
A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive - imartin2k
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-01/a-new-way-of-voting-that-makes-zealotry-expensive
======
mc32
Looks like this would favor highly coordinated groups to have outsