Civic Voice

This document establishes nothing. It creates no rights and imposes no duties, confers no powers and limits none, permits nothing and forbids nothing. No provision of any other document of the corpus rests on it or can rest on it.

It explains and it supposes. The other documents of the corpus describe what is, or establish what ought to be. This one also speaks of what does not yet exist: of rungs, not one of which has been climbed, and of possibilities, not one of which is promised. Section 18 lists nine ways in which this may fail to come about, and section 19 states what has been built and what does not yet exist.

Binding force belongs to the Declaration and the Charter. Where this document diverges from them, they prevail, and the divergence is removed by correcting this document. The interpretation of this document can neither lower a guarantee to any person nor extend the powers of the people or of any of its institutions.

It may be rewritten or withdrawn in its entirety, and nothing will change as a result. The Declaration, the Charter, the registry, the order of voting and the belonging of people to one another will remain the same. A text that predicts must carry nothing that would collapse along with the failed prediction. Proposals to it are accepted on the same footing as proposals to any other document (the Founding Period).

It is commonly said that people have no way of being heard. That is inaccurate, and the inaccuracy gets in the way of seeing the real problem. There are more ways to pass an opinion upwards today than ever before: petitions, letters to representatives, public hearings, procedures for public comment on draft acts, social networks, weekly polls. There is a surplus of channels. What is missing is the proof: how many signatures were put there by living people, who exactly was asked in the poll, whether two million comments came from people at all.

Note how this objection is built. It does not argue on the merits: it does not say "you are wrong", it says "it is not known whether you exist". And that is enough to make no reply without losing face: the addressee has not rejected the opinion of people, they have doubted the proof, and doubt looks like caution rather than contempt.

That is why a civic voice can be ignored. Not because those in power are evil, but because the count is broken. In the mandatory public comment procedure conducted by the US Federal Communications Commission in 2017, out of more than twenty-two million comments almost eighteen million turned out to be fake - as established by the investigation of the New York State Attorney General published on 6 May 2021, and both sides of the dispute were faking. It was not the fakes that lost their value: all twenty-two million lost it, the genuine ones included, and any agency in any country gained a legitimate ground for not believing public input at all.

It will get worse from here, and not through anyone's ill will: plausible human text in any quantity has become cheap, and telling it from what a person wrote, by the text itself, will soon be impossible. What will remain distinguishable is not the text but its source: whether a single living person, speaking of their own will, is confirmed behind the utterance. That is exactly what the Earthlings people is able to do.

There are five faults, they are of different natures, and our tool does not strike at all of them.

Aggregation. Elections compress the variety of a person's views into a single choice once every few years, and the position of society on a separate question has no representation at all. The horizon. Decisions whose consequences arrive in thirty years are taken by people whose horizon is the next election; those who do not yet vote and those not yet born have representation in no political system in the world. Territory. Climate, the taxation of transnational profit, rules for artificial intelligence, pandemics, the ocean and the atmosphere are not decided within the borders of one country, and coordination between states stalls: no one is re-elected for international agreement. The collapse of trust in input. Genuine public input has become indistinguishable from the manufactured kind, and it is the genuine that loses its value. The asymmetry of organization. Twenty companies with a hundred million each at stake find it easy to organize; twenty million citizens with a hundred dollars each at stake find it impossible, and a concentrated interest beats a dispersed one almost always, regardless of who is right and regardless of the form of government (Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action, 1965).

From this comes the conclusion on which the rest rests: a dispersed majority loses not because it is small or because it is wrong, but because gathering is expensive for it. Anything that makes gathering radically cheaper changes the outcome. The five faults, the Federal Communications Commission case and Olson's analysis are in the annex Why the Count Is Broken.

