8 ms·

Quadratic Voting

124 points by k2enemy 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tgv 6y ago
So, for this to work - you need a reasonably large set of decisions to be decided in one big election, - rational agents, even though the topics is emotional. And how do they reach the conclusion that "the system will be predisposed to dominance by special interest groups with strong, concentrated interests"? That might be in some limit towards infinity case, but in practice? And why that would be a good thing, is beyond me.
- erentz 6y ago
  And who decides what the issues are that get voted on? This is an important flaw IMO against multi issue voting with this system. If the people making the list of issues are biased they can make one big issue for all the stuff they care about, and a thousand little issues for the stuff other people care about. Every issue needs equal footing to overcome this, meaning each issue needs to be its own independent election, effectively making QV useless.
  - tgv 6y ago
    I too think it's totally possible to rig such elections. E.g., if there's something group A wants, but you don't, you add something group A is totally against, so all their votes will go to the latter issue, and the status quo is kept as far as group A is concerned. Meanwhile, their votes are lost for other issues.
antiquark 6y ago
Odd that they didn't mention Arrow's impossibility theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arrows-theorem https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arrows-theorem
- WillDaSilva 6y ago
  From the Quadratic voting Wikipedia page: Quadratic voting is a variant of cumulative voting in the class of cardinal voting. From the Arrow's impossibility theorem Wikipedia page: Cardinal voting electoral systems are not covered by the theorem, as they convey more information than rank orders.
- godelski 6y ago
  You want Gibbard's. It is an extension for cardinal systems. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%27s_theorem
- naniwaduni 6y ago
  Arrow's theorem is an interesting result on its own, but its practical applicability is kind of undermined by the fact that the dictatorship criterion is actually pretty rarely interesting (and is almost totally irrelevant to a ballot).
  - contravariant 6y ago
    You do realise that the dictatorship criterion simply replicates the vote of one particular voter no matter what? [1] In most realistic implementations this is likely either the first or the last voter. Surely we can agree that those wouldn't really be desirable? [1]: See here for a somewhat easy to follow proof: https://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/arrow.pdf https://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/arrow.pdf
    - naniwaduni 6y ago
      The dictatorship criterion is slightly more wide-reaching than that specific construction which makes it sound silly (though, honestly, not really tremendously unfair). Your link gives a decent enough definition: > (No dictators) If a single voter prefers X to Y, but all other voters disagree, then the voting system should override the wishes of that single voter and rank Y higher than X.
      - 6y ago
munfred 6y ago
Nice to see this here, I spent the last weekend reading about quadratic voting/funding. The core idea is that in order to decide how much "endorsement" each project amongst many receives, you take the square root of how much each person gave to that project, sum that, then square it to decide how much of a matching contribution to be given. It has a couple interesting properties that make it appealing for the funding of "public goods" (such as software) via grant matching mechanisms. The main ones: - Projects with distinct supporter bases will receive more funding if they join forces as a single project with more supporters - Projects with few supporters that give a lot of money/endorsement will receive very little boost from this - You can also implement the possibility of "negative votes/funding" that allow people to "short" the projects that they consider a net negative Over the past year a grant matching mechanism using quadratic funding has been trialed in a platform called Gitcoin, which supports crowdfunding Ethereum development projects: https://gitcoin.co/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-gitcoin/ https://gitcoin.co/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-gi... A post by Vitalik Buterin describing quadratic funding is here: https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html Vitalik also wrote about the last 3 rounds of this funding on Gitcoin, they’ve been making tweaks and the results are extremely promising: https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/04/30/round5.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/04/30/round5.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/01/28/round4.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/01/28/round4.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/10/24/gitcoin.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/10/24/gitcoin.html The idea of quadratic funding came from quadratic voting, which was discussed in the 2018 book Radical Markets: https://vitalik.ca/general/2018/04/20/radical_markets.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2018/04/20/radical_markets.html In september 2018 Vitalik together with one of the book authors and another person put out a preprint describing their ideas for quadratic funding, which is very interestingly written: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.06421.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.06421.pdf The broader field under which this fits is called "mechanism design", which means inverse game theory: instead of specifying the rules and seeing what the outcome is, you decide which outcome you want and try to design a game that leads to it...a very enticing idea. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design
