How it works
The rules are deliberately thin.- Open ballot access. There are no signatures to gather and no filing fees; registering a party takes a verified account, and the party is on the ballot from that moment. An automated review — a check for spam and abuse, not for politics — decides only what is shown by default: a flagged party is left out of the list a voter sees first, and any voter who chooses to show all parties can still find it and vote for it. Its leader is told where it stands.
- A weekly cycle. Elections currently run weekly, and each one shows its own opening and closing times. The schedule can still change while we refine the system, so trust the dates on the election itself.
- One vote per person. Voting takes a signed-in account that has passed a short face check. A vote shows a political opinion, so each one also asks for your consent to count it. You get one vote in each election, and it is final once cast.
- Results at the close. No standings are shown while an election is open. When it closes, each party’s votes and seats are published.
From votes to seats
Each test election is counted the way a parliament is elected: into 2,025 seats. When voting closes, the seats are divided among the parties by their share of the vote, using the Sainte-Laguë method, which favors neither large nor small parties. A threshold of one seat. A party needs at least 1 vote in every 2,025 cast — about 0.05% of the vote — to win a seat. Many national parliaments set the line much higher, often at 5%; here it is one hundred times lower, so small and new movements can still win representation. When two parties have an equal claim to the last seat, it is decided by a draw that anyone can re-run from the published result — never by which party is bigger.Why 2,025 seats
The number comes from the cube root law, an observation by the political scientist Rein Taagepera: the size of a national assembly tends to be close to the cube root of the population it represents. Countries of very different sizes fit it remarkably well. Applied to the whole world: the United Nations projects the world’s population at 8,300,678,395 on July 1, 2026 (World Population Prospects 2024). Its cube root is 2,024.7 — so 2,025 seats. The number stays the same from one election to the next, so every party knows it before the vote. It may be recalculated when the United Nations publishes a new projection, always announced before the election it first applies to. It may also change if a better method is agreed, or if a world parliament decides to change it.How the count has changed
From Test election 33, results are counted into seats. Earlier elections published each party’s share of the vote; seats make each result read as the assembly it would elect, and put the counting method a binding election needs under real load every week.
Earlier results stand as they were published. They were not recounted into seats.
Real incentives
The political outcome of a test election is not binding. The funding is real: the seats a party wins also set its share of that election’s reward pool of world drachma. Party subsidies has the formula and how it is paid out.The path to binding governance
Test elections belong to the first phase of the World Republic’s governance roadmap. The phases, and what has to be true before each transition, are set out in the organization overview.Next steps
Cast your vote
Vote in an open election
Register a party
Put a new party on the ballot