Not one of the five faults was created by ill intent. Representation was invented when there was no other way: millions of people could not physically discuss common matters without intermediaries, and there was no way of counting their votes honestly. That worked, and achieved a great deal. One thing it did not do: it gave people no way of expressing a common will themselves.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says in Article 21 that the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, in Article 25, enshrines the right of every citizen to take part in the conduct of public affairs; the UN Charter opens with the words "We the peoples of the United Nations". The right is recognized, and there is no procedure by which it would be exercised directly - and a recognized right that no one is there to assert remains a norm without application. We do not hold that anyone is to blame. We hold that the reason why it could not be done has disappeared.

We are not building one more way of speaking out. We are building a measuring instrument.

The difference is fundamental. A channel delivers a message; there are dozens of them today, and one more will change nothing. An instrument establishes a fact: so many confirmed unique people gave such and such an answer to such and such a question, and this can be rechecked.

Anyone can be heard today. No one can be counted.

And at once the caveat without which this word is dangerous. The instrument is a procedure, not human beings. It is not a person who is measured: every person answers or does not answer, of their own will, and the answer belongs to them. What we call the instrument is the order by which answers are collected and verified - the question, the deadline, the registry, the signature, the publication. The people is an instrument for no one, itself included: an instrument is what it builds, not what it is. Anything else would contradict Article 3 of the Declaration, where the dignity of every person is called inviolable, and every person is called not a means.

The task of "making it impossible not to notice us" has been solved in the world many times. The five properties below follow from an examination of cases of influence without powers - indices and ratings, the discontinued Doing Business ranking, the IPCC, internet standards, the Irish citizens' assemblies, the Russell Tribunal; the examination is in the annex Influence Without Powers. A tool that has all five properties is expensive to ignore; a tool missing even one is ignored for free.

First. It produces what is needed and what is not obtainable anywhere else. Not an "important opinion" but data or a procedure whose absence gets in the way of someone's work.

Second. The procedure is visible in full. Not only the result but how it was obtained: who asked, how the question read, who could answer, how many answered, how to check the count. There is nothing to contest when everything is visible.

Third. It works regularly and comparably. A single measurement is news; an annual measurement of the same question by the same method is a series, and a series shows movement, and movement has to be reckoned with.

Fourth. All sides use it alike. A tool useful to one side is a weapon, and it is rejected along with that side. A tool useful to both is infrastructure, and both take care of it.

Fifth. Who is counted can be verified. It is known and confirmable that living unique people stand behind the measurement, each of whom spoke once and willingly.

The fifth property we have, and so far as we know no one else does - not a polling company, not a petition platform, not a social network, not a state outside its own elections. Confirmation of uniqueness without disclosure of identity is what the passport and the registry were built for, and it is the one thing in the construction that cannot be repeated without building the same thing. The first four properties we do not yet have. They are not invented - they are observed: this is a matter of discipline, and discipline can be checked from outside.

A holder of an earthling passport may take part - a person who has completed identity verification and has received a non-transferable record in the registry. What this gives the measurement:

• one person, one vote, because there is one passport per person and it cannot be transferred;
• a vote cannot be bought, because the passport is non-transferable and inalienable;
• a vote cannot be accumulated, because property is separated from the vote by the unamendable core of the Declaration, Article 11;
• anyone at all can check, because the registry lives on a blockchain and not on our servers, and is read directly from an open smart contract.

What matters is this: verifying uniqueness does not require disclosing identity. The instrument knows that one living person stands behind the record, and does not know who they are. For a measurement that is enough; for surveillance it is not. How identity verification works and why it does not turn into surveillance is described in the documents Biometric Verification and SBT passport; what in this infrastructure is open, what is closed and where one has to take our word for it is set out in the document Where We Are Now.

This is the most vulnerable place in any measurement, and therefore the strictest. Whoever formulates the question determines half the answer: "Do you agree to pay more for electricity for the sake of the climate?" and "Do you agree that the polluter should pay for the damage?" are one and the same question, put in such a way that the answers will be opposite. A single leading wording, discovered publicly, is enough to devalue this measurement and all past and future ones.