lalaland1125 6y ago
One key principle that a lot of people miss is that quadratic voting doesn't work with real money because people don't value wealth in a linear fashion. $5 is worth much more for a homeless person than for a millionaire. Proof of this can be seen in preference surveys or other studies of human behavior. This fact breaks the key assumption of quadratic voting and causes skewed results in that people with more money can buy more votes even with "weaker" preferences.
- elpin 6y ago
  This is addressed in the Wikipedia page under "Criticisms of quadratic voting mechanisms". Potential solutions include giving everyone the same amount of starting artificial "money", using one-person-one-vote when issues are polarized along wealth-lines, or making votes more expensive for the wealthy. To me, the first option of delegating everyone the same starting votes seems the most reasonable. However, I think allocating vote prices based on wealth could create some interesting incentives and resulting politics.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    What the wikipedia criticism doesn't mention issue flooding/packing. Quadratic voting works, on paper, when applied to set piece issues. It doesn't address the reality of legislatures, that "issues" are not fixed pieces on a chessboard. Issues can be split across multiple referendums. Whoever is in control can use splits to dilute votes, causing voters to spend their votes repeatedly winning a minor issue until their are depleted. Then those who 'lost' the first rounds now have the votes to win the last round. Giving everyone equal footing on every vote stops this.
    - bullfightonmars 6y ago
      I had the same thought. This system does not account for the introduction of legislation that can be voted on. Who decides which legislation to consider. Surely the party in power could sway the outcome by stacking the decions against each other. This is equivalent to gerrymandering political districts. Spread out the votes on the issues based on the electors in favor of a predtermined outcome.
xchaotic 6y ago
Actually, I think what would be more useful is the ability to vote directly on all things and delegate your vote on specific topics or in general when you want not every 4 years. We can have the technology to enable this and it would effectively kill a full time politician as a job. That think would instead be done by retirees in their spare time. And if things were not going to work in the right direction, you can vote immediately, any time. If, on the other hand you don’t care or don’t know enough about the subject, you can delegate your vote and that person can also delegate your and her vote too.
- mpettitt 6y ago
  The Aurora Rising books by Alistair Reynolds are set in an environment where this is the case. Basically the only automatic right is that to have a vote.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wurst_case 6y ago
  I love this topic and have been researching liquid democracy on the side. We need more people researching the implications of this political system.
- zupa-hu 6y ago
  That’s precisely what I have came up with and wish existed.
- tom_mellior 6y ago
  This is precisely the idea of liquid democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
- ianopolous 6y ago
  This is exactly what the flux party is doing in Australia: https://voteflux.org/ https://voteflux.org/
- amelius 6y ago
sandworm101 6y ago
>> Using this anonymous ballot system provides identity protection from vote buying or trading since these exchanges cannot be verified by the buyer or trader. I'm really split on that one. I'm not sure that anonymity does much to curb vote buying. I think it allows vote buying to fly under the radar. If we know how a politician votes we can then compare that to fundraising and lobbying records. With anonymous voting we are blind. A modern lobbyist doesn't care about verifying individual votes. They lobby multiple people, entire parties, to shift trends. If they fail on an issue that only means the people they were lobbying don't have control of their party. The lobbyists move to other people for the next round. Eventually they work out where to send their money and start winning regardless. At least with non-anonymous voting outsiders have some hope of tracking what is going on.
- jedberg 6y ago
  The author is talking about anonymous votes for citizens. Not representatives.
- mkolodny 6y ago
  Lobbying is very different from vote buying. Vote buying is saying to someone, "I'll buy your vote for $X". If votes are anonymous, then there's no way to verify that you actually got what you paid for.
  - cheerlessbog 6y ago
    Presumably there are reliable votes on either side that are well known : subtract those from the result and you may have a fair idea whther your puppet obeyed his master. It might not be easy to confidently disobey.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Votes by people in elections are what’s being contemplated as being bought, not votes by a much smaller group of representatives on specific legislation.
godelski 6y ago
