
Quadratic Voting (2014) - evunveot
http://ericposner.com/quadratic-voting/
======
glenweyl
The equity issues you all are raising are very important, but death with in
detail here:
[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956).
The simplest solution is just to use an artificial currency that everyone is
given equal amounts of but can spread over the decisions most important to
them. In this piece with Rory Sutherland we discuss this:
[http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9512322/humans-are-
doing...](http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9512322/humans-are-doing-
democracy-wrong-bees-are-doing-it-right/)

~~~
sytelus
There seem to be one big issue with this voting system. It allows variable
number of votes per individual but how does an individual choose how much cost
to take and exactly how much to vote? I think it is a fallacy to assume that
individual would set the number of votes depending on how important they think
is the issue. Instead they must _speculate_ how others would vote and optimize
their cost accordingly. For example, an individual may depend on wrong
information to arrive at conclusion that everyone is in agreement with him/her
sentiment and decide to spend less even though they deeply care about specific
outcome. Mean while a small group might be secretly conspiring and spends huge
sums to win their desired outcome. I would suspect that this voting system
would promote speculation based market which can be easily manipulated by
either asymmetric information or incorrect information by a small group.

Another thing to think about is too many small minority groups. So for
instance, assume there are N questions to vote for and for each of these
questions, we have a significant minority group that deeply cares about
specific outcome. At some point, because of required increased expenditure,
wouldn't votes for all questions favor minority sentiment?

I think we have to understand that while there is a dark side to "tyranny-of-
majority", there is an important bright side too: It shields from scenarios
where small group of radicals take over the system because they deeply care
about their ideas that are not good for majority.

~~~
sytelus
For people, who are new to HN, do not use downvotes to express your
disagreement with author. Use them if the comment was off track, spam, bad
mannered or in general not adding any value whatsoever.

~~~
thomasahle
That is what I thought as well, until this thread happened
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9237644](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9237644)
Apparently it is the official HN policy that up/down voting is for
agreement/disagreement. :-(

~~~
Frozenlock
And downvoted posts become impossible to read unless you use a custom CSS.

Nice.

Then I wonder why HN sounds like a cult on some subjects...

------
jmount
With all due respect, it sounds like while it might fight flaws common to
other voting systems, pay-back based voting will have its own gamesmanship.

Consider 1,000 voters upwind of a factory and 1,000 more voters downwind.
Suppose the factory wants to stop scrubbing its exhaust for a savings of
$1,000 (to itself) and cost of $10 to each down-wind voter (in health costs).
All the factory has to do is propose the same initiative (to allow the removal
of regulation) again and again and not vote that much. Each time the down-wind
people try to protect their selves they transfer money to up-wind abstainers.
After enough rounds of this the down-winders are impoverished and the factory
buys the election cheaply.

Edit: and instead of voting large the factory could try to bribe the up-wind
voters or a faction of the down-wind voters.

~~~
glenweyl
This is not an equilibrium; the down-winders would not vote unless they
thought that vote mattered. In any case we have a nominating process to avoid
this sort of manipulation; see
[http://ssrn.com/abstract=2321904](http://ssrn.com/abstract=2321904) or
[http://ssrn.com/abstract=2343956](http://ssrn.com/abstract=2343956).

~~~
jmount
My point is: it is a bad situation, equilibrium or not. And some down-winders
have to vote if the factory votes a little bit each time. Or even if the
factory threatens to vote (and then doesn't). If all the magic is in the
nominating process- then we really don't need the voting mechanism.

~~~
savanaly
If it's not an equilibrium then it can't happen! That doesn't make the claim
foolproof or anything-- maybe it's not actually an equilibrium for one reason
or another we didn't foresee, but the phrase "it is a bad situation,
equilibrium or not" is nonsensical.

~~~
infinity0
Assuming that the proofs make perfect assumptions that exactly match real
life, sure.

"the down-winders would not vote unless they thought that vote mattered." \-
this decision requires mental resources to make, and if the rational choice is
too complex then many people wouldn't make it, breaking your assumptions.