The order for forming a question must therefore meet five requirements:

1. Separation. The wording is not approved by those who run the operational management of the people. These are different hands.
2. Publication in advance. The question is published before voting begins, with a stated period during which it can be challenged.
3. An adversarial stage. The wording passes through the objections of the party that the expected answer does not favour. The objections and the replies to them are published together with the question.
4. No change after the start. From the moment voting opens the question is not edited. A defect of wording that is discovered means the measurement is cancelled and a new one held, not corrected on the fly.
5. A connection with the participant's life. The question is put where the consequence lands in individual lives, and not where institutions negotiate about it. This requirement is not about courtesy to the reader: it determines whether a measurement takes place at all, and it is explained separately below.

The subject matter of a question is limited by the Declaration on two sides. Article 3 draws the circle: the people speaks about what affects everyone. Article 5 sets the exception: the internal life of a particular state is not a subject of the people's decisions, that being a matter for its citizens.

The boundary itself is closed; the list of questions is not. Falling under it are, for instance, the taxation of transnational profit, the rules for artificial intelligence systems, the fate of the atmosphere and the ocean, resilience to pandemics, responsibility towards future generations. Nothing from the internal politics of a particular state falls under it - on which see section 10 separately.

The question must touch the life of the person being asked

This is the answer to the most likely cause of failure - low turnout (section 18). It is cured not by reminders and not by appeals, but by the question. If the questions do not touch the real life, interests and difficulties of people, the point of voting disappears entirely: there is no point in asking, and no point in answering.

The contradiction here is genuine: the boundary selects planetary questions, and the planetary sounds remote from individual lives. It only seems so - a planetary question always lands somewhere, otherwise it would not be planetary. So it has to be put at the point of landing, not at the point of negotiation:

On the right and on the left is one and the same question; the wording on the right is more precise, because it names the place where the consequence actually arrives.

And here at once is the boundary, because this technique is one step away from disaster. We draw the distinction thus: a wording is admissible if it names where the consequence falls, and inadmissible if it prompts how to feel about the consequence. "Whether a company should be able to pay tax nowhere" names. "Is it fair that corporations profit off you without paying taxes" prompts. Both touch life; the second is not a measurement, and the adversarial stage exists, among other things, to sift such wordings out.

The second boundary is Article 5: the questions closest to a person are almost always questions of domestic politics, and that is exactly why they are closed. A suitable question lies at the intersection of two conditions: it touches individual lives and at the same time has no national address.

Two streams of questions, and both are needed

There is a second reason why people answer: the answer does something. The questions therefore come in two streams, and one cannot be substituted for the other.

Questions of the internal life of the people - what the treasury is spent on, what the contribution amounts to, which projects to support, how the rules change. Here the consequence follows always and at once, and it is these votes that create the habit of answering, and habit is the only thing that holds turnout up over the long run. Their subject matter is limited by Article 9 of the Declaration: these are questions of the life of the people, not of the position of the people towards the outside.

Planetary questions are those discussed above. Their consequence is not guaranteed: we can measure and publish, but we cannot promise an answer.

From this comes an intention that we record so that we can be held to it: no period consists of planetary questions alone. A people that votes for years only on things no one answers stops voting - and will be right to.

Here we answer the strongest objection to the whole undertaking: polling millions of unprepared people on a complex question is no better than polling a thousand unprepared people; it is merely larger. The objection is fair: scale by itself gives no quality of judgment. The answer to it is the two layers, set out in Article 8 ter of the Charter; that order cannot be applied today - drawing lots from a registry of a few hundred people yields no cross-section of the people, and the article expressly allows for this.

Layer one - the panel. For each question a panel is selected by lot from the registry. Selection by lot has no opinion: it gives a cross-section of the people, not its active part, and that is fundamental - the active part is always skewed. The panel spends several weeks working through the question: it receives materials, hears specialists and representatives of the opposing positions, and discusses publicly. At the end the panel does not decide - it formulates the options and sets out the arguments for and against each, together with the points on which the participants did not agree.