If you like this, you'll probably be interested in STAR[0]. It has a really high voter satisfaction efficiency[1]. Pretty much it is the best if you want to account for strategic voting[2] (Condorcet methods don't handle these as well, but do have a higher VSE when it isn't accounted for, but we're talking pretty close anyways). So why Cardinal systems? They are a lot easier than ranked systems. You like two people equally? You hate two people equally? No worries, just give them the same number. You basically have all the advantages in this case (I'll mention that Gibbard's[3] is an extension of Arrow's and it applies here). But why we would want this system is because it makes for the best of both worlds between the "we need parties" and "fuck parties" groups. Let's take an example: Pick your favorite outside candidate: Bernie, Tulsi, Warren, Yang. If the general election was using STAR it wouldn't matter who the Dems pushed. You could still vote for these candidates and it wouldn't help you're candidate win. So I'd imagine a HN ballot could look something like this Biden: 5 Gabbard: 7 Sanders: 10 Trump: 3 Warren: 9 Yang: 8 If Bernie, Tulsi, Warren, and Yang did not get enough votes to win, it would still be like the same election where we are choosing Biden v Trump, even though Biden wasn't your first choice. This means you can vote honestly (i.e. which candidate is closest to your opinion and not which candidate you think can win). It entirely removes the "electibility" question. Why cardinal over ranked? One simple answer is that when cardinal breaks down it turns into approval voting. Approval voting is "I like this candidate" vs "I dislike this candidate". It is essentially the way we pick where to eat with friends. Everyone says "I don't know". So you start listing off places and once enough people say "sure", you pick that. It doesn't get you the best place to eat, but no one is really unhappy either. What STAR does is basically give you the options: "Hate it", "no", "ehhh", "I guess", "fine", "yes", "hell fucking yeah" (that'd be STAR06). STAR is simple to understand, leads to high voter satisfaction, removes the electibility issue, let's parties exist without parties dominating (i.e. other parties can actually compete), easy to pick a winner, and more qualities we like in voting systems (if you're trying to make a fair system where people get representatives that represent their ideals). Of course, this does not fix the issues of money in politics, people lying, and all that. This is just one component, but I think an essential component that will have huge effects on any democratically elected system and I think it is something that we really should fight for. It is also easy to sell the idea because everyone wants a more fair voting system. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting [1]https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/ https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_voting [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%27s_theorem
cryptonector 6y ago
> Under various sets of conditions, quadratic voting has been shown to be much more efficient than one-person-one-vote in aligning collective decisions with doing the most good for the most people. That's a severe misunderstanding. We don't have elections to make collective decisions that yield "the most good for the most people". We have elections because the alternatives to not having elections are worse. Moreover, "the most good for the most people" is subjective -- any objective measures of that that you come up with will be subjectively chosen. Some will say that maximizing the health of the environment does the most good for the most people, while others will say that maximizing GDP per-capita does -- if those two are in conflict, who's right? Elections sidestep the matter: it's not about being right, but about what people want. Sometimes people want things they really really shouldn't, and they may try to get their way via elections. For that we have institutions (e.g., constitutions, courts, separation of powers, etc.) that keep them from getting those things for some time. The alternative to all that is absolute monarchy, caudillos, dictatorship, war, anarchy (for a while until you get a strongman) -- all bad things. If you manage to impose a technocracy not headed by a strongman, soon it will be, and either way may well lead to revolt, possibly civil war. I too would like a better system, because "democracy is the worst system of governance, except for all the others", but like Churchill, I'm skeptical that there is something better than a constitutional, democratic republican form of government. Utopia peddling seems very commonplace nowadays. That's a bit worrisome.
- jbay808 6y ago
  I think what they mean is it results in outcomes that better align with the preferences of the voters than other voting schemes.
- zodiac 6y ago
  I think research into voting systems like this shouldn't be read as coming from a point of view of "we have the correct objective function we prove that our system is unequivocably optimal under this objective function". Rather the objective function is a "toy model" which we understand does not capture all of reality, but hopefully captures enough of it to provide some interesting insight. I mean, obviously policies and outcomes at stake in any voting system are subjective, so that's an objection that can be levelled against any objective function, but that includes anything you choose as well. E.g. if you say that your objective function will be to minimize the risk of participants getting dissatisfied enough to violently go out of the system (i.e. revolt / civil war), well, one-person-one-vote can fail like that too; who's to say that that system is really optimal with respect to this objective function?
noodlesUK 6y ago
I really like the idea of this assuming it’s some kind of vote credit rather than money, and the vote credits are distributed equally per person. However, it doesn’t take into account that the number of things to vote on might not be fixed (or even finite). As more things to vote on are added, do people get more votes? How are they distributed? This would create a whole new variable to gerrymander.
