In communities (organizations, teams, projects, locales, towns, etc) where membership is defined or controlled, and it is easy to determine whether an individual IS a member, or a member has participated in a vote, whether a member is eligible for voting, etc. there exist voting systems that do the job of guiding decisions to resolution, for better or for worse.

In communities where membership is NOT so clearly defined or controlled, it is less easy to determine these predicates, and traditional existing voting systems fail due to the inability to do this identification and counting.

Nevertheless, such communities of unclear membership exist. One is “the GCC”, which is opt-in on Facebook, and currently has over 1000 “members” who have so opted.

The emergence & growth of the internet (even from early Arpanet days)