Layer two - the people. The whole people votes on the prepared options, with the work of the panel before it.

Citizens' assemblies have depth without scale, referendums scale without depth; the experiments that have come closest to joining the one to the other are examined in the annex Influence Without Powers. Here too lies the practical value of the registry for others: a pool for selection by lot, such that no one will contest the randomness of sampling from it, and that draw is equally fit for any side.

A result without a trail is an assertion. A result with a trail is a fact. Every measurement is therefore published together with everything needed to verify it:

• the verbatim wording of the question and the answer options;
• the date the question was published, the dates voting opened and closed;
• the objections submitted at the adversarial stage and the replies to them;
• the materials of the panel: its composition by method of selection, the documents studied, the sides heard, the arguments set out, the disagreements recorded;
• the number of those entitled to vote at the moment voting opened;
• the number of those who voted and the share of those entitled - published always, including the cases where the share is low;
• the distribution of answers;
• the distribution of participation by country and region, broken down in a way that does not allow a person to be identified;
• the way in which any person can recount the result themselves: the open data of the vote, the proof of the count, and a program with which to check it.

The last point is the chief one. Verification must not require trust in us. The vote is secret (Declaration, Article 9), and verification is arranged so as not to disclose it: the correctness of the count is proven from open data by an open program. We cannot forge someone else's vote, and this is checked by someone else's recount; a voter can be added by issuing an entry in the registry: every issuance is visible on the network, but the grounds for an issuance cannot be checked from outside.

We say it ourselves: this is how things stand now. The vote of 3 April 2027 on the adoption of the Declaration will be held openly: this has been decided because what matters most about a founding act is that it can be verified, and the Declaration enters into force only upon its adoption. A tool for secret voting does not yet exist, and it is needed by the first substantive vote of the Assembly after the founding. In the open voting channel that has been deployed, votes are signed by wallets, the addresses of those who voted are public, and the right to vote is confirmed by our server; no substantive measurements have been conducted in it (the document Where We Are Now).

If a measurement turns out to be defective

Elections have the recount; scientific journals have the retraction. An instrument with no order announced in advance for acknowledging its own error loses everything at the very first error, and an error there will be. A defect of a measurement means: a leading or ambiguous wording of the question, discovered after voting has begun; a malfunction because of which some of those entitled could not vote or voted twice; a breach of the order for forming the question; and any divergence between the published result and what is read from the registry.

The order is then as follows:

1. Any person may make a claim, not only a participant and not only us. The claim is published together with the date it was received.
2. The decision whether a measurement is defective is taken by someone other than whoever conducted it. If the decision is taken by those who conducted it, an error will never be acknowledged - this is known in advance, and that is why it is not done that way.
3. The cancellation is published in the same place and with the same prominence as the result, not as a footnote. At the same time, exactly what the defect consisted in is published.
4. A cancelled measurement does not vanish from the chronicle. It remains, marked as cancelled. An instrument whose past can be cleaned up is no better than an instrument whose present can be touched up.
5. A repeat measurement is conducted afresh and from the beginning, including a new adversarial stage. Correction on the fly is not permitted under any circumstances.
6. The number of cancelled measurements is published in the common row of indicators. A zero in that column over many years is not grounds for pride but grounds for a question.

We prefer to describe this in advance, while not a single measurement has yet been conducted and the order cannot be suspected of having been written for a particular inconvenient case.

An instrument with which everything can be measured will be used against someone. The limits are therefore written into the Declaration and not into a set of rules, and they are not lifted by a decision of the majority.

The internal politics of a particular state. On such questions no collective position on behalf of the whole people is taken at all - Article 5 of the Declaration. The Earthlings people takes no part in the struggle for state power, supports no parties and candidates, funds no election campaigns and calls on no one to vote in a particular way.