nabla9 6y ago
Quadratic Election Law (great article) https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/quadratic-election-law https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/quadratic-election-law
mirekrusin 6y ago
Why not simply allocate weights of preference between choices so they sum up to 1 (100%)? If you require that some peoples votes are of higher weight, run the same thing but on population that votes - assigning weight to every individual - so it sums up to 1 (100%) as well. With problem defined in this way you have this intuitive tool to easily compose/merge or compare outcomes, ie. voting run for shareholders (weighted on shares) can be merged with votes of ie. employees (could be weighted on salary and/or time spent in the company) - all those can be merged givig weight to each vote run. This can be extended with more exotic things like votes (at any level) attached to probablity of some yet unknown "fact" or time or any arbirary input which is an output of any DAG created by this voting rule. This makes the whole setup dynamic. Complexity always collapses into simple, intuitive values that can be interpreted (and used as input for other voting-like decisions). Weighted voting all the way down.
arnejenssen 6y ago
I wonder how it would work on popular TV shows like American Idol. Maybe it is not in the interest of the broadcaster that the voters get less frustrated/angry with the outcome?
BorisTheBrave 6y ago
If I care strongly about an issue, but I also know it's likely to win, isn't the best tactic for me to not vote for it to save my credits for more marginal issues? If everyone votes tacitcally, it seems like a lot of votes would be won with slim majorities. But that risks random upsets, even on issues which everyone basically agrees on!
- The_rationalist 6y ago
  This is why the base vote must not cost credit
- vivekv 6y ago
  Principles of game theory come into play at that time isnt it?
sohamsankaran 6y ago
What frustrates me most about Quadratic Voting, and in general a lot of ideas promoted by Glen Weyl and his coterie, is that arguments in its favour almost completely ignore the significant additional cognitive burden it places on the populace. American Voters barely understand the difference between the popular vote and the electoral college -- to ask them to view the results of QV votes as fair and legitimate would be a bridge too far. Hell, I know a fair bit of math and CS, and I would feel uncomfortable quickly deciding how to divide my votes across issues, let alone advising other people on what to do.
- dunkelheit 6y ago
  > American Voters barely understand the difference between the popular vote and the electoral college -- to ask them to view the results of QV votes as fair and legitimate would be a bridge too far. It is not like simpler voting methods are without subtleties (and I certainly wouldn't call electoral college simple!), but these subtleties are well-known and everybody is kind of accustomed to them. Again, immediately abandoning ordinary voting and switching to QV on the level of countries would be stupid, but I don't think they are advocating that. > Hell, I know a fair bit of math and CS, and I would feel uncomfortable quickly deciding how to divide my votes across issues, let alone advising other people on what to do. This can probably be less of a problem with sufficiently good UI. Imagine that you can play with some sliders and immediately see the consequences of your actions. After some fiddling you will probably get pretty close to what you want. Some friction can even be beneficial, encouraging people to be more thoughtful about issues. There was a study (link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2755844 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2755844) where they used QV in opinion polls and were able to get more information about relative preferences of participants because they were forced to think about correctly allocating their credits instead of blindly answering "strongly agree"/"strongly disagree" even if they didn't really care about a particular issue.
orbifold 6y ago
Prussia had a three tiered voting system, which allotted electors by dividing the tax income per district in three parts and awarding equal numbers of electors to each of the subpopulations (4.7%, 12.7%, 82.6% of the population in 1849). That it was applied per district had the interesting consequence that even wealthy people could easily be in the lowest of these three brackets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_three-class_franchise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_three-class_franchise)
bsurmanski 6y ago
This is the voting mechanism used in the game "Civilization VI" (Gathering Storm expansion), if you are interested in checking it out
tromp 6y ago
> For example, a voter with a budget of 16 vote credits can apply 1 vote credit to each of the 16 issues. However, if the individual has a stronger passion or sentiment on an issue, they could allocate 4 votes, at the cost of 16 credits, to the singular issue, effectively using up their entire budget. It would be better for this individual "A" to find another one "B" who feels strongly about another issue, and agree to both use 2 votes each on A's cause in exchange for both using 2 votes each on B's cause. That way they each pay only 2^2+2^2 = 8 instead of 16, for the same outcome. This assumes some amount of trust between A and B in case they cannot provide each other with evidence of how they voted.

