The problem Tax Weighted Voting solves

National elections today in a developing country like India is based on the principle of one person one vote. This is a fair principle, but it encourages more bad behaviour than good.

Key Problems

1. Short-termism: Politicians are incentivised to focus on short-term gains, rather than long-term benefits.
2. Populism: Politicians are incentivised to make popular decisions, rather than the right decisions.
3. Bribery in Elections: Politicians are incentivised to bribe voters to win elections.
4. Stagnation: Politicians are incentivised to keep the poor poor, so that they can continue to bribe them in future elections.
5. Polling Booth Capture: Politicians are incentivised to capture polling booths to win elections.

Tax weighted voting is a possible solution to these problems. In tax weighted voting, the weight of a voter is determined by the average tax slab they fall in based on their last 3 year's tax returns. This is also a step to help distribute the tax payer inequality in developing countries (3% of the population pays 97% of the income taxes in India and they aren't the ones making the highest income!).

Challenges I ran into

Broadly I was faced with the following challenges:

1. Who will determine the weight of a voter?
   • Using TLSNotary to notarize the tax returns of a voter from the Income Tax Portal.
2. What happens to first-time voters and retired voters? (Do they get a weight of 1? Is that fair?)
   • This is a difficult though exercise. It almost feels like a chicken and egg problem. Do you want to add more factors to over complicate the system? Or do you want to keep it fair?
3. How will the voting be conducted?
   • Onchain using MACI.
4. Will this positively impact the systems we have today?
   • Is the current system the most effecient and is this all and overkill?
   • Will we be shifting corruption to tax calculation bodies and are we solving or moving the problem?
     • With the first promise of a blockchain being solving money, maybe this helps in building infra in the long run.

On a more lower level,

1. TLSNotary has examples of notarising GET APIs but I was working with APIs with other HTTP verbs which was a challenge to figure out.
2. Debugging was a pain as I was not able to pin point failures: API call fail, status code, parser fail, etc.

I got around most of this by reading the tlsn-browser-plugin code, using the plugin in dev mode and console logging errors. (YOLO)

Additional Features

This hackathon was the first time I was implementing this idea. Complete beginner to using both TLSNotary and MACI. I divided the project into a few phases and what I have been able to implement is one part of it, the Income Tax Portal TLSNotary browser plugin's plugin (Confusing naming LOL). Here is a table to give you an overview:

(No table support in markdown :( )

Parts:

1. Gatekeeping voters: Using TLSNotary and Income Tax Portal of India. (Implemented)
2. Voting: Using MACI. (Started but not complete)
3. Bridging: Using the TLSNotary to gatekeep the MACI voting