeds equally per capita as UBI
• Settle obligations, debts, and relation-based transfers
• Normalize: rescale Bᵢ so that Σ Bᵢ = N, with deterministic tie-breaking for residual fractions
• Recompute sovereignty levels (SLᵢ) from the delegation graph

Tie-breaking uses a globally agreed ordering (e.g. hash of public key + index) so that all nodes converge on the same result without ambiguity.

Sovereignty graph & SL

Representation is modeled as a directed graph where edges represent voluntary delegation:

i ➜ j (with weight wᵢⱼ)

A representative’s sovereignty level can be expressed as:

SLⱼ = 1 + Σ (wᵢⱼ · f(depth(i, j)))

where f(·) is a depth penalty function that ensures distant chains of delegation do not explode in impact.

SL values feed into protocol decisions (e.g., quorum thresholds, veto capability, or budget prioritization) without replacing basic personhood equality: each person still anchors exactly one Ballot.

System layers

Pilot & research

The Ballot standard is designed to be piloted alongside existing currencies and institutions. Potential launch paths include:

• A sandbox ledger for academic and policy research
• City- or region-level pilots as a complementary currency and governance system
• Integration into humanitarian or basic income experiments where fairness and transparency are crucial

All pilots share a common goal: validate how a population-pegged money unit behaves in the real world — for liquidity, stability, and political legitimacy.

Get involved

This is intended as an open standard, not a closed product. If you want to build, study, or legislate around the Ballot, the next step is to connect.

Contact: mike@elasticrepublic.com
Website: https://elasticrepublic.com