124 points by k2enemy 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tgv 6y ago

So, for this to work - you need a reasonably large set of decisions to be decided in one big election, - rational agents, even though the topics is emotional. And how do they reach the conclusion that "the system will be predisposed to dominance by special interest groups with strong, concentrated interests"? That might be in some limit towards infinity case, but in practice? And why that would be a good thing, is beyond me.

erentz 6y ago
And who decides what the issues are that get voted on? This is an important flaw IMO against multi issue voting with this system. If the people making the list of issues are biased they can make one big issue for all the stuff they care about, and a thousand little issues for the stuff other people care about. Every issue needs equal footing to overcome this, meaning each issue needs to be its own independent election, effectively making QV useless.
- tgv 6y ago
  I too think it's totally possible to rig such elections. E.g., if there's something group A wants, but you don't, you add something group A is totally against, so all their votes will go to the latter issue, and the status quo is kept as far as group A is concerned. Meanwhile, their votes are lost for other issues.

antiquark 6y ago

Odd that they didn't mention Arrow's impossibility theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arrows-theorem https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arrows-theorem

WillDaSilva 6y ago
From the Quadratic voting Wikipedia page: Quadratic voting is a variant of cumulative voting in the class of cardinal voting. From the Arrow's impossibility theorem Wikipedia page: Cardinal voting electoral systems are not covered by the theorem, as they convey more information than rank orders.
godelski 6y ago
You want Gibbard's. It is an extension for cardinal systems. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%27s_theorem
naniwaduni 6y ago
Arrow's theorem is an interesting result on its own, but its practical applicability is kind of undermined by the fact that the dictatorship criterion is actually pretty rarely interesting (and is almost totally irrelevant to a ballot).
- contravariant 6y ago
  You do realise that the dictatorship criterion simply replicates the vote of one particular voter no matter what? [1] In most realistic implementations this is likely either the first or the last voter. Surely we can agree that those wouldn't really be desirable? [1]: See here for a somewhat easy to follow proof: https://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/arrow.pdf https://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/arrow.pdf
  - naniwaduni 6y ago
    The dictatorship criterion is slightly more wide-reaching than that specific construction which makes it sound silly (though, honestly, not really tremendously unfair). Your link gives a decent enough definition: > (No dictators) If a single voter prefers X to Y, but all other voters disagree, then the voting system should override the wishes of that single voter and rank Y higher than X.
    - 6y ago

munfred 6y ago

Nice to see this here, I spent the last weekend reading about quadratic voting/funding. The core idea is that in order to decide how much "endorsement" each project amongst many receives, you take the square root of how much each person gave to that project, sum that, then square it to decide how much of a matching contribution to be given. It has a couple interesting properties that make it appealing for the funding of "public goods" (such as software) via grant matching mechanisms. The main ones: - Projects with distinct supporter bases will receive more funding if they join forces as a single project with more supporters - Projects with few supporters that give a lot of money/endorsement will receive very little boost from this - You can also implement the possibility of "negative votes/funding" that allow people to "short" the projects that they consider a net negative Over the past year a grant matching mechanism using quadratic funding has been trialed in a platform called Gitcoin, which supports crowdfunding Ethereum development projects: https://gitcoin.co/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-gitcoin/ https://gitcoin.co/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-gi... A post by Vitalik Buterin describing quadratic funding is here: https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html Vitalik also wrote about the last 3 rounds of this funding on Gitcoin, they’ve been making tweaks and the results are extremely promising: https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/04/30/round5.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/04/30/round5.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/01/28/round4.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/01/28/round4.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/10/24/gitcoin.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/10/24/gitcoin.html The idea of quadratic funding came from quadratic voting, which was discussed in the 2018 book Radical Markets: https://vitalik.ca/general/2018/04/20/radical_markets.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2018/04/20/radical_markets.html In september 2018 Vitalik together with one of the book authors and another person put out a preprint describing their ideas for quadratic funding, which is very interestingly written: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.06421.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.06421.pdf The broader field under which this fits is called "mechanism design", which means inverse game theory: instead of specifying the rules and seeing what the outcome is, you decide which outcome you want and try to design a game that leads to it...a very enticing idea. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design

lalaland1125 6y ago

One key principle that a lot of people miss is that quadratic voting doesn't work with real money because people don't value wealth in a linear fashion. $5 is worth much more for a homeless person than for a millionaire. Proof of this can be seen in preference surveys or other studies of human behavior. This fact breaks the key assumption of quadratic voting and causes skewed results in that people with more money can buy more votes even with "weaker" preferences.

