The rule, exactly. Before an election each citizen chooses: to vote — or to take a payment and not vote in that election. The payment is a percentage of the median income, set by referendum; there is no fixed sum. One ballot is one vote, with no multiplier in the count; the vote is amplified only in that each ballot's share grows as others step out. The budget pays under law; a candidate never pays. Only a referendum of all citizens — simple majority, no quorum — introduces, changes or repeals the rule.
The protocol has been introduced nowhere and no pilot has been run: shares, turnout and outcome figures in the chapters are estimates, and the protocol promises nobody an election victory. If a chapter says otherwise, Exact Answers and the Charter are correct. For a candidate: ten questions and ten steps. For a citizen, a mayor, a finance officer, a donor, a journalist, a scholar, a lawyer: answers by role. Everything in force in one file: llms-full.txt.
A Board with No Good Moves: Half a Hundred Zugzwangs of the Protocol¶
Chapter: 01 — Introduction and the Basic Formula (paired with §1b) File: 01_001c · v1 · 20 September 2026 Source: the architect's remark after the analysis of vote counting and the sign on the ballot (048i.5b–6c, 056d.7b): "I love catching a cunning government in zugzwang on its own ground; the whole protocol is about this", and his request — to go through the entire repository, gather such situations in one place and put them at the start of the book with an explanation of why they were described.
How to read this chapter (note of 02.10.2026). The text contains wording that is easy to misread: the efficiency bonus has been removed. The exact-answers sheet 1d and the charter 048m are in force.
1. Why this catalogue exists¶
Almost every reform fails in the same place: it counts on those who lose by it behaving well. The official will comply, the party will not obstruct, the loser will accept. The AB-EXIT protocol is built differently, and the catalogue below is a way to check that. It gathers situations in which an opponent of the protocol acts strictly in his own interest, cunningly and with no goodwill whatever — and still finds no move that helps him.
The catalogue serves three purposes. The first is a test of the design: a mechanism that works only as long as nobody resists it does not work; here one sees what happens under resistance. The second is a map for whoever will advance the idea: for every objection and every action of an opponent it is visible in advance where it leads. The third is honesty: any place where the opponent would have a good move is a hole, and such places are easiest to look for along a list.
2. The chess logic: three figures¶
Chess has exact words for such positions, and they describe three different arrangements.
The fork. One piece attacks two at once; only one can be saved. In politics this is a choice where the opponent keeps one value at the price of another: a government that forbids its supporters to take the payment keeps turnout and loses their affection; allowing it keeps the affection and loses turnout.
Zugzwang. A position where any move worsens one's standing, and not moving is impossible. This is the catalogue's main word, and its second half is the main thing in it. In ordinary politics the strong side always has a best move — to stay silent and wait for the subject to go away. The protocol takes away exactly that: once money has been publicly offered to the citizen, silence stops being a pause and becomes an answer, and the worst one available. The right to pass disappears, and a position that rested on that right begins to crumble by itself.
The pin. A piece cannot leave because it shields the king. Such are the positions where the opponent cannot remove what is inconvenient without exposing what is essential: an electoral autocracy cannot give up paper elections without losing the ritual that produces its legitimacy and the exam by which it tests its own apparatus (048i.6c).
The three figures have one thing in common, and it sets the protocol apart from ordinary political struggle: in none of the positions below is the opponent attacked. Nothing is taken from him, nothing is forbidden him, he is not exposed. Only the price of his habitual move changes — as in "reform by subtraction" (019c). A chess player would call this positional play: the game is won not by a combination but because the opponent has run out of useful moves.
3. The main fork: free abstention stops being a choice¶
(Added 29.09.2026 following the architect's correction: "before, a voter could vote or not turn up; with the payment we in effect impose on him a choice without a choice — he almost always takes part in the election: either he takes the money or he votes. This is the very first fork.")
Everything else starts from it. The A/B fork (001b §1) is possible only because this one has already worked.
| Today | After the protocol | |
|---|---|---|
| Vote | free; the vote weighs 1/N | the vote weighs more (×2–×3) |
| Do not vote | free, silently, nobody sees | for money and on record: exit is a transaction at the treasury (056e §3) |
| Do nothing | ordinary abstention, 40–50% of the roll | lawful, but worse than both options at once: neither money nor weight |
A choice without a choice — but without coercion. Nobody forbids the old option: one can still stay away and take nothing. It simply becomes dominated — worse than both new buttons at once — and a person who thinks about it for even a minute will not choose it. So almost everyone takes part in the election: some with a vote, others with a record at the treasury. Both "vote for free" and "abstain for free" lose from the day the formula is said out loud (048g §6).
