The user experience problems of quadratic voting

This is susceptible to ballot poisoning: lobby to put something you had no intention of doing but your opposition feels very strongly about on the ballot and then watch them waste their credits “reaffirming” the status quo of the hot-button issue while educating “your” voters to prioritize the actual issue under contention.<p>Imagine a ballot with one contentious question A. Opposition Y adds a question B they know will flop but is guaranteed to disproportionately attract all the attention <i>of the other party</i> to the ballot. Party X voters waste their credits on the red herring question B (which has greater than 50% support in the overall population anyway and would never fail them) while opposition Y advises its voters to spend the credits on the actual question A they care about.<p>As a completely contrived example, the real question is a controversial “add a carbon tax” that could go either way and one party either adds “ban all abortions in all cases for everyone” or “ban all firearms for all people” to the ballot to misdirect. Either of these is guaranteed to disproportionately attract all the attention of one of the parties more than the other despite neither having a remote chance of passing. Because of the phrasing and the topic chosen, even if you don’t educate your voters you can rely on the fact that <i>their</i> voters simply care a lot more about the topic than yours do.

Here’s a quadratic voting demo that looks nice and provides more intuition: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2021&#x2F;12&#x2F;18&#x2F;quadratic-voting" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2021&#x2F;12&#x2F;18&#x2F;quadratic-v...</a>

I don&#x27;t understand how quadatic voting can deal with collusion. Say I want to give 4 credits to A, and a friend wants to give 4 credits to B. So each of us gives 2 votes to their preference. But if we join together, we each give 2 credits to each option, that is sqrt(2) votes. So each option gets 2*sqrt(2) ~= 2.8 votes instead. So we are strongly incentived to found a party and to pool our votes. I&#x27;m not sure this is what people intended.<p>It also seems to punish caring strongly for a certain issue, whereas I wonder if that isn&#x27;t maybe an indicator that you are informed about a topic, and thus your vote should count more rather than less?

What a bizarre voting system, it values diversity of vote credits which incentives people to organize their voting strategies. Multiple people with overlapping concerns want to coordinate their credit spending. People with extra credits and no desirable issue to spend them on want to trade with others in similar situations. Seems like a great way to bias voting against smaller disorganized causes, unfairly suppressing minority representation in the vote counts.

On the point of the results being hard to interpret, and sanity-check, i have a couple of thoughts.<p>Firstly, rather than just publishing the total number of votes, and vote credits, for each choice, publish the histogram of vote credits. 60 people allocated 1 credit, 40 people allocated 2 credits, 35 people allocated 3 credits, etc. That is sufficient to verify the total votes for that choice, and across all choices, to verify the total vote credits used, allowing sanity-checking. It can also be used to give some sort of visual indication of the structure of voting: imagine a bar comprising a fixed-width slice per vote, sorted in order of ascending credits per vote, coloured according to credits per vote. An option with uniform support will have a uniform colour, with the intensity of colour indicating the concentration of support; an option with some weak and some strong supporters will have a gradient of colour.<p>Secondly, rather than mapping credits to votes and just displaying votes, consider n^2 - n of the credits allocated by a voter to a choice &#x27;wasted&#x27;, and display a total of wasted credits as an additional part of the bar. The first part of the bar shows votes, and so which option wins, but the total bar shows credits allocated, and so some measure of total support.

What I would change in the Strikedao voting app (for what I can see from the videos): show people how much will next vote cost them. So, if you haven&#x27;t voted for option A, your first vote costs 1. After voting for the first time, option A&#x27;s cost grows to 3 to cast your second vote, then to 5 to cast your third vote, and so on. Showing an ascending odd-numbered cost for voting would be more intuitive than thinking about square roots and whatnot.

I generally agree with the premise of the article and don’t think quadratic voting is a good option for a democratic government — though it might make sense in other situations.<p>However I don’t understand the point about not being able to use all credits because you have to spend them buying whole numbers of votes. Why not allow fractional votes? I realize there is probably a good reason, but I don’t see it immediately.

Hi, OP here. I&#x27;m grateful for getting this exposure. Thank you!<p>I wanna give a shout out to the commentators on &#x2F;r&#x2F;programming and that we had a meaningful discussion that may be relevant too: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;programming&#x2F;comments&#x2F;tptbzb&#x2F;the_user_experience_problems_of_quadratic_voting&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;programming&#x2F;comments&#x2F;tptbzb&#x2F;the_use...</a> &lt;3

This is fairly interesting, but I do have to note that counting the desire to not have pollution as the externality is... interesting.

There is a chapter in the excellent book &quot;Why Flip a Coin&quot; dedicated to exploring voting alternatives. The main point of the chapter is that given three intuitively obvious requirements (like adding a 3rd candidate should not change the relative order of the first two) - it can be mathematically proven that NO voting scheme will satisfy them.<p>See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...</a>

On the face of it it seems weird that votes for one thing can be influenced by the existence of unrelated issues on the same ballot.<p>It makes more sense if you&#x27;re making a selection among many people for one position, but if you have, say, 5 different issues on a ballot, you can influence the impact of those 5 by adding useless issues to the ballot. (e.g., if you are a pink legislator you can feign partisanship and add a bunch of low-importance purple issues to the ballot so that purple voters cannot easily oppose your pink issue).

I wonder if there&#x27;s been much research into modelling voting as an adversarial process in which different parties (and not necessarily the political parties) try to attack the various aspects of the process, including the stages before, during, and after the vote-casting and counting takes place.<p>For example, we&#x27;ve seen attacks on voter registration and availability of polling stations, and bizarre (but insidious) schemes like deceptively-named candidates and misinformation about when an election is held. We also have the problem of &quot;fraudits&quot; where various groups try to undermine the confidence in elections that have already taken place.<p>It seems like any attempt at electoral reform should take into account this adversarial context, and consider any proposed clever mathematical formula or any technology more complex than a pencil to be part of the epistemological attack surface that needs to be minimised as much as possible.<p>That doesn&#x27;t mean that current systems are perfect, or that FUD is an unbeatable strategy for opposing reforms, but it does mean that it&#x27;s not enough for a proposal to offer elections that are more convenient or that have better psephological properties.

I&#x27;ve followed a few links that explain the mechanism of quadratic voting, but still haven&#x27;t seen a simple explanation of why it might be a good idea.<p>What makes quadratic voting better than just converting credits directly into votes -- one credit, one vote? (&quot;Cumulative voting&quot;)

Quadratic voting seems like a very convoluted way to say: &quot;The rich should have all the votes&quot;<p>If voting incurs a cost, and the more of that cost you can pay, the greater your vote, then all that does is disenfranchise people who cannot afford to vote.<p>This is just poll taxes 2.0, now with extra feudalism.

Yes. Every scheme I’ve seen to “improve” first past the post brings in all sorts of problems that the big brain political pundits are blind to (willfully or not).

<i>Builds MVP-quality product</i><p><i>Announces that the world isn&#x27;t ready for the idea as a whole</i>