elpin 6y ago
This is addressed in the Wikipedia page under "Criticisms of quadratic voting mechanisms". Potential solutions include giving everyone the same amount of starting artificial "money", using one-person-one-vote when issues are polarized along wealth-lines, or making votes more expensive for the wealthy. To me, the first option of delegating everyone the same starting votes seems the most reasonable. However, I think allocating vote prices based on wealth could create some interesting incentives and resulting politics.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  What the wikipedia criticism doesn't mention issue flooding/packing. Quadratic voting works, on paper, when applied to set piece issues. It doesn't address the reality of legislatures, that "issues" are not fixed pieces on a chessboard. Issues can be split across multiple referendums. Whoever is in control can use splits to dilute votes, causing voters to spend their votes repeatedly winning a minor issue until their are depleted. Then those who 'lost' the first rounds now have the votes to win the last round. Giving everyone equal footing on every vote stops this.
  - bullfightonmars 6y ago
    I had the same thought. This system does not account for the introduction of legislation that can be voted on. Who decides which legislation to consider. Surely the party in power could sway the outcome by stacking the decions against each other. This is equivalent to gerrymandering political districts. Spread out the votes on the issues based on the electors in favor of a predtermined outcome.

xchaotic 6y ago

Actually, I think what would be more useful is the ability to vote directly on all things and delegate your vote on specific topics or in general when you want not every 4 years. We can have the technology to enable this and it would effectively kill a full time politician as a job. That think would instead be done by retirees in their spare time. And if things were not going to work in the right direction, you can vote immediately, any time. If, on the other hand you don’t care or don’t know enough about the subject, you can delegate your vote and that person can also delegate your and her vote too.

mpettitt 6y ago
The Aurora Rising books by Alistair Reynolds are set in an environment where this is the case. Basically the only automatic right is that to have a vote.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wurst_case 6y ago
I love this topic and have been researching liquid democracy on the side. We need more people researching the implications of this political system.
zupa-hu 6y ago
That’s precisely what I have came up with and wish existed.
tom_mellior 6y ago
This is precisely the idea of liquid democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
ianopolous 6y ago
This is exactly what the flux party is doing in Australia: https://voteflux.org/ https://voteflux.org/
amelius 6y ago

sandworm101 6y ago

>> Using this anonymous ballot system provides identity protection from vote buying or trading since these exchanges cannot be verified by the buyer or trader. I'm really split on that one. I'm not sure that anonymity does much to curb vote buying. I think it allows vote buying to fly under the radar. If we know how a politician votes we can then compare that to fundraising and lobbying records. With anonymous voting we are blind. A modern lobbyist doesn't care about verifying individual votes. They lobby multiple people, entire parties, to shift trends. If they fail on an issue that only means the people they were lobbying don't have control of their party. The lobbyists move to other people for the next round. Eventually they work out where to send their money and start winning regardless. At least with non-anonymous voting outsiders have some hope of tracking what is going on.

jedberg 6y ago
The author is talking about anonymous votes for citizens. Not representatives.
mkolodny 6y ago
Lobbying is very different from vote buying. Vote buying is saying to someone, "I'll buy your vote for $X". If votes are anonymous, then there's no way to verify that you actually got what you paid for.
- cheerlessbog 6y ago
  Presumably there are reliable votes on either side that are well known : subtract those from the result and you may have a fair idea whther your puppet obeyed his master. It might not be easy to confidently disobey.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Votes by people in elections are what’s being contemplated as being bought, not votes by a much smaller group of representatives on specific legislation.