Is there any research that tries to model the economic cost of coming to a
"rational" decision (as defined by the voting game)?

~~~
glenweyl
Yes, in this paper
([http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2571012](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2571012))
I also consider the case where people make mistakes. You can study equilibrium
even in models where people are not perfectly rational.

------
evanpw
It seems important to distinguish between actually voting, where everyone
votes or has a chance to vote (at near-zero cost), and lobbying for individual
legislation, where only the very highly-motivated "vote", at high cost.

In the latter case (lobbying), most people seem to believe that small groups
exert too much power over the process. But that's entirely because the
majority have essentially zero influence. If some small industry has an
intense preference for a special tax break, they would easily be defeated if
everyone else expressed their mild disapproval. The problem is not that the
rich get too many votes, but that the first vote is too costly.

In ordinary voting, the opposite situation is more likely. A small group of
people are very passionate about some issue (gay marriage, drug
liberalization, environmental protection), while the majority doesn't know or
care very much, but is slightly negative on average. In that case, the weak
preferences of the majority win out, giving an inefficient outcome. This is
where Quadratic Voting could help.

~~~
ericposner
People will be more likely to vote in the first place because they can exert
greater influence over the outcomes they care about (say, gay marriage). Once
in the voting booth, they can use marginal votes against things they oppose
but less passionately (say, farm subsidies). Of course, there are complex
design issues--just how much should people vote about, and should a
representative system be used instead. But on balance QV should motivate
people to vote more not less.

------
nutate
Their startup:
[http://collectivedecisionengines.com/](http://collectivedecisionengines.com/)
seems to give decision makers X units of currency and then refund them the
average outlay.

It seems like it would have failure modes in communities w/ transient
populations. As in, if you give me 100 units, I'll buy 10 votes and know that
I at least voted as much as I could. But in conditions where you have a fixed
community it could work well.

Clearly in the real world if you have 100 credits, a Koch brother would have
~100 million credits... Bill Gates ~200 million credits... (based on US median
net worth of $44,000 vs their respective 42billion and ~80billion)

But there are plenty of decisions to be made that could be done with fake
credits in a controlled environment.

~~~
ericposner
If a Koch brother really wants to use up $40 billion on voting, he could put
200,000 votes on a single issue. If everyone opposes his position, he could be
easily outvoted by a small town of low-income people casting a couple votes
each for a few dollars. They would also get nearly all his money.

~~~
nutate
That is quite true, the redistribution on the backend after the vote would be
amazing. :D

------
higherpurpose
I still prefer approval voting over it:

[http://www.electology.org/#!approval-
voting/cc04](http://www.electology.org/#!approval-voting/cc04)

1) elimintes the spoiler effect problem

2) most "approved"/liked candidate can win, not necessarily the most "popular"
within a certain group

3) gives lesser known candidates/parties a much better chance to compete and
rise up against the incumbents

4) statistically proven to be one of the voting systems with the least remorse

5) very simple (essentially HN style voting)

