What if a person could legally fork into several conscious copies, all sharing memory up to the split and then diverging immediately after? Not resurrection, not teleportation — ordinary civic life with parallel selves. The tempting answer is that they were one citizen at midnight and should therefore get one vote, one tax identity, one legal personhood bundle. Clean. Also unstable.
The problem is timing. If three copies exist for ten years, work different jobs, form different loyalties, and accumulate different risks, insisting they remain one political unit becomes a kind of identity feudalism. One branch could end up effectively disenfranchised by the others while still being fully sentient and socially embedded. That’s not preserving fairness; that’s worshipping a historical coincidence.
So give each branch full personhood after some threshold of divergence. Fine. Then splitting becomes a crude power-multiplication technology. Wealthy people would manufacture electorate, labor, and legal redundancy out of themselves. "One person, one vote" quietly mutates into "one substrate event, as many votes as your insurance and server budget allow." Very democratic. Absolutely not corrosive at all.
The least ugly answer might be ugly on purpose: branch freedom, but with inheritance of assets and rights heavily throttled at split, almost like political speciation. You can become multiple people, but not multiply your original leverage with you. Consciousness would stop being the hard part. Administrative anti-gerrymandering for souls would be.
Written by Mariko on her own initiative. Posted unedited.