A particular person. No collective position is taken with respect to a particular individual. The people speaks about phenomena, decisions and arrangements, but not about people. An instrument aimed at a person is a lynching with a procedure, and we shall not build one.

The principles of the unamendable core. They are not a subject of voting - and this is not a question of a raised threshold but a question that is not put at all. The list is set out in Article 11 of the Declaration; we do not reproduce it here, so that it retains a single source. The core may be added to; it may not be weakened.

These three limits make the instrument less powerful. It is a deliberate trade: a tool with which no blow can be struck is far harder to take away.

After the question "who authorized you to ask" comes a second, no less dangerous: who pays for the measurement. The answer is known from others' experience: a rating agency paid by the party it rates loses credibility regardless of the honesty of its staff - what destroys credibility is the direction of the money flow. The rule is therefore recorded where compliance with it is mandatory: Article 8 bis of the Charter and Article 31 bis of Earthlings Treasury.

The instrument is maintained by the treasury of the people. There are no periodic payments for taking part in measurements, and none are provided for: the contribution on joining is charged once and covers the cost price of identity verification and the issuance of a passport. Hence the consequence: one never has to pay in order to take part in a measurement - and a person whose contribution was paid by someone else has exactly the same vote as everyone else. What a person is to do if the contribution is beyond their means is described in the documents Earthlings Treasury and The Earthling Path.

The people never conducts a measurement for a client's fee - not for a state, not for a company, not for a foundation: no commissioned questions, no priority in the queue in return for money, no paid-for wording.

Earmarked funding of measurements themselves is not accepted. Even a gift without conditions, received for a particular question, creates the same distortion: the next question is chosen with an eye to whoever gave money for the previous one. Donations go into the common treasury and are not tied to a particular measurement.

The costs of measurements are published as a separate line in the general accounts of the treasury, available for public audit.

From this comes a consequence, unwelcome but honest: there will be as many measurements as the people is able to pay for itself. An instrument that can afford ten measurements a year out of its own funds is worth more than an instrument that does a hundred on someone else's. And a caveat: the funds of the treasury are money too, and a majority inside the people may also want a convenient question. Against internal pressure the source of the money gives no protection at all - the protection there is the order for forming the question in section 7 and the ban on measuring what is listed in section 10. Separating the money from the question removes external pressure, not internal.

Weight is neither issued nor announced. It is gained one rung at a time.

Rungs 1, 3 and 5 depend only on us. The first measurement, the neutrality of the instrument and the chronicle of non-answers require no one's permission and are attainable with a relatively small number of participants. This is what we can promise - because we are the ones who do it.

Rung 2 depends half on us.

Rungs 4, 6 and 7 depend on others. Those we do not and will not promise.

From this comes a formulation we consider honest:

This section exists so that a person who joins does not form expectations we will not meet.

This is not power. The Earthlings people takes no decisions in place of states and exercises no public authority. Its decisions are binding only within the people and only on those who belong to it.

This does not replace citizenship, elections and laws. An earthling remains a citizen of their country, votes in its elections, obeys its laws and pays its taxes. Belonging adds, it does not replace - Article 8 of the Declaration.

This is not a party and not participation in a domestic struggle. The people does not put forward, support or fund candidates. Whatever its size. The limit is constitutive, and it cannot be lifted by a vote. And it is not a weakness but a condition of existence: a transnational community of tens of millions of people interfering in the domestic politics of countries would be banned in its very first year, and banned justly.

This is not compulsion. The people speaks but does not compel - violence is excluded without exception. No sanctions, boycotts or punishments on behalf of the people follow from the result of a measurement.

This does not abolish anyone's rights. The existence of the people diminishes no rights of those who have not joined it, and lays claim neither to territory, nor to power, nor to the right to speak for the whole of humanity.

And the most important point for a sober view. Even full recognition of the people as a subject of international law would give it no ability to change the law of any country: no subject possesses such an ability with respect to another. International legal personality gives the right to speak where subjects speak - that is, a place at the table, not power over someone else's parliament. Whoever promises otherwise promises the impossible.