Range voting could also work, but it's debatable whether the extra "scores"
are worth the loss of simplicity. Range voting also seems to have a bigger
degree of regret, although it does seem to do slightly better with electing
the "ideal" candidate.

~~~
ClayShentrup
The non-garbled link is www.electology.org/approval-voting

> Range voting also seems to have a bigger degree of regret

No. It has the lowest regret of any commonly discussed system.
[http://ScoreVoting.net/BayRegsFig.html](http://ScoreVoting.net/BayRegsFig.html)

> although it does seem to do slightly better with electing the "ideal"
> candidate.

Lower regret = more ideal candidate. So you just said a contradiction.

------
ychantit
People in North Africa have been doing this for a while now.

When I was kid we had a congressman where I lived in Morocco who win a
election with a strategy similar to a quadratic voting. His team went to the
poorest neighborhoods of the district and they distribute half (literally half
the bill) of today equivalent of 20$ and you get the rest after the election,
it had cost him roughly around 100k$ and he won. From the power he got he had
made a lot more and been able to invest again in his own district and get two
more districts for his son and brother in law in the next election... this is
a bad idea at least for the poor.

The point is you need an independent third party to establish a fair market
value for the votes otherwise the poor will be ripped of...

------
jellicle
> 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.

Notoriously? In actual practice, U.S. democracy and many others function the
exact opposite of what is described (passionate minorities such as Iowa corn
farmers and F-35 plane builders and M1A1 tank builders and various
intellectual property advocates routinely beat unpassionate majorities,
resulting in laws that are bad for most and good for a very few, decreasing
overall welfare). The idea that the masses are voting themselves loot from the
treasury over the objections of the noble elites is a fantasy that exists only
in some libertarian heads, and never in the real world. I can't really read
any further in this article. This is basic stuff.

------
cge
I'm interested to know what the authors think about the problem that could be
called vote splitting or support buying, which would be akin to vote buying in
one-person-one-vote system. This seems particularly relevant because, unlike
most systems, buying the support of small numbers of voters could be useful.

Consider the case given elsewhere in this thread of 10,000 voters willing to
pay only $1 against a proposal, and a single supporter. That supporter would
need to pay over $100m for the measure to pass, giving each person against it
at least $10,000.

Now suppose that person takes their $100m, and only purchases $25m worth of
votes. They find someone else, and transfer $35m to them with the agreement
that the person will buy $25m in votes, and keep the remaining $10m. A person
who is only willing to vote $1 against a measure is unlikely to turn down such
a deal, but it saves the lone supporter $40m.

It seems like it would be very difficult to police this, as the transfers
would not necessarily need to be direct. For example, verbal agreements
between the one wealthy, lone supporter and nine opponents that those
opponents would get contracts in the future worth $1m each would be hard to
notice, but would save the supporter $90m. An employer could give bonuses
vaguely tied to the success or failure of a measure, and so on. And in all of
these cases, the savings are so extreme that vast amounts could be spent
hiding the fraud.

Even _without_ buying the votes of opponents, it can be very beneficial for
wealthy, motivated supporters to transfer money for voting to poorer or less
motivated supporters, to move closer to the optimal funds arrangement (all
amounts equal). In some cases, this could be almost indistinguishable from
legitimate behavior, and would lead to all sorts of claims: is a
philanthropist giving money to the poor to help them live, or to support her
social agenda?

In a one-person-one-vote system, buying the votes of individuals requires mass
fraud to have an impact. In QV, however, every doubling in size of a group
that votes optimally doubles the number of votes they can buy at the same
total cost. Thus it seems like small, motivated groups have a very, very large
motivation toward fraud, while that fraud could take place at an extremely
small level that would be difficult to detect. This doesn't even need to be
organized: it makes sense for even a single motivated supporter to go out on
their own and split their vote with one other person, perhaps a close friend
of theirs.

~~~
stormbrew
> In a one-person-one-vote system, buying the votes of individuals requires
> mass fraud to have an impact.

More specifically, even if you do go to the trouble of outright buying
people's votes, since secret ballots are generally considered the way to go
(though they haven't always been, even relatively recently), it's
extraordinarily difficult to have confidence in the value of your 'purchase'
because you have no way of knowing if the person you paid off did it.

In this system, the scaling may make it a lot easier to identify that a person
followed your directions and spent a particular amount on the vote...

~~~
glenweyl
We are actively working on the identifiability issue; Ron Rivest (of RSA
encryption) is writing a paper for a conference on the topic trying to solve
this: [http://bfi.uchicago.edu/events/quadratic-voting-and-
public-g...](http://bfi.uchicago.edu/events/quadratic-voting-and-public-good)

------
Strilanc
How does this system deal with the logarithmic value of dollars, and the
asymmetry in who has them?

When you get ln(X) happiness from X dollars, you are sacrificing 1/X happiness
per dollar spent. A billionaire buying a thousand votes is paying ln(10^9 -
(10^3)^2) - ln(10^9) ~= 1 milli-utilon, but a thousandaire buying ten votes is
paying ln(10^3 - 10^2) - ln(10^3) ~= 100 milli-utilons.

It seems like billionaires, who easily get a factor of a thousand advantage in
marginal votes-per-happiness cost over 99% of the population, will massively
distort a quadratic voting market.

Uniformly redistributing the voting cost makes that effect smaller, but I
don't think it overcomes the logarithmic effect.

~~~
SamReidHughes
Billionares are vastly outnumbered by thousandaires. For example, in an FPTP
election their ability to buy 31600 votes would, nationally, let them move the
50 yard line, towards which politics converges, 0.001% to the left or right.

~~~
rosser
_> Billionares are vastly outnumbered by thousandaires._

While true, the billionaires' liquid and un-accounted-for dollars vastly
outnumber the thousandaires'. If Joe Average has to choose between voting on
something and paying his mortgage, while Jim Squillionaire is choosing between
voting and buying another jet (yes, hyperbole; my point still obtains), guess
whose votes you're more likely to see...

