This is fascinating, as I've done some work with weighted voting systems in the past.<p>If I understand correctly, some emergent effects would occur.<p>1. The poor would collectively have less voting power.<p>2. The poor would likely become less poor due to distribution of voting funds. This would be roughly proportional to the amount of voting power lost.<p>3. The middle class, assuming it still exists the way we know it, may or may not have increased collective voting power.<p>4. Upper-middle class will gain proportionally more collective voting power than what middle class gained, but they are fewer in population. The 1% will gain even more, but they are only 1% of the population. Each social class (aside from the poor) will have more representation, while the poor will receive money (and a tiny amount of representation).<p>5. More passionate voters will pay more, and polarizing or strongly motivating issues will create a less-predictable situation at the polls. This could be a very good thing or a very bad thing, I don't know. Perhaps this is where the magic happens.<p>6. Political groups will form voting coalitons to vote certain ways, and may be paid to do so, beyond the voting fees, unless legally prohibited. However, this may prove to be not the most viable use of resources.<p>I think that this could work in positive ways. However, I wouldn't bet on it, as there are as many things that could go wrong. When dealing with complex strategy or architecture choices with unknown consequences, it is a hard sell to willingly go with one that brings significant risk. However, one can argue, especially with the current political climate and lack of faith in the system, that not switching to this would be the bigger risk.<p>I'm interested in finding smaller scale applications of such a system, as a crude proof of concept.
I accept that this is a superior voting system to one-person-one-vote. However, for it to succeed, it should not merely be superior, it should also appear superior. The trust the voters put into the system is paramount. And for that to be true, the vast majority of the voters have to understand exactly how it works. Unfortunately, and, yes, I'm a cynic, I don't believe we are close to having a voter base that is capable of understanding, and hence accepting an outcome of such a voting system.<p>Disclaimer: I'm not a US citizen.
Is this a fair system? It looks to me like the very wealthy get there own way.<p>Let's say I'm a very wealthy person, and I have $4M to spend. It looks like I can buy 2000 votes. However, money is very fluid. So I decide I'm going to find 10,000 "budget-constrained" voters and give them each $400. I'll say, "Here's $100 for buying 10 votes, and keep the remaining $300 for yourself." Now I've just purchased 100,000 votes.<p>Ah! ZenoArrow (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15206589" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15206589</a>) beat me to it. Well done.
> Majority rule based on one-person-one-vote notoriously results in tyranny of the majority–a large number of people who care only a little about an outcome prevail over a minority that cares passionately, resulting in a reduction of aggregate welfare.<p>Calling the majority tyrannous and assuming fringe interests to be naturally benevolent reeks of an agenda.
Why would you ever pay for an additional vote yourself, instead of giving the money to someone likely to vote in your favor? If you want 50 votes, just give 3$ to 1/p * 50 people with a p probability of voting for the thing you want. 1/p * 150$ is almost certainly massively cheaper than 2500$.
Hmm, but what if "a minority that cares passionately" are nazis or religious fanatics or some other extremist group? They fit the description pretty well, and just being a minority doesn't validate your ideas or views automatically. This system would, as a side-effect, effectively give more political leverage to all extremist groups out there, too.<p>In many European countries ethnical minorities are given a few guaranteed seats in the parliament to ensure that their voices are heard. The same could be done for a wider spectrum of minority groups that are of interest to society, selectively boosting their political influence, but still filtering out the crazy ones. Problem with this is that it's not as stable as giving everyone the same rights unconditionally, as it's much more prone to manipulations, like cutting deals with minority representatives who got elected without voting and making wide coalitions with them in order to take over the power, against the will of the majority.
The real problem is that there is a tyranny of sorts involved, whether by the majority or the minority is not really all that important. Consensus building should be the norm, not to ram your view down other people's throats because you can.
I didn't read the whole article, so maybe they address this, but instead of letting people buy votes with money, which favors the rich, why not allocate an equal number of special credits to everyone that they can apportion among different issues (still using the quadratic system, if that there are reasons to think that is optimal)?
Take note if you're thinking:<p>> Hmm, but what if "a minority that cares passionately" are nazis or religious fanatics or some other extremist group?<p>Then they cause an outcome by <i>paying all the people that are not in the minority lots of money</i>, and then next election the majority uses that money, more effectively per voter, to reverse the outcome.<p>If you think the median individual is rational enough to be allowed to vote at all (I don't), then the passionate minority still has to keep the majority happy or else they transfer large sums of money and therefore a larger sum of distributed-voting-power onto that group for future elections.<p>Understanding the quadratic effects and that <i>the money is returned per capita</i> is absolutely key to the beauty of it. Imagine 10 rich voters buying an election out of 1000 voters. They spend $10 million to do so. The next election, those 990 (now unhappy) voters, with the proceeds of the $10m money they received, can all buy <i>many more</i> distributed votes than the 10 voters were able to buy, and reverse the decision overwhelmingly.<p>So if you're really worried about this (and think voters are rational), just allow snap elections or votes of no confidence if there's enough protest, and the majority with their new dollars can right the ship very quickly.