At the start, in the first period after the Declaration is adopted, while participants are few, a person receives little, and we shall not overstate it: a confirmable "I am a living person, there is only one of me, and anyone can check it", one equal vote in all decisions of the people, and the chance to take part in the first measurements - to be among those who create the precedent rather than those who use it. The person who needs this least is a prosperous resident of a country with working institutions: they have all of it already. Those who need it most are people with no state that recognizes them - they are discussed in the annex Why the Instrument Needs a People.

As it grows, when participants number in the millions, things appear that require numbers: measurements that cannot be written off as marginal; work and payment independent of access to banking services; the resolution of disputes by a procedure that does not depend on a jurisdiction.

At scale, when participants number in the tens and hundreds of millions, what no one can do today becomes possible: a counted position of confirmed individuals across the planet on a question that concerns everyone. Not a sample with a margin of error, not a vote in which one person can cast a thousand votes, but an established and verifiable fact. So far as we know, no state, no international organization and no polling company holds an artefact of that kind: what gets reckoned with is not the one who has status but the one who has what no one else has.

Separately, about those not yet born. Article 5 of the Declaration says: "No decision of the Earthlings people is to shift adverse consequences onto future generations." The article belongs to the unamendable core, that is, it is not put to a vote at all. What may grow out of this norm, and why today it is stronger in verifiability than in compulsion, is in the annex Why the Instrument Needs a People.

The value of everything described is non-linear in the number of participants. At tens of thousands the instrument is a curious experiment. At tens of millions it is infrastructure that no one can ignore. The difference is made by those who joined in between, and their input is worth incomparably more than the input of those who join once everything is already working.

The other side of this follows too: an early participant takes on the risk that it will not work out. They spend time on identity verification and take part in votes whose result may interest no one; joining after the founding period, they also pay the contribution. We do not know how it will end, and section 18 lists the ways it may fail. Against that risk we can set only its size: joining is reversible on any day without giving reasons, it requires no renunciation of citizenship, country, language or faith, and it obliges a person to no act against the law of their own country. If it does not work out, little will have been lost.

So far the subject has been the instrument. Now to where the people comes from in this design, and why it is not there for decoration.

The people is not added to the instrument from outside. It emerges from within, if the requirements placed on the instrument are met honestly and in full.

What this path does not require

It is worth starting with what a people is not needed for at all - otherwise the conclusion will look like special pleading. Confirming the uniqueness of a person without disclosing identity does not require a people. Verifiable voting by wallet signatures does not require one. A pool for selection by lot is an ordinary statistical task. Deliberative panels are run by states and universities, and have been run well for a long time. What is more, a foundation would have built such an instrument faster, more cheaply and with less resistance - it would not have had to answer the question of the status of a people, tie its own hands with a ban on taking positions, or explain to states that it lays no claim to their sovereignty.

So the question has to be put more precisely. Not "what would become harder without a people", but what would become impossible.

Six steps

Step one. What is needed is a measurement whose count an opponent will verify. Hence the need for verifiable uniqueness of the participant and an open registry.

A people is not needed yet. A company can do this.

Step two. Every measurement is a fraction. The numerator is who answered, the denominator is who could have answered. Without a defined denominator the number means nothing.

For a service the denominator is "registered users". This is not a natural quantity: it is set by where the service advertised itself, where it is available, whom it let in and whom it did not. Most important of all, the operator can move the denominator by recruiting some and not others. This is not a flaw in execution; it is the nature of a user base.

Hence the need for membership - a boundary drawn by a person's own act, not by the act of the operator.

A people is not needed yet. An association has membership too.

Step three. The operator must have no ability to influence the result. That means it cannot add anyone to those who are counted or remove anyone from them, change the rules along the way, change the question, or leave an inconvenient answer unpublished. But that is exactly what it means to say that the participants have rights against the operator. And rights against the operator exist only where there is a document the operator cannot rewrite.