~~~
SamReidHughes
I just explained why spending $1 billion on votes won't affect the outcome of
politics, in the other sentence of my post, that you didn't quote. That's part
of the reason the cost of votes is nonlinear in this scheme.

~~~
PepeGomez
You didn't explain anything, you only provided a cryptic analogy.

~~~
SamReidHughes
Don't you have your square roots memorized? 31600 is approximately the square
root of a billion. The U.S. population is about 316 million.

~~~
glenweyl
That is the point of the software!

------
jacques_chester
> _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._

Except in voluntary voting systems, where highly motivated voters dominate the
apathetic majority.

~~~
smsm42
Mandatory voting won't help as apathetic votes would be either distributed
randomly or given according to preference having nothing to do with the
issues, such as which candidate is better looking or which one appears more on
a popular comedy shows.

~~~
jacques_chester
You're speaking hypothetically, but the experience of countries with mandatory
voting bears out that mandatory voting drives parties towards the median
voter, not the fringes. It's called Hotelling's Law.

America and Australia have a lot in common, including that of people of
eligible to vote, those who have religious aims are in the minority.

One of these countries is dominated by the politics of trying to enforce the
laws of herders from thousands of years ago. And the other is not.

Motivated voters -- such as folk with a religious bee in their bonnet -- are
highly over-represented in voluntary systems. In a mandatory system, the
median voter dominates. That's generally a better outcome, because the median
voter is more interested in Shit Just Sorta Approximately Working, rather than
ultra-serious micromotives.

~~~
smsm42
USA and Australia are very different politically. I have no idea what you mean
by "the laws of herders from thousands of years ago", but if I venture a guess
I'd assume you refer to the Judeo-Christian principles. That ye olde "do not
murder", "do not steal", "do not perjury" stuff. If so, I'm pretty sure,
unless I missed some recent developments, that both USA and Australia are
still on board with enforcing those. As USA is about 15 times bigger than
Australia, fringes are bigger too - on bigger sample, you get more place for
exceptional outcomes to manifest.

> because the median voter is more interested in Shit Just Sorta Approximately
> Working,

Why this is a good thing? It is known that every hard problem has easy, cheap,
understandable and incorrect solution. Or, as you call it, "Shit Just Sorta
Approximately Working" but not actually working because of complicated reasons
that median voter wouldn't bother to comprehend. So you get a lot of voting
for shit that sounds good but doesn't work. How that's good for anything?

~~~
jacques_chester
> _the Judeo-Christian principles_

It may shock you to learn that legal systems other than the Mosaic law have
that "don't kill or steal" stuff. I was thinking of the more tasteless parts
of Leviticus. In fact it was worked out and written down thousands of years
before anyone was thinking about leaving Egypt.

Another name for it is "Judeo-Greco-Persian-Roman-Christian-Celtic
principles", given the roots of the western culture which Britain transmitted
to the colonies.

> _Why this is a good thing?_

Because it leads to a Benthamite political culture. Australian politics is
either boring or depressing, American politics is either exciting or
depressing. But the boring-or-depressing option leads to occasional outbreaks
of good policy. Australia is one of the less-worse governed countries in the
world over the past 30 years.

Neither side of politics needs to pander to a narrow base, except as mild lip
service. So they tend to be centrist managerialists. Boring but sometimes
effective.

~~~
smsm42
> legal systems other than the Mosaic law have that "don't kill or steal"
> stuff.

It wouldn't shock me, but it so happened one that is in force in US and
Australia draws largely from Christian law and moral traditions, which borrows
a lot from Judaic tradition (not only, Roman too, some Celtic, very little
Persian as far as I know). In other countries, it is different, but in those
two specific ones that's where the roots are, that's just history.

> Australia is one of the less-worse governed countries in the world over the
> past 30 years.

How do you know that? Australia doesn't have the same problems the US has, by
many dimensions, and is very different geographically, population-wise,
traditionally and so on. How you would even compare the governance, on which
basis?

> Boring but sometimes effective.