Whoever takes the money has not dropped out; he controls his own cancelled vote. His vote is officially cancelled and cannot appear in the ballot box: a ballot in his name is a double spend, exposed by reconciling the treasury statement with the box, without catching commission members red-handed (056e §3). The number of those who took the money sets a published ceiling on turnout: the roll minus those who exited (048f).
Whoever did nothing is a risk zone that needs special control. The architect: "those who do nothing are a glaring risk zone; it is such an illogical choice that this is exactly where all the machinations can be — that is where one must study carefully and search." After the protocol, inaction stops being the norm and becomes an anomaly, and an anomaly is where forgery hides. The "empty places" (on the roll, did not take the sum, did not come to vote) are the only raw material for stuffing that the person himself does not check; they enter the forgery-ceiling formula directly (048i §5b). So control is concentrated precisely here:
- the late payment at a 20–30% discount: anyone in whose name a ballot was stuffed can come for the sum after the election — and hear "you voted"; stuffing acquires a witness with a personal interest (048i §5b);
- reconciling the remainder after the first cycle: records for which nobody came either before or after the election are a ready list for checking against those who left and those who died; the protocol cleans the rolls as a by-product (048i §5b);
- comparing precincts: today 40–50% abstention surprises nobody; after the protocol a precinct where the share of "did nothing" is markedly higher than its neighbours' and than in past cycles is a signal to check first.
For the opponent this too is a fork. Keeping the "empty places" on the roll means keeping raw material for stuffing that now shows up as an anomaly and has live witnesses. Cleaning them out means losing the last resource for forgery.
3b. The forks of recent days: rolls and counting¶
| Position | The opponent's moves — and how each ends | Where analysed |
|---|---|---|
| The late payment | stuff a ballot for an "empty place" — acquire a witness who was paid to turn up; do not stuff — be left without the resource for stuffing | 048i.5b |
| Dirty rolls | clean them — lose the reserve of records for forgery; do not clean — every surplus record costs the treasury money and becomes evidence | 048i.5b |
4. Politicians and parties¶
| Who | The moves — and how each ends | Where |
|---|---|---|
| The politician who introduced the protocol | carried it through — his apathetic base took the payment and left; did not — remained the candidate who loses | 047.1 |
| All politicians after the first move | stay silent — everyone else has the subject; "against" — unsayable; "for" — devalues one's own mobilising skills | 047.2 |
| The heavyweight who tries to take over | take over the subject — it builds the first mover's monument; leave it alone — the underdog holds the subject | 047.3 |
| The underdog's opponents in a district | consolidate — the slogan "we won't let you have the money" is unsayable; do not — the invisible voters turn up and give a mandate | 047.4 |
| The politician who always answers | answer — there is no answer that is not shameful; stay silent — the silence itself becomes news | 047.5 |
| Whoever explains why the payment is unnecessary | a fiscal, sacral or paternalist argument — self-exposure; the honest argument — unsayable | 046.4 |
| The system against a question | answer — any answer campaigns for it; stay silent — silence breaks at the first utterance | 046.2–3 |
| Parliament and a petition | hold the debate — officials answer aloud for the first time; refuse — "a million signatures, and ninety minutes were enough for them to say no" | 046.5 |
| The authorities' lawyers | drag it out — every clause becomes a poster; do not — a law | 046.6 |
| The incumbent | copy the idea — launch the audit that destroys him; do not — leave the underdog what cannot be taken over | 042 §74.3, 030.14 |
| Parliament and a private referendum | stay silent; ridicule; ban; discuss seriously — all four moves work for the idea | 035 §84.3 |
| The establishment politician before any law | argue — the argument is with a sense of injustice, not with the candidate; stay silent — both old options already look like losing ones | 048g.6 |
| Those who want to roll the protocol back | repeal by referendum — persuade the majority to vote against its own payment; do not — the protocol is entrenched by that same majority | 048g.6b |
| The authorities and the public counter | keep it public — the underdog gets the same precise data as the authorities; classify it — admit the figure is bad and breach the text adopted by referendum | 004.4.3b, 004.4.7b |
| The national populist in power | fit into the system he promised to break; keep his promises — eat through the reserves and collapse | 039b.4 |
5. The autocrat and his apparatus¶
| Who | The moves — and how each ends | Where |
|---|---|---|
| The order "take the money and come anyway" | to a few — turnout is not restored; to many — a mass accounting discrepancy, which is no longer an electoral violation but budget embezzlement, with the traces left by banks | 048f.4c |
| Observers after the first flow leaves | keep them out — turnout above the ceiling stays unexplained; let them in — comparing two numbers is open to anyone. The register cannot be omitted: it is part of the mechanism, and unpublished it works as a hostage | 048f.4b |
| The two-passenger-flow machine | the loyal must come, the disloyal must not; the payment is universal and so dries both flows at once — and the second arrives precisely because the first left: the futility of a vote rested on the compulsory mass. Excluding the dependent means writing dependence into statute and publishing a list of the owned | 056 correction-2026, 23b.2 |
| Excluding state employees from the payment | give them an equivalent separate payment — they take it and stay away; give them less or nothing — deliver a resentful voter to the urn, told so by his own superior. There is no third form | 056 correction-2026, 057e.3 |
| The authorities and their core electorate | forbid taking — take live money from their own; allow it — the core takes it and stays home, no turnout | 056d.3, 048h.7 |
| The head of an enterprise | order a refusal — reach into the employee's pocket and compensate with a bonus; do not — zero turnout | 056d.4, 048h.5 |
| The autocrat and poverty | keep them poor — they take the payment and leave; make them rich — they refuse and vote against him | 056d.5, 048d.4 |
| The authorities and their own constitution | forbid the demand — admit the constitution is a fairy tale; allow it — hand over the rent | 056d.7 |
| The autocrat and his own budget | outbid — pay himself past the intermediaries; ask people not to take it — a tenth at most have the fanaticism required | 056e.2 |
| The regime after launch | cut the payments — get an influx of the enraged with a tenfold vote; print money — inflation eats the payment | 056e.3 |
| The dictator and the army | order suppression — the soldier kills the source of his own income; do not — there is nothing else to repeal the protocol with | 048d.3 |
| A dependent court and its honest judges | keep them — put up with inconvenient rulings; throw them out — hand them to a parallel court where their rulings are open and cited | 048j.5e |
| The ruler before his own family | does not see the solution — a fool; sees it and does not introduce it — a thief | 048d.5 |
| The dictator and the defector from the elite | kill him — make a martyr; leave him — he prepares the transition | 048d.6, 057c.4 |
| The regime explaining that money is harmful | explain — lose the role of the people's protector; do not — propaganda cannot explain why one may not become richer | 048d.7 |
| The autocrat and the neighbours' "pitiful money" | offer more — wreck the budget and show the money was there; talk of pride — the well-fed teaching the hungry to fast | 048e.2 |
| "Why do they have it and we don't" | "they have corruption"; "a conspiracy against us"; "money is evil" — every answer has a counter-question | 048e.3 |
| The regime and an unpolitical question | stay silent — the silence is deafening; explain — excuses breed contempt; repression — hastens the ending | 048e.4 |
| Fake elections after the figure is known | hold them — a referendum on disgrace; cancel them — tear off the mask; hold and forge them — the worst of the three | 048e.5 |
| Any regime against the spread of the idea | ban it — there is no organisation or server to shut down; defend — the only defence against the idea "you are owed money" is to pay | 048.4 |
| The authorities and the voter's stupidity | dumb people down — the dumbed-down take the payment, political gain nil; do not — the electorate resists manipulation | 048b.1–2, 038b.3 |
| Lukashenko | support it; oppose it; prevent the referendum; forge it — every move wrecks one of the regime's myths | 057b.4 |
| The Iranian clergy | declare the payment haram and press — the mentors turn into gendarmes; do not ban — the foundations lose their flows | 057c.2 |
| The autocrat against the opposition's protocol | "it is nonsense" — argue with mathematics and open code; "we shall introduce our own" — admit the opposition is right | 057c.5 |
| The median computed by the authorities themselves (07.10.2026) | understate the median to pay less — the median comes from the same reporting taxes are collected from, and the treasury loses more than it saves; compute it honestly — pay in full. The guard of the payment is its own tax authority, with an opposite interest | 040o, 048k §3 (the fifteenth) |
6. Buyers, intermediaries, lobbies¶
| Who | The moves — and how each ends | Where |
|---|---|---|
| The vote buyer | keep paying — the person takes both his money and the payment and votes as he likes; stop paying — no influence | 053.4, 019d.4b |
| A party's foreign sponsor | outbid the state — astronomically costly; pay as before — the bought audience has left | 055c.2 |
| The trade union as intermediary | call a general strike — the worker with unpaid bills quietly takes the payment; accept the protocol — lose the intermediary's monopoly | 055b.4 |
| The recipients of levies | bring the indifferent to the polls — they took the money; vote themselves — they are thousands against hundreds of thousands | 019c.3 |
| Social networks | block the subject of free money — censorship in the eyes of nearly all users; do not — spread it themselves | 048e.6 |
| The elite without the protocol | lobbying — the agent serves whoever re-elects him; media — the output is an unpredictable radical; capital flight — there is no spare West | 030.11–15 |
