Democracy Infrastructure:
Aspiring To Achieve Immunity From Capture
The Citizens Internet Portal (CIP) is a proposed open-source platform for voting, budgeting and oversight, designed so that corrupting it would cost far more than it could pay back.
Illustration only. Click any node to compromise it and see why no single one matters.
Why reform keeps failing.
Concentrated power attracts corruption. Spreading power out helps, until corruptors target the spreading mechanisms themselves.
The paper calls this goal structural incorruptibility. It reviews why ethics rules, transparency and prosecution fail inside a captured system, and points to post-Citizens United spending growth as the case study: political spending rose from $3.1 billion in the 2008 cycle to $14.4 billion in 2020.
How CIP is designed to work.
CIP combines a few well-understood building blocks. Pick one to see what the paper proposes, then try a simplified version.
This is a starting point, not a closed list. New voting and deliberation systems, such as approval voting or new ways to structure debate, can be proposed, prototyped and added as the community builds. Suggest one in Discussions.
Want a bigger model? Try the mild-majority, intense-minority simulator, which compares one-person-one-vote with quadratic voting.
A second model tests liquid delegation with caps and cycles. A third shows ranked-choice counting and tie-breaks. A fourth tests how colluding node operators or guardians could attack the ledger or abuse the halt power.
The Phase 3 prototype has two pages, on test data only. Try the proposal flow: file a test proposal, sign it, comment and amend it, and watch each step go into a tamper-evident log. Then check the log in the log viewer.
The demos are simplified illustrations of the proposed designs, not working election software.
The Judicial Guard.
U.S. currency integrity is protected by the Secret Service. The paper proposes a similar protective enforcement agency for democratic participation.
Many, not few
500 to 2,000+ independent guardians instead of a council that could be bought. Nobody can order a guardian to end an investigation.
Many paths to prosecution
Federal, state and local prosecutors, special prosecutors, citizen grand juries and more. One honest prosecutor is enough to pursue a case.
Public scorecard
Every criminal case referral and declination is published on CIP. A high decline rate triggers automatic escalation.
One layer of a larger system.
CIP is the democratic layer of the Compassionism Framework, a set of connected architectures. Here is each system in brief, then how CIP connects to it.
CCO: Creative Currency Octaves
A dual-currency system. Citizens can opt in to receive monthly-expiring Basic Units for essentials like food, housing and utilities, with unlimited earning potential through a conversion system run by creative collectives.
PTF: Public Trust Foundations
Not-for-profit and community-benefit organizations that provide foundational goods and services such as groceries, utilities and restaurants. Private businesses can also operate within the system's boundaries. They accept Basic Units for goods and services according to the local charter and oversight agencies.
PTH: Public Trust Housing
Community-owned housing held in public trust. Residents govern it collectively and hold individual equity accounts that grow with participation.
SZH: Social Zone Harmonization
A way to organize communities around shared values and lifestyles, such as family-safe zones or artist districts, while keeping local autonomy.
Where CIP fits in
Choose a system to see how CIP connects to it.
See the Better To Best Research Hub for additional details.
The proposed path.
Foundation and pilot (years 1 to 3)
Legal framework, first infrastructure, and pilots in 3 to 5 cities with advisory votes.
Expansion (years 4 to 7)
More cities and states, moving from advisory to binding referenda.
National implementation (years 8 to 15)
Federal authorization and integration with the legislative process.
Maturation (years 16 to 25)
Continuous improvement and international adoption.
Timelines and targets come from the paper and are proposals, not commitments. Because CIP can be built and tested as an open-source project, these timelines could be accelerated well beyond what the institutional phases assume.
Build it with us.
The code, the specs and the open questions all live in one repository. You don't need to be a developer: designers, security reviewers, writers, legal thinkers and civic organizers all have a place.
Go deeper.
The CIP paper
Full argument, architecture and integration analysis.
Full PDF with Appendix A
Judicial Guard detailed specifications.
Research Hub
All five architectures and 17+ open-access papers.
Beyond Reform (Medium)
An 8-minute plain-language tour of the paper. Its closing line: "This isn't utopian fantasy — it's engineering."
Compassionism Simulation
An interactive agent-based model of the wider framework CIP belongs to.
Research wiki
Glossary, FAQ and implementation guides for every architecture.
X-Cents
A companion proposal that could use CIP as its ledger.
Paper details: keywords, classification and more
- Authors
- Duke Johnson (independent researcher) and Claude (Anthropic), December 29, 2025
- Keywords
- digital democracy, anti-corruption infrastructure, distributed governance, Citizens Internet Portal, blockchain voting, inverse elite, structural incorruptibility, Judicial Guard
- JEL classification
- D72, D73, H11, K42, O33
- Key design parameters
- Node caps: 10% per location, 5% per funder. Delegation cap: 1% of the population per delegate. Judicial Guard: 500 to 2,000+ guardians; DOJ decline rate above 40% over 12 months triggers escalation.
- Expected cost of corruption
- Traditional systems:
0.15 × $1M × 0.05 = $7,500
CIP-enhanced:0.75 × $5M × 0.62 = $2.325M - Network value
V = k₁n² + k₂n·log(n)with k₁ = 0.3 and k₂ = 0.7- Funding
- No external funding. Conducted independently.
- Conflict of interest
- The authors declare no financial conflicts of interest.
- License
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
- Cite as
- Johnson, D., & Claude (Anthropic). (2025). Citizens Internet Portal: Structural incorruptibility through distributed democratic architecture. Better To Best Research Hub. Licensed CC BY 4.0, so please share and adapt with attribution.