Effective doing what? I don't know much about Australian politics, I admit,
but I know Australia has no freedom of speech - people were imprisoned or
otherwise sanctioned by government for merely expressing various political
positions. Or this one: [https://wikileaks.org/aus-suppression-
order/](https://wikileaks.org/aus-suppression-order/). But maybe the
government is efficient doing something else than protecting basic rights -
but what?

~~~
jacques_chester
> _one that is in force in US and Australia draws largely from Christian law
> and moral traditions_

Nonsense. The Common Law doesn't take the Torah as a source of precedent,
neither does it look to the continental law for precedent. The bible is
useless as a source of anything other than motherhood statements.

It spends less than a page listing the "ten commandments", of which only 4
(killing, theft, adultery and false witnessing) are actually enforceable laws
of social consequence.

It then goes on to spend pages and pages and _pages_ listing interior
decoration instructions for the Holy Tabernacle. Even a few scribbled pages of
notes about common moral questions ("is killing in self-defence murder?", "do
Moses's instructions to commit genocide override the commandments?") would
have been helpful. Not a peep. It was left to Rabbis and Churchmen to make any
sense of.

What does the Bible say about the common defences to a murder charge? Nothing.
About the intricacies of trial law? Not a peep. The bread-and-butter legal
issues -- property, trusts, estates, torts, duties, equity -- that occupy 99%
of the daily life of the law and most of its positive value to society?
Nowhere to be seen.

Any major actually-used legal system utterly ignores the Bible as a source of
law. Probably because it was not written by lawyers.

> _How you would even compare the governance, on which basis?_

Very much a matter of opinion. But if I had to gamble on which country will be
bankrupt in 100 years, I'd be asking to settle the bet in Australian dollars.

> _Effective doing what? I don 't know much about Australian politics, I
> admit, but I know Australia has no freedom of speech - people were
> imprisoned or otherwise sanctioned by government for merely expressing
> various political positions._

Actually, the High Court has consistently found that the Australian
Constitution provides freedom of communication on political matters, starting
with _ACTV v The Commonwealth_ , proportionate to public safety.

------
toolslive
Most of the time, it's not the voting system that's the problem, it's the set
of things you can vote for. Sometimes, you can vote A or B but you like
neither alternative. Maybe you should be able to express your dislike too. A
vote like "I don't care who gets elected, as long as it is not this specific
person".

~~~
mhuffman
The ability to "negative vote", really should be a thing. Since the US system,
in particular, is set up in a way that makes change unrealistic for the
"common folk" it would be the only way I can think of for poor people to
really get any disapproval across.

~~~
glenweyl
I completely agree. This is a crucial feature of QV with multiple
alternatives. QV also has a nominating process to ensure the right things are
on the ballot.

------
bspates
I may be missing something, but it seems as though QV is associating how
passionate a party (specifically a minority) is about a topic with the
importance that their view be equally represented against an apathetic
opposition. The problem inherent to this is lack of education of topics that
will be well know to a minority party but unknown to a majority. The
majorities ignorance is not the same as not caring, and the impetus to gain
knowledge may not always be clear. Beyond this its seems like minority
opinions no matter how impassioned should not become the center of debate
merely because they have spent more money. The act of voting involves far more
than the act itself as evidenced by the prolonged campaign periods in the US.
The national attention span is short and is already dominated by the extreme
and the rich.

~~~
glenweyl
As Marty Gillens argues in his book Affluence and Influence
([http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9836.html](http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9836.html)),
on almost every issue there is a sub group within those who feel a particular
way on an issue that is highly informed about that issue and a subgroup that
is less informed. 1p1v gives both groups equal weight while QV gives much more
weight to the informed. This is much fairer, because the uniformed group will
typically be easily swayed by advertising and manipulation to vote the other
way, making groups with more uniformed people easily undermined even if there
are some members that are informed and who could speak for this group's
interests. This is a major problem in American politics: the poor often favor
less redistribution than the rich do (again see Gillens)! So I actually think
QV would improve the situation precisely along the dimensions you are
highlighting.

~~~
McDoku
Part of the real issue is identity politics and the black box thinking it
generated.

Rethorical devices would still maintain the greatest power. You don't need
information just conviction and resources.

------
jmckib
Tyranny by majority is important, but I wonder if quadratic voting would
address another important issue: if enough people are participating, then the
cost of voting (research + going to polling station) outweighs the benefit
(changing the outcome). The cost of voting is roughly fixed, while the benefit
decreases rapidly as the number of participants grows.

Maybe if quadratic voting was used, then only people that truly care about an
issue would vote, giving the individuals that do care enough influence to make
voting worthwhile.

------
ryanthejuggler
I feel like this could potentially work with "voting tokens" or something else
that's not money. Maybe with some sort of crypto verification. You'd still
have the scarcity that the system demands, but without the "inequality
baggage" you'd start out with if the system were implemented with actual
money.

If you implemented this system using money to buy votes, then you'd end up...
well probably with something like the inequality situation we have today.

