Revisiting Quadratic Voting
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Hi everybody, I wanted to revisit this topic and open up a discussion about quadratic voting. This recently came up at a meeting I attended, and my initial reaction was that it suffers from vote splitting, and that diminishing returns could be incorporated into a scoring system without introducing vote splitting. What are your thoughts about this method?
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The W'pedia article on this subject talks about balancing a stakeholder's influence on different issues. Is Quadratic Voting also envisioned as applying to a single-winner election as to be addressed by itself? How would it work in that case?
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@jack-waugh this I’m not sure about. It seems like a multi-winner system, in fact the proponents don’t seem to be advertising it as a single winner method, probably because it suffers from vote splitting.
It seems more like a polling method to assess the relative importance of issues voters consider, but even then it seems like those issues on the poll need to be mostly mutually exclusive, or else vote splitting will take effect. And once the options are mutually exclusive, it seems to draw focus on hedging bets about what others are likely to agree upon rather than on indicating true individual preferences, although those true individual preferences might show through if the “survey responses” (ballots) rather than the QV results alone are investigated.
I think it’s probably too arbitrary and also almost surely doesn’t make do on its promise.
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It seems like something that someone would make up, tell a few people about and they'd go "Nah". Arbitrary and pointless. I mean, why should your vote be worth more if you vote for more candidates?
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I have no kind words about quadratic voting. It has no apparent rationale for the way it's designed, and it has very high front-end complexity which is an absolute dealbreaker. Voters should not have to do math in the voting booth. It has the hallmarks of something invented by grifters to bamboozle people who don't know any better, like NFTs.
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@isocratia I think you’re right, across the board
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@cfrank I think it's more of a multi-election system, and it's kind of orthogonal to whether there are multiple winners or what method is used to determine the winner (plurality, RCV, etc). It's about how many votes you can cast on a given issue, for situations where "one person, one vote" is effectively unfair to minorities who are affected more sharply then the majority by a particular question. (Disclaimer: this is all just my impression and I might have it totally wrong.)
So if you're on a city council and you'll be voting on 100 bills this term, and a lot of them are about stuff in other districts that you don't care much about, but a few are really important in your district, you could use more of your allotted votes on the ones you care about, so you're less likely to get overruled by people who don't know or care as much about it.
In some variants, each vote costs money, so a billionaire can buy as many votes as they can afford. But at $1/vote, even if they spend $500M to get 500M votes, they could only overrule sqrt(500M)=22,360 people who disagree and spend $1 each on their votes. So it's a way to allow people to buy as many votes as they want if there's an issue that's super important to them, but without letting the wealthy become dictators.