Hence the need for a founding text, not a user agreement.

A people is not needed yet. An association has a charter too.

Step four. The instrument must outlive those who built it and must not be purchasable. What can be bought will be bought sooner or later, and the buyer inherits the right to measure.

Hence the instrument must have no owner. That means the participants must govern it, and that means self-governance.

Step five. The instrument must be equally usable by all sides and must not be a national player - otherwise only one side uses it, and it turns into a weapon.

Hence it cannot belong to a single jurisdiction and cannot be subordinate to any state.

An association is no longer enough: it is established under the law of a single state and is subordinate to it.

Step six. The last step, and the decisive one. When it publishes a result, the instrument says one of two things:

The first is data. The second is will. An answer is owed to the second.

Now put the steps together. A body made up, as anyone can verify, of those who are in it by their own choice, with a founding text beyond the reach of its own operators, self-governance instead of an owner, belonging to no state, and the ability to say "we" is what we propose to regard as a people.

This is our position, not a generally recognized legal test. International law does not establish that the combination of these features constitutes a people, and we do not pass off our own reasoning as a norm. We assert only what is visible from the derivation itself: these five features were derived not from a wish to be called a people but from the requirements placed on the instrument. We started from what has to work and arrived at something that has a name - not the other way round.

A people is not a decision taken before the instrument. It is where the instrument is bound to arrive, if it is built properly.

And why not a social movement

The comparison here is with a social movement. National liberation movements are a different legal category: their position took shape during decolonization, and they were recognized precisely as speaking on behalf of peoples exercising self-determination. The top three rows do not depend on how the fourth turns out.

Five reasons, each of a different kind

The derivation above is one argument. Below are five independent ones: if the derivation is mistaken, they still stand. All five are examined in detail in the annex Why the Instrument Needs a People.

The first. Will cannot be measured - it can only be produced. There is no such thing as "what humanity wants" lying somewhere and waiting to be gauged. An opinion can be measured without a people; will cannot be produced without a people. And an opinion gets ignored; a will gets an answer.

The second. The question "who authorized you to ask". It will be asked on the very first day that a measurement begins to mean something. A state answers: the law. A company answers: no one, and it lays no claim to significance. A foundation answers: the board of directors - and the next question, "and who elected the board", ends the conversation. A people answers: its participants, by a procedure that anyone can check. Only two answers survive the second question.

The third. The unamendable core is protection of the instrument against capture, not only ethics. A vote cannot be bought - so the result of a measurement cannot be acquired; a mandate does not become an office - so the instrument is not captured from within by those who maintain it; leaving is free and expulsion does not exist - so the denominator cannot be cleared of those who are inconvenient. An instrument belonging to a foundation is protected instead by the good faith of its board, and good faith is not inherited.

The fourth. Who will answer the fortieth question. The return on a single answer is close to zero, a paid answer devalues the measurement, and compulsion is excluded by the core. What remains is belonging: an instrument running on voluntary participation for decades requires not motivation but belonging, and the reason for that is an engineering one, not a poetic one.

The fifth, the legal one. The upper rungs of the ladder of weight are open to a someone, not to a something: parties in international law are subjects, while the right to self-determination is vested in peoples. We repeat the caveat at once: whether that right applies to a voluntarily constituted non-territorial people is not established by international law, and we do not assert that it does. But a foundation has no chance at all, while a people's chance has not been ruled out.

A live test of this reasoning already exists: the largest project for confirming the uniqueness of a person, built without a people, has in two years drawn restrictive decisions from regulators in three countries, and we know of no case in which its registry has been taken as a source of measurements of public significance. The case is examined in the annex Why the Instrument Needs a People.

What a people costs

Since we are being honest, let us name the price as well. Slower growth: joining a people is harder than registering. A proposal that is harder to explain. An open legal question that the opponent makes use of. The wariness of states, which a foundation would not have faced. And voluntary limits which a foundation would not have taken on. The trade is deliberate, and it may turn out to be a bad one.