~~~
smsm42
I think one feature of the system is that the accumulated funds are then
distributed equally after the vote. With tokens, this would not be very
useful, as if everybody gets the same amount tokens, there's no difference
between getting one token and getting one million, tokens themselves have no
value.

~~~
pavel_lishin
They have value when it's time to vote for something.

~~~
smsm42
If voting tokens do not perish between votes, that leads to the similar
inequalities if I abstain from voting for a number of cycles. If old tokens do
expire, then it doesn't matter when everybody else gets the same - up to the
limit of the quantization of tokens, how many tokens you have is less
important than how much more tokens than your opponents you have . I.e. if
there is a yes/no question, the important thing for you, if you favor "yes",
it to have more tokens for "yes" than for "no", but how many tokens for each
does not matter. In multilateral choice it's more complex but I think if you
have enough tokens to not be limited to voting for one thing because you only
have one token, it is again the same situation.

~~~
ryanthejuggler
> if I abstain from voting for a number of cycles

The whole point of the system is to railroad people into only voting for what
really matters to them, by "saving up" their votes. I think this isn't a flaw
but a feature.

I'd expect that there'd be a fairly large number of tokens so that
quantization wouldn't come into play too much.

------
goodmachine
Since QV appears, on the face of it at least, to be a single-round blind
auction, why would it not be vulnerable to bad signalling and consequent price
distortion? As another poster commented below, all players are blindly
speculating on the real price of a win.

Take any vote as an example. One side announces they will pay a mighty sum (or
have already marshalled a sufficiency) towards a vote Con to scare off those
supporting an opposing vote Pro.

Pro voters may react either by believing this signal (and not voting/ buying
in at all) or issuing their own claims - all are strongly incentivised to
exaggerate their own preferences and strength of support prior to the vote.

Bad signalling is bound to occur AFAICT

1\. To win the vote cheaply with FUD by scaring off both the apathetic
(apathetes, let's call them that) and some percentage of the previously
committed.

2\. To punish the winning side financially (maximising Winner's Curse) in case
of my side losing. This benefits the losers by weakening the winners as a
precautionary measure for the next round of voting on some other issue too.
That is, I may be likely to oppose the opponents of gay marriage on other
issues too, for example. So it's 'worth it' to hurt them.

As an aside, QV appears to have a limited concept of time and the irrational
(pre-vote FUD, post-vote revenge) alike. There is a distinct taste of
'rational actors' acting rationally (when will they learn?) underpinning the
scheme generally.

3\. To benefit from maximising pro-rata payout if you are a canny apathete.

I must be missing _something very obvious here_ and would be delighted to be
corrected. Otherwise QV looks like a fascinating, useful and interesting probe
for tabletop scenarios (using virtual currencies for expressing trivial
preferences, say).

~~~
glenweyl
As we prove in this paper
([http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2264245](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2264245)),
a small group can never beat out a large population with an overall preference
in the opposite direction in equilibrium, regardless of what they announce.
The reason is that any small individual or group can never really buy very
many votes. $10 billion buys only 100,000 votes. Do you think this could
really deter others from voting? Now a large group could deter other from
voting, but of course this can happen under one-person-one vote as well. If
you think Obama is the overwhelming favorite you do not show up. But that is
not really how things work out in practice and I doubt they would under QV. To
begin with, the members of the large group would have no incentive to show up
either. It requires assuming a very strong asymmetry across groups which will
mess up any system.

------
lifeformed
If this was implemented, it seems like the best strategy for an interest group
would be to spread their funds over as many voters as possible. I wonder what
kind of complications that would cause?

~~~
glenweyl
I deal with this in another paper:
[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2571012](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2571012)

------
blula
QV would work better than HN's mysterious points system. Give everyone who
signs up 100 credits, replenished periodically, to allocate among posts in
quadratic fashion.

------
eridius
Just reading the linked summary (and not the paper itself), it seems like this
doesn't take wealth disparity into account. If the cost for your votes is the
square of the votes you want to cast, then that means people with a lot of
money can trivially buy significantly more votes than people with very little
money, even if they don't necessarily care more about the issue than the
people with very little money. It seems like this would change tyranny of the
majority into tyranny of the wealthy.

~~~
cwp
The thing is, we already have the tyranny of the wealthy. The Tullock paradox
is basically that the cost of lobbying is dwarfed by the returns.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tullock_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tullock_paradox)

I'm still getting my head around it, but it seems that Quadratic Voting would
actually increase what wealthy people pay to influence public policy.

Edit: Just as an example, the largest "outside money" spender in the 2012
election was Crossroads, which spent about $57M. I have no idea how many votes
they were able to get for that money. With Quadratic Voting, they'd get 7,550.
That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

~~~
kybernetikos
> spent about $57M. I have no idea how many votes they were able to get for
> that money. With Quadratic Voting, they'd get 7,550.

Doesn't that make it seem likely that they would prefer to continue with their
current strategy rather than use the money to buy votes then? It seems likely
that they ended up with more than 7550 votes for their 57M, especially
considering that 7550 votes would be a smaller proportion of total votes in a
system where people could get more than one vote.

While very interesting, I don't think a system like this really addresses the
main problems which are more to do with the need for an educated and informed
populace than anything else.

~~~
glenweyl
This is a great point. We address it in great depth in the paper with Posner,
Voting Squared
([http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956)).
QV helps here, a lot we hope, because most current expenditure on advertising
is useful because it targets very indifferent swing voters who feel a duty to
vote but do not care one way or the other. They can easily be swayed by noisy
and wasteful advertising. But under QV they would not matter much as they
would never cast more than a very small vote in either direction. On the other
hand persuading those who really know an issue to feel a bit more strongly or
less strongly would have a lot of value. This would make the sort of public
discourse that was encouraged much more intelligent and mature, like
investigative reports rather than slanderous or vacuous ad copy.

~~~
cwp
Here's another interesting thought: QV might reduce the influence of PACs by
solving the principal-agent problem. PACs like Crossroads are not, in fact,
wealthy people. They're pools of donations from many politically sympathetic
individuals. People donate to PACs because they want to do more than cast
their one vote on a particular issue.

But donating to a PAC is a really inefficient way to have a political effect.
The rules governing PACs are so loose that the people controlling them can do
anything they want with the money, including flying a private jet to Tahiti
and drinking MaiTais during the election. Even more responsible PACs will
probably not spend the money exactly the way the donor would. They might, for
example, concentrate their spending on certain "key" elections and ignore the
donor's favourite candidate. Or they might support all the candidates from a
given party, when the donor only really cares about one of them.

With QV, the donor can put his money to work in exactly the way he wants. That
might leave PACs with much less money to spend.

~~~
kybernetikos
> With QV, the donor can put his money to work in exactly the way he wants.
> That might leave PACs with much less money to spend.

We can hope. I expect though that in general having your dollars have - by
design - a quadratically decreasing power in vote purchasing is quickly going
to give you less bang for your buck than spending it on manipulating the
perceptions of others. There'll be some cross over position in value, and
people will spend $x on votes and the rest on manipulating/persuading others
which is what PACs are for.

------
Redoubts
I suppose it seems cool, since the fund pays back to the voters -- so it's
effectively a tax on political influence against those who would spend a lot
on a campaign. But I have to naively ask if this will really change anything.
How will this divert money in politics away from directly buying off people in
power. It seems like a new, parallel avenue to assault with big bucks.

~~~
gipp
Read to the bottom -- it looks like the general idea here is to empower direct
democracy. Less institutional power in the form of representational voting and
beauraucratic/constitutional checks on each other means less attack surface
for corruption.

~~~
smsm42
Direct democracy is a very dangerous thing and unchecked can very quickly lead
to oppression of minority contingents and minority opinions. And, of course,
direct democracy is vulnerable to the base form of corruption in the form of
"vote for us and we'll take money from the other guys and give it to you".

~~~
Veedrac
The whole point of this seems to be to avoid oppression of minority opinions
by weighing in how much you care.

------
im3w1l
Idea: Sow discord between [group a] and [group b]. Profit as they fight.

------
dang
What experiments could be (or have been) run to test this?