godelski 6y ago

If you like this, you'll probably be interested in STAR[0]. It has a really high voter satisfaction efficiency[1]. Pretty much it is the best if you want to account for strategic voting[2] (Condorcet methods don't handle these as well, but do have a higher VSE when it isn't accounted for, but we're talking pretty close anyways). So why Cardinal systems? They are a lot easier than ranked systems. You like two people equally? You hate two people equally? No worries, just give them the same number. You basically have all the advantages in this case (I'll mention that Gibbard's[3] is an extension of Arrow's and it applies here). But why we would want this system is because it makes for the best of both worlds between the "we need parties" and "fuck parties" groups. Let's take an example: Pick your favorite outside candidate: Bernie, Tulsi, Warren, Yang. If the general election was using STAR it wouldn't matter who the Dems pushed. You could still vote for these candidates and it wouldn't help you're candidate win. So I'd imagine a HN ballot could look something like this Biden: 5 Gabbard: 7 Sanders: 10 Trump: 3 Warren: 9 Yang: 8 If Bernie, Tulsi, Warren, and Yang did not get enough votes to win, it would still be like the same election where we are choosing Biden v Trump, even though Biden wasn't your first choice. This means you can vote honestly (i.e. which candidate is closest to your opinion and not which candidate you think can win). It entirely removes the "electibility" question. Why cardinal over ranked? One simple answer is that when cardinal breaks down it turns into approval voting. Approval voting is "I like this candidate" vs "I dislike this candidate". It is essentially the way we pick where to eat with friends. Everyone says "I don't know". So you start listing off places and once enough people say "sure", you pick that. It doesn't get you the best place to eat, but no one is really unhappy either. What STAR does is basically give you the options: "Hate it", "no", "ehhh", "I guess", "fine", "yes", "hell fucking yeah" (that'd be STAR06). STAR is simple to understand, leads to high voter satisfaction, removes the electibility issue, let's parties exist without parties dominating (i.e. other parties can actually compete), easy to pick a winner, and more qualities we like in voting systems (if you're trying to make a fair system where people get representatives that represent their ideals). Of course, this does not fix the issues of money in politics, people lying, and all that. This is just one component, but I think an essential component that will have huge effects on any democratically elected system and I think it is something that we really should fight for. It is also easy to sell the idea because everyone wants a more fair voting system. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting [1]https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/ https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_voting [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%27s_theorem

cryptonector 6y ago

> Under various sets of conditions, quadratic voting has been shown to be much more efficient than one-person-one-vote in aligning collective decisions with doing the most good for the most people. That's a severe misunderstanding. We don't have elections to make collective decisions that yield "the most good for the most people". We have elections because the alternatives to not having elections are worse. Moreover, "the most good for the most people" is subjective -- any objective measures of that that you come up with will be subjectively chosen. Some will say that maximizing the health of the environment does the most good for the most people, while others will say that maximizing GDP per-capita does -- if those two are in conflict, who's right? Elections sidestep the matter: it's not about being right, but about what people want. Sometimes people want things they really really shouldn't, and they may try to get their way via elections. For that we have institutions (e.g., constitutions, courts, separation of powers, etc.) that keep them from getting those things for some time. The alternative to all that is absolute monarchy, caudillos, dictatorship, war, anarchy (for a while until you get a strongman) -- all bad things. If you manage to impose a technocracy not headed by a strongman, soon it will be, and either way may well lead to revolt, possibly civil war. I too would like a better system, because "democracy is the worst system of governance, except for all the others", but like Churchill, I'm skeptical that there is something better than a constitutional, democratic republican form of government. Utopia peddling seems very commonplace nowadays. That's a bit worrisome.

jbay808 6y ago
I think what they mean is it results in outcomes that better align with the preferences of the voters than other voting schemes.
zodiac 6y ago
I think research into voting systems like this shouldn't be read as coming from a point of view of "we have the correct objective function we prove that our system is unequivocably optimal under this objective function". Rather the objective function is a "toy model" which we understand does not capture all of reality, but hopefully captures enough of it to provide some interesting insight. I mean, obviously policies and outcomes at stake in any voting system are subjective, so that's an objection that can be levelled against any objective function, but that includes anything you choose as well. E.g. if you say that your objective function will be to minimize the risk of participants getting dissatisfied enough to violently go out of the system (i.e. revolt / civil war), well, one-person-one-vote can fail like that too; who's to say that that system is really optimal with respect to this objective function?

noodlesUK 6y ago

I really like the idea of this assuming it’s some kind of vote credit rather than money, and the vote credits are distributed equally per person. However, it doesn’t take into account that the number of things to vote on might not be fixed (or even finite). As more things to vote on are added, do people get more votes? How are they distributed? This would create a whole new variable to gerrymander.