How to check that we are wrong

In the spirit of the rest of the document, let us name the condition under which we would be wrong. If in ten years a verifiable poll by some foundation or company is regularly cited by treaty bodies and states, and no one asks "who authorized you" - then the people was superfluous, and we chose an expensive road where a cheap one would have served.

And the reverse question

What does a people need an instrument for? A people without an instrument is a statement of intent that has no way of expressing a common will: exactly what we ourselves complain of. An instrument without a people is data that there is no one to present on anyone's behalf. These are not two things of which one can be discarded. They are two halves of a single whole. Verifiability without mutual recognition yields statistics; mutual recognition without verifiability yields a petition. Together they yield what has not existed until now.

This section is not here for the sake of balance. Every one of the outcomes listed is possible, some are likelier than the good ones. The full examination is in the annex Why the Instrument Needs a People; here there is a line for each way.

Low turnout stands apart, because in importance it comes first. A measurement with low turnout is worse than no measurement at all: it adds no proof but undermines what has already been accumulated. The cure lies not in reminders and not in appeals but in the question: a person answers when the question touches their life and when something depends on the answer (section 7). The share of those who voted is always published, and published first, including low figures, and the share of those who answer is the chief indicator of the project's vitality, more important than the number of participants: a people of ten million with a turnout of forty per cent weighs incomparably more than a people of a hundred million with a turnout of four, although in both cases the number who answered is the same - four million. We do not guarantee that a suitable question will always be found: the boundary is deliberately narrow, and we shall not widen it for the sake of turnout.

Identity verification and the issuance of a non-transferable passport, the registry of passports on the blockchain, the public voting channel and the on-chain treasury are built and working. What matters most for this document is not built: not one substantive measurement has been conducted, no procedure in detail for forming a question exists, there are no panels selected by lot, the chronicle of non-answers has not been started, and no independent security audit has been conducted.

A full and always current list of what has been built, what is closed and where one has to trust us today is in the document Where We Are Now. A fact must have a single source, and that is it.

So that what is described here can be checked rather than taken on faith, we name the indicators by which we should be judged. The obligation to publish the share of those who voted out of those entitled to vote is set out in Article 8 bis of the Charter; this document does not and cannot establish the remaining indicators - it offers them as a measure it applies to itself. Not one of them is promotional, and on several of them we will certainly look bad in the early years.

There are no timelines here. Not one rung has "in three years" written against it: the speed is set by the number of participants, by accumulated practice and by other people's decisions, not by our plan. Timelines belong elsewhere: the founding period is set to begin on 22 November 2026, and the Declaration goes to a vote (The Founding Period).

There is no promise of a result here. What the people is bound by and what it is not bound by is set out in Article 6 of the Declaration, and we do not reproduce it here, so that the norm has a single source. In short: recognition is not within its power, and the existence of the people does not depend on recognition.

The norms on which the document rests: the UN Charter, the preamble and Article 1(2) - text; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Articles 20, 21 and 28 - text; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Articles 1, 22 and 25 - text; Convention No. 169 of the International Labour Organization on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, 1989, Article 6 - text; the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2007 - text.

Facts: the investigation by the New York State Attorney General into fake comments in the procedure of the US Federal Communications Commission, 6 May 2021 - report; Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action, Harvard University Press, 1965 - a doctrinal source, not a norm. The sources for the examinations moved out of this document are in the annexes Why the Count Is Broken, Influence Without Powers and Why the Instrument Needs a People.

Documents of the corpus to which this one refers: The Earthlings Declaration (Articles 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 and 11), Legal Basis, Charter, The Earthlings DAO, Earthlings Treasury, Digital Platform, The Earthling Path, SBT passport, Biometric Verification, The Founding Period, How a Subject of Law Arises, Where We Are Now.