If you think of the market as another democratic institution (albeit with another set of principles for what's considered fair), could this be a step towards addressing both? (A market is afer all just another way to try and select preferences fairly and effective)<p>I've long found it an interesting idea to allocate limited capital assets (aka land) in a similar manner, select best use (aka owner) through highest bid (aka vote), but offset the opportunity cost, and rent extraction, by expressing said bid in a rent paid as a public dividend.<p>Perhaps when discussin public policy decision by means of voting with your wallet it opens the door to also discuss market decisions as a democracy implementation.<p>(Oh well, I have a 58-page paper to read to see if this comment was entirely of topic)
The real problem is the winners take small American electoral system and the lack of mandatory voting.<p>Fix either one, preferably fix both, and I suspect people will stop proposing brain dead ideas like this.
<i>> Weyl and Lalley prove that the collective decision rapidly approximates efficiency as the number of voters increases. By contrast, no extant voting procedure is efficient.</i><p>I'm assuming they're working within some mathematical formalism where efficiency is defined in some manner, but I can't access the linked paper. Can anyone explain what efficiency means in this context or provide some links to the mathematical framework for this stuff?
At a cursory read, this is similar to Demand-Revealing Referenda / Revealed Preferences, I think? <a href="http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2007/03/trident_how_to_.html" rel="nofollow">http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...</a> <a href="https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/half-baked-ideas-demand-revealing-referenda-applied-to-fedora-features/" rel="nofollow">https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/half-baked-ideas-deman...</a><p>I love that there are so many better ways to vote, and I hate that we still use FPTP.
Does anyone know whether this has any effect on Arrow's Impossibility Theorem? Or does it violate some assumption, making it a separate (but related) issue? (Of course a theorem is a theorem, so it's not going to invalidate it...)<p>I'd assume that this paper is written by someone who has intimate knowledge of AIT, just looking for some perspective.
One question that remains for me other than whether this is fair to groups with income <x>, is: how do you decide which proposals to vote on? Otherwise, there'd be incentive to submit ridiculous proposals that greatly disadvantage the wealthy, who would then have to pony up to keep those proposals from being implemented.
HN thread from two years ago, featuring participation from the paper's authors:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9477747" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9477747</a>
It only favors extremists and extremely rich over the normal democratic process. But since the US is already an oligarchy, it makes sense for them.<p>And it's of course a cheap take on the tragedy of the commons.
How does it work?<p>If there is say - Aerith and Bob running for president, say there are Charlie and Drako that want to buy two votes each for Aerith.<p>Do they each pay 4 or do they pay 16?
This is certainly an intriguing and creative proposal.<p>But as the paper notes, it is mainly around referendum voting. And referendum voting can be viewed as opposed to representative democracy. Voters will happily vote yes on one referendum for higher benefits, and yes on another referendum on lower taxes, and the end result is laws that don't make sense. This can be seen as an example of the Condorcet Paradox [1]. But the point is, referendums are generally a terrible way to make decisions.<p>So on page 45 of the paper [2], the authors discuss that democracies are generally run according to representation, not referendums. So first they suggest using QV to elect candidates. Yet when given a choice between 2 (or even a handful) of candidates, do we really expect QV to make a difference? Republicans and Democrats are both extremely passionate, so I'd call it a wash. There's such a mix of social and economic issues large and small, QV doesn't seem to help untangle that.<p>The second thing the authors suggest is for representatives to "put their constituents' money at stake" when voting on laws. The authors wisely don't go too deeply into this, because it's clearly nonsensical when representatives are from a district which contains significant members of both sides. They actually admit as much ("QV in representative
assemblies would probably make more sense in a parliamentary system than in a presidential system") but actually get their terminology wrong -- it would make more sense in a <i>proportional representation</i> system than in a <i>first-past-the-post</i> system. (Presidential/parliamentary refers to the relationship between the legislature and the executive, which this proposal has nothing to do with -- which reveals their amatueur-ish level of analysis in this case.) At least they're honest in saying "many details clearly need to be worked out".<p>But I have an even more basic question, even for deciding referendums: who determines the base price of a vote? If a single vote cost $0.10 or $100, I imagine that could drastically affect outcomes, and I don't see them address this question anywhere.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox</a><p>[2] <a href="https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=287114112074116088083081078093027028127035061037007087028124077125100068075086098105101029122061103047118074117001004065016074013074027021053114119097009025082072058089039087066113081004111112107026019118092094008080003119026104024028079005074103100&EXT=pdf" rel="nofollow">https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=2871141120741160...</a>
What's the reasoning behind choosing the power of 2 for this?<p>It could be tuned to a power of 1.9 or 2.1 or 3 or 1.5.<p>Aside from being a round number, how do we know 2 is best?
What would be the pro/con of a higher exponent?
What about the pro/con of a lower exponent?