nabla9 6y ago

Quadratic Election Law (great article) https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/quadratic-election-law https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/quadratic-election-law

mirekrusin 6y ago

Why not simply allocate weights of preference between choices so they sum up to 1 (100%)? If you require that some peoples votes are of higher weight, run the same thing but on population that votes - assigning weight to every individual - so it sums up to 1 (100%) as well. With problem defined in this way you have this intuitive tool to easily compose/merge or compare outcomes, ie. voting run for shareholders (weighted on shares) can be merged with votes of ie. employees (could be weighted on salary and/or time spent in the company) - all those can be merged givig weight to each vote run. This can be extended with more exotic things like votes (at any level) attached to probablity of some yet unknown "fact" or time or any arbirary input which is an output of any DAG created by this voting rule. This makes the whole setup dynamic. Complexity always collapses into simple, intuitive values that can be interpreted (and used as input for other voting-like decisions). Weighted voting all the way down.

arnejenssen 6y ago

I wonder how it would work on popular TV shows like American Idol. Maybe it is not in the interest of the broadcaster that the voters get less frustrated/angry with the outcome?

BorisTheBrave 6y ago

If I care strongly about an issue, but I also know it's likely to win, isn't the best tactic for me to not vote for it to save my credits for more marginal issues? If everyone votes tacitcally, it seems like a lot of votes would be won with slim majorities. But that risks random upsets, even on issues which everyone basically agrees on!

The_rationalist 6y ago
This is why the base vote must not cost credit
vivekv 6y ago
Principles of game theory come into play at that time isnt it?

sohamsankaran 6y ago

What frustrates me most about Quadratic Voting, and in general a lot of ideas promoted by Glen Weyl and his coterie, is that arguments in its favour almost completely ignore the significant additional cognitive burden it places on the populace. American Voters barely understand the difference between the popular vote and the electoral college -- to ask them to view the results of QV votes as fair and legitimate would be a bridge too far. Hell, I know a fair bit of math and CS, and I would feel uncomfortable quickly deciding how to divide my votes across issues, let alone advising other people on what to do.

dunkelheit 6y ago
> American Voters barely understand the difference between the popular vote and the electoral college -- to ask them to view the results of QV votes as fair and legitimate would be a bridge too far. It is not like simpler voting methods are without subtleties (and I certainly wouldn't call electoral college simple!), but these subtleties are well-known and everybody is kind of accustomed to them. Again, immediately abandoning ordinary voting and switching to QV on the level of countries would be stupid, but I don't think they are advocating that. > Hell, I know a fair bit of math and CS, and I would feel uncomfortable quickly deciding how to divide my votes across issues, let alone advising other people on what to do. This can probably be less of a problem with sufficiently good UI. Imagine that you can play with some sliders and immediately see the consequences of your actions. After some fiddling you will probably get pretty close to what you want. Some friction can even be beneficial, encouraging people to be more thoughtful about issues. There was a study (link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2755844 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2755844) where they used QV in opinion polls and were able to get more information about relative preferences of participants because they were forced to think about correctly allocating their credits instead of blindly answering "strongly agree"/"strongly disagree" even if they didn't really care about a particular issue.

orbifold 6y ago

Prussia had a three tiered voting system, which allotted electors by dividing the tax income per district in three parts and awarding equal numbers of electors to each of the subpopulations (4.7%, 12.7%, 82.6% of the population in 1849). That it was applied per district had the interesting consequence that even wealthy people could easily be in the lowest of these three brackets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_three-class_franchise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_three-class_franchise)

bsurmanski 6y ago

This is the voting mechanism used in the game "Civilization VI" (Gathering Storm expansion), if you are interested in checking it out

tromp 6y ago

> For example, a voter with a budget of 16 vote credits can apply 1 vote credit to each of the 16 issues. However, if the individual has a stronger passion or sentiment on an issue, they could allocate 4 votes, at the cost of 16 credits, to the singular issue, effectively using up their entire budget. It would be better for this individual "A" to find another one "B" who feels strongly about another issue, and agree to both use 2 votes each on A's cause in exchange for both using 2 votes each on B's cause. That way they each pay only 2^2+2^2 = 8 instead of 16, for the same outcome. This assumes some amount of trust between A and B in case they cannot provide each other with evidence of how they voted.