| The elite and the "tax on silence" | want to rule without the masses interfering — pay and develop the economy; do not pay — the masses return to the polls | 040f.2 |
7. Critics¶
| Who | The moves — and how each ends | Where |
|---|---|---|
| The academic critic and non-voting | treat half the electorate not voting as normal — the protocol worsens nothing; call it exclusion of citizens — admit the system already excludes half for free | 029.1, 029.9 |
| The academic critic in a dispute | propose a better mechanism — become a co-author; retreat into abstraction — lose by default | 043 §76.6 |
| The opponent with a personal interest | state the objection aloud — name his own motive; go into the shadows — a quiet attack during a bright campaign becomes a scandal | 039 §88.3, §88.6 |
| The offended "proud" critic | "I won't take the money" — then don't, and the protocol strengthens your vote; took it — nothing left to argue about | 040c.3b |
| The defender of the "sanctity of the vote" | admit the poor person's choice is voluntary — no ground to forbid the deal; call it an illusion — then the lottery and the casino, on which the state earns, must be banned too | 021 §63.3–4 |
| The liberal establishment | give everyone a voice — the populists come; introduce filters — become the censor oneself | 055c.3 |
| The old democracies | reform — break their own great institutions; do not — become a historical park | 048e.7 |
8. The fork in which the opposition itself sits¶
One row of the catalogue is built the other way round: locked inside it is not an opponent of the protocol but those who today fight the authorities by the old rules (056d.1). To vote for establishment spoilers is to lend the election legitimacy; to boycott is to dry up turnout in favour of the dependent electorate; to spoil the ballot is useless, because the percentage is counted from valid ones. This is a true zugzwang, and the opposition of many countries has sat in it for years.
It is telling that the way out was found by the same method on which the whole catalogue is built: not by a new move on the old board but by changing what counts as a move. A sign in a valid ballot (§8b) chooses none of the three losing branches — it votes and informs at once. That is how the protocol works as a whole: it does not offer the citizen a better move in a game where he has no good ones, but adds to the board a square that was not there before.
8b. The sign on the ballot — an auxiliary technique, not the main fork¶
| Position | The opponent's moves — and how each ends | Where analysed |
|---|---|---|
| The sign on the ballot | keep paper — the sign stays: a referendum on any question laid on the table before one's own apparatus; go over to the machine — lose the ritual, the apparatus's exam and one's own base's faith in the figure | 048i.6c, 056d.7b |
| The invitation in a debate | stay silent — the invitation stands; forbid one's voters to put the sign — come out against a harmless idea; support it — the idea becomes common property | 048i.6c |
| Banning the sign | ban a particular sign — it is changed within a day; describe the only permitted one — spoil the ballots of one's own elderly supporters | 048i.6c |
What "the sign" is. The rows above concern the technique analysed in 048i §6c. A candidate who cannot put the protocol to a referendum asks voters on election day to put, in the box of their candidate and in addition to the usual mark, a common sign — for example a letter: A — "I support the protocol and would take the sum", B — "I support the protocol and would stay to vote". Those who do not support the protocol make the usual mark. The ballot stays valid: most countries' rules require not a particular form of mark but a clear intention of the voter, so the sign is written right in the box, not beside it. The sign goes in the box of one's own candidate, whoever that is, so the technique is detached from the candidate and shows support for the idea across parties. The result is a referendum without a referendum: the ballots are unfolded in front of the commission and observers from all parties, and everyone who counts sees how many people support the idea. Banning a particular sign is useless — it is changed within a day to any other, as long as it is common to all; the only reliable countermeasure — moving from paper to machines — costs an electoral autocracy its ritual, the exam of its own apparatus and its supporters' faith in the figure (048i §6c, 056d §7b). The technique's status is a working assumption of the architect, not part of the protocol. 🟡
9. Weak point of the section¶
The catalogue was compiled by a sweep of the text: the wordings are taken from the sections the references point to, and each row was not separately checked against its source. The chapter on the USA was not included in the sweep. And the main point: a fork on paper is a claim that there is no third move, and the absence of a move cannot be proved — one can only fail to find it. Every third move found is a discovery, not a defeat, and the row in which it was found should be rewritten or removed. 🟡
Related: 001b (the essence of the protocol) · 047 (zugzwang: a rocket one cannot stay on) · 046 (detonators) · 048e (export of truth) · 048d (the security forces) · 048i (three channels, the sign on the ballot) · 056d (Russia: the opposition's deadlock) · 019c (reform by subtraction) · 013b (counterintuitive game theory)