Technical Paper

The Problem

You have 50,000 people and a hard question. How should the city spend its infrastructure budget? You could run a poll—but polls only let people choose between options someone else picked. You could hold a town hall—but 50 people show up and the loudest three do all the talking. You could survey everyone—but you get 50,000 disconnected opinions with no deliberation.

What you actually want is for all 50,000 people to discuss the question in small enough groups that everyone gets heard, and for the best ideas to rise to the top through repeated evaluation by different groups of people. That's what Unity Chant does.

The Core Mechanism

Everyone submits one idea. The ideas are shuffled and dealt into small groups of 5 called cells—5 ideas per cell, 5 voters per cell. Each cell votes. One idea advances. The other four do not.

The top ideas from every cell are collected and dealt into new cells of 5. Now each idea faces top ideas from other cells—ideas that already survived one round of scrutiny. New voters evaluate them. One advances. Four do not.

This repeats. Each round cuts the field by 5x, and each round the competition gets harder—every surviving idea has beaten more opponents, evaluated by more people. After enough rounds, one idea remains—the Priority. Not the most popular idea. The most robust one.

Your City of 50,000

50,000 residents. Each submits one idea. Here is how 50,000 ideas become one Priority.

Every round, surviving ideas are grouped into batches of 5. All 50,000 residents vote every round—they're distributed across batches, split into cells of 5 within each batch. Every cell in a batch votes on the same 5 ideas. Votes are summed across all cells in the batch. One idea advances per batch. The rest do not.

As the field narrows, the number of batches shrinks—but the number of voters per batch grows. Each surviving idea faces more scrutiny, not less:

In Round 1, each idea is seen by 5 people. By Round 5, each surviving idea is evaluated by over 3,000. In the final, all 50,000 residents vote on the same 5 ideas and every vote counts toward the result.

After Round 6, only 3 ideas remain. The 2 strongest non-advancing ideas from Round 6 are brought back to fill the field to 5. Then all 50,000 residents vote on the same 5 finalists. The idea with the most total support becomes the Priority.

Seven rounds. 50,000 people. Every person participated every round. Every idea got a fair hearing. The priority didn't just get the most clicks—it convinced the most people in the most conversations.

Scale

Each round reduces ideas by 5x. This means scale grows logarithmically—doubling the number of participants adds roughly one round. The process stays exactly the same at any size. Only the number of rounds changes.

Your city of 50,000? Seven rounds. Not seven months—seven rounds of voting, each taking as long as you give people to think. Rounds happen in parallel across all cells, so the calendar time is measured in days, not the number of participants.

A million people reaching genuine consensus—not a slim majority, but an answer stress-tested in thousands of independent small-group conversations—in nine rounds.

How Voting Works

Voters don't just pick one idea. Each person gets 10 points to distribute across the ideas in their cell, however they want. All 10 must be spent.

Love one idea? Give it 8 points and toss 2 to a runner-up. See two strong options? Split 5 and 5. This lets people express how much they support each idea, not just which one they'd pick if forced.

When voting closes, points are summed per idea across all voters in the cell. Highest total advances. The rest do not.

If ideas tie, all tied ideas advance. If a cell has only one voter, an idea needs at least 4 points to advance—preventing a single person from pushing a throwaway pick.

The Final

When 5 or fewer ideas remain, the process enters its final round. This works differently from earlier rounds:

• Same ideas, all voters. Every cell receives the same set of finalists. All active participants vote.
• Votes counted across cells. Points are summed across every cell—not per cell. The idea with the highest total across all voters wins.

This is important. In earlier rounds, each cell picks its own top idea independently. In the final, the entire population determines the outcome together.

If fewer than 5 ideas reach the final, the strongest non-advancing ideas from the previous round are brought back to fill the field to 5. Strong runners-up get a second chance—the final always has real competition.

Running It Online

Share a link. People arrive at their own pace. The system handles everything automatically:

• Cells form as ideas arrive. Every 5th idea submitted triggers a new cell. No waiting for a deadline.
• Voters join as they arrive. People enter available cells on a first-come basis. No pre-registration required.
• Rounds advance automatically. As soon as 5 advancing ideas accumulate at any round, they form a new cell at the next round. A Round 2 cell can be voting while Round 1 cells are still forming.

The facilitator closes submissions when ready. The process runs itself to completion.

Running an Event

For in-person groups, the facilitator controls the pace:

• Collect all ideas first, then start voting
• All cells at a round finish before the next round begins
• Everyone is reassigned to new cells each round—every person participates in every round

Why It Can't Be Gamed

Groups are random. You don't know who you'll be with. An idea has to win in every round to survive—not once, but in cell after cell, evaluated by different people each time. Coordinating enough voters to control the outcome would require controlling a majority in every cell at every round across the entire process.

Sybil resistance

A common attack on voting systems is creating fake accounts to stuff the ballot. In a traditional poll, 100 fake accounts means 100 extra votes—a linear advantage.

In Unity Chant, fake accounts are distributed randomly across cells. To guarantee an outcome in a single cell, you need 3 of the 5 voters. But your idea has to win in every round. In a 50,000-person deliberation with 7 rounds, an attacker would need to control a majority in the right cells at every tier—an exponentially growing number of accounts for diminishing influence. 100 fake voters in a pool of 50,000 have a negligible chance of landing together in the same cells round after round.

The structure makes Sybil attacks expensive. The more rounds there are, the harder it gets. The more participants there are, the more diluted any coordinated block becomes. Scale is the defense.

Additional safeguards

• You are never placed in a cell with your own idea
• Cells with zero votes keep waiting—no ideas are removed without human input
• A grace period after the last vote lets others reconsider before a cell finalizes

Good Arguments Travel

When someone writes a comment that others find helpful, it spreads. At 3 upvotes, a comment reaches neighboring cells. When an idea advances to the next round, its most upvoted comment is promoted with it.

A voter in Round 4 can see the argument that changed minds back in Round 1. Good reasoning travels with the ideas it supports—it doesn't stay trapped in one conversation.

Reference