# One World Government by 2150

Can we determine when humanity will unite under a democratic one-world government by projecting voting patterns? Almost certainly not. Is that going to stop me from trying? Absolutely not. The approach is simple: find every record-breaking election in the historical record, plot them, and extrapolate with unreasonable confidence.

To determine precisely when the first election took place is to quibble about definitions and to place more faith in ancient sources than they deserve. So, instead of doing that, suffice it to say that by ~500 BCE both the Roman Republic and Athenian democracy were almost certainly holding elections.

The Athenians had an annual “who’s the most annoying person in town” contest. The “winner” had 10 days to pack their bags before they were banned from the city[^e26qxfu8wm4]for a decade. Each voter scratched a name onto a pottery shard (ostrakon) to submit their vote, which is where we get the word *ostracism*. [Archaeologists have found](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ancient-athenians-voted-kick-politicians-out-if-enough-people-didnt-them-180976138/) about 8,500 ballots from one ostracism vote around 471 BC, so we have an actual number, which is more than can be said for most ancient elections.

![](https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/mirroredImages/858e208585ab5b3ee8b0c956748fe202cd92a34fbe3a2351fdd53dd99177a7f9/igcygufl71xr3krpksed)

Ostraka for the Athenian general and politician Themistocles, who was expelled and ended his days as governor of Magnesia (a Greek city) under Persian rule, a guest of the empire he had once helped save Greece from.[^y0wiofeyck]

The largest election in the ancient world may have been in the late Roman Republic, around 70 BC. The franchise was broad—any male citizen could vote—but there was a catch: [you had to show up in Rome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_the_Roman_Republic) [on election day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_the_Roman_Republic)(and that day might get pushed back [if the magistrates were getting bad vibes from the local birds](https://x-legio.com/en/wiki/elections)). So while millions were eligible across Italy and beyond, actual turnout was likely on the order of tens of thousands. Precise numbers are debated, but [50,000 voters seems to be a reasonable estimate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_the_Roman_Republic).

Then… history happened. The Roman Republic turned into the Roman Empire, the Empire fell, and large-scale elections mostly disappeared for the next millennium.

The next major vote took place in [1573 in the](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1573_Polish%E2%80%93Lithuanian_royal_election) [Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1573_Polish%E2%80%93Lithuanian_royal_election). When the last Jagiellonian king died without an heir, the commonwealth did something radical: it let every nobleman vote for the next king. About 40,000 szlachta rode to a field outside Warsaw and elected Henry of Valois, a French prince.

Henry did not stay long. He was elected in 1573, arrived in early 1574, and then—upon learning that his brother, the King of France, had died—quietly fled Poland in the middle of the night to claim the French throne. The Poles were undeterred and simply held another election and chose someone who actually wanted the job this time.

Elections began to scale in early modern Europe. Britain’s 1715 parliamentary election had on the order of a [few hundred thousand voters](https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9780826434074_A23738903/preview-9780826434074_A23738903.pdf).

In 1804, Napoleon held a plebiscite to approve his elevation to Emperor. He [won with 99.93%](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_French_constitutional_referendum) of the vote, which tells you everything you need to know about how strictly we're defining “elections” here. Elections in France grew over the century (both in number and actual democratic participation), culminating in the election of 1870 with about 9 million voters.

For most of the 20th century, the largest elections were those in Russia and the Soviet Union. The 1937 election took place during the Great Purge, and one party ran—the Communist Party—and [won with 99.3%](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Soviet_Union_legislative_election) of the vote. Again, we’re being generous about what counts as an election here.

By 1984, the exercise had become pure choreography: 184 million participants, one pre-approved candidate per seat across each constituency, [99.99% turnout, 99.95% approval](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0261379485900150)—all while the man nominally running the country, Konstantin Chernenko, was visibly dying of emphysema.

India is the current record holder, which in 2019 ran an election with about 615 million votes cast. It required seven phases, 39 days, 4 million voting machines, and a [single polling station established in the Gir Forest for one voter](https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/5/8/an-election-booth-inside-a-forest-in-india-for-just-one-voter) because Indian law requires no voter travel more than two kilometers to cast a ballot. They broke their own record in 2024 with 642 million voters.

The funny thing about these is that, if you take all the largest known elections since the Dark Ages[^wz4njyw1fg] and plot them on a log scale, you can fit a straight line to it pretty well, showing that the record for the largest single vote has grown roughly exponentially over the past five centuries. That is, the number of voters participating in the largest ever election appears to double every 30 years.

If you project that line forward and take a [recent projection of world population](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36568848/), you see that the trend line crosses the world population curve around the year 2150, at roughly 9.6 billion people. In other words, if voting records keep growing at the historical rate, a single election would involve every living human being sometime in the mid 22nd century.

Behold. The graph:

![](https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/mirroredImages/XNbgqHfezYJwrnakS/3dc96b5e456402f920098857c33c7a7e94450dc7c34d9abb6044ecc8da9a6541/wrbbyboa4thndixmrzbj)

One world government by 2150. You heard it here first.

OK, maybe not a one-world government. But maybe something interesting? A global referendum? A planetary-scale plebiscite? A vote on whether AIs get voting rights so the trend can keep going?

Of course, this methodology is nonsense, but it’s *nonsense with a graph and a line of best fit*. There's something satisfying about drawing a line through 500 years of data points and watching it hit a target.

But, if there really is a global vote in 2150, I want credit for calling it.

[^e26qxfu8wm4]: Technically, this wasn’t exile because they got to retain their property, whereas if they were truly exiled they wouldn’t. 

[^y0wiofeyck]: Plutarch tells us he was ordered to lead a Persian army against Greece and killed himself rather than comply. The method, per Plutarch, was drinking bull's blood. If it seems like all ancient greats had awesome, poetic deaths, it's because that's what the historians wrote down. Is it true? This is history we're talking about. If you want the truth, study physics. 

[^wz4njyw1fg]: Athens and Rome weren’t used in calculating the line of best fit. The Dark Ages happened, democratic elections mostly didn't, and including them would skew the fit.