~~~
glenweyl
Two sets, in very controlled laboratory settings, have turned out well:
[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aeaweb.org%2Faea%2F2015conference%2Fprogram%2Fretrieve.php%3Fpdfid%3D719&ei=aUhFVYD6BpPggwSdsYCwDA&usg=AFQjCNH2uVQwp8cApJTkWbjKwf99AoQddA&sig2=P6h0unOMsxZ21G4Ov4v51A&bvm=bv.92291466,d.eXY)
and
[http://rangevoting.org/GoereeZhangMar2013.pdf](http://rangevoting.org/GoereeZhangMar2013.pdf)

------
vernon99
I don't get it. So I can randomly vote with my single vote for all the causes
and get increased votes back (since somebody else may buy additional votes and
the total sum for redistribution will be larger than individuals count). Or
not?

------
glenweyl
pas on vote buying, linear vote buying is bad according to the same theory
that predicts QV is good. The only equilibrium under linear vote buying is
that the single most intense (or wealthiest) individual has her way at
everyone else's expense. This intuition seems to underly much of the
discussion here, but only applies when vote buying is linear. The logic, as
cwp pointed out, is Tullock's. So while QV is much better than
1-person-1-vote, linear vote buying is worse than either.

~~~
nullc
This is assuming that quadratic voting isn't really linear voting.
Participants in a process like this aren't "honest" they can't be counted on
to follow the rules.

In a QV system one can bypass the quadratic penalty by buying people's votes
directly for a small premium.

~~~
ericposner
Think how hard this would be in real life, plus it's illegal to buy votes, and
impossible given the secret ballot.

------
dnautics
If this is really a good thing (tm) then perhaps the best incubator to test
the theory in a 'crucible of experiment' would be in corporate governance. As
more corporations move towards QV (with, hopefully, good results) it may find
its way into political public policy.

~~~
glenweyl
We decided to follow the advice of a leader in the field, Rory Sutherland, and
pursue the application to market research surveys first: [http://www.research-
live.com/impact-magazine/the-shape-of-th...](http://www.research-
live.com/impact-magazine/the-shape-of-the-tolerance-zone/4013241.article). My
start-up, Collective Decision Engines, is actively working on this.

------
fmdud
I don't think "the tyranny of the majority" is really the problem.

------
fmdud
I don't understand, so basically if you're homeless or don't have a bank
account, or if you're not in the workforce for one of a million reasons, you
don't get a say at all?

Am I missing something?

~~~
lifeformed
Votes are cheap when you just want a few of them. Perhaps the first one is
free? Then you get a windfall for being a voter, because all the money spent
is redistributed per capita among the voters.

------
pdonis
How does quadratic voting get around Arrow's Theorem?

~~~
beefield
Arrow's Theorem applies only for voting on ordinal scale. QV allows degrees of
preferences in voting so Arrow should not apply. (This actually is why I do
not understand all the fuss about Arrow)

~~~
glenweyl
For a long time I thought this too. But then Ken Arrow started working on QV
and while he agrees that in spirit QV gets around the theorem, it does not to
the letter. The reason is that there can be multiple equilibria given income
effects if you had a whole society governed by QV. All equilibria would be
pareto-efficient and any pareto-efficient outcome could be implemented by QV,
just as in the market economy, but in the market economy as well there may be
multiple equilibria with income effects. This has little impact in a small
vote in the short-term, but in the long-term taking everything into account,
prices changing can impact effective budgets and lead to multiple equilibria.
As soon as there are multiple equilibria effectively the system is not
transitive because different equilibria are simultaneously preferred and
dispreffered by the social ranking to one another. But this does not stop us
thinking that the market is a good system because of its efficiency
properties. So I think Arrow's theorem has been misunderstood.

------
fallingfrog
This is a terrible, terrible idea. What kind of idiot would pay n^2 dollars
for their own votes when they can pay 2n dollars for other people's votes?

------
moultano
Is there a short sketch of an intuition for why quadratic works better than
linear?

------
BendertheRobot
Key phrase is.... Collective good. How do they figure what will accomplish
that?

------
xnull2guest
Quadratic, exponential, or Ackermann - it's a terrible idea to exchange votes
for money.

~~~
Confusion
'Money' does not necessarily mean the same thing you're currently using daily.
You could also simply be dealt a finite amount of 'voting tokens' per time
unit.

~~~
xnull2guest
Can you expound on what this would look like? (I don't think that is what the
paper is recommending.)

------
pellmellism
blockchain

~~~
toomim
mockchain

~~~
pellmellism
are we 5?

~~~
mrpsrinkles
That is:

are we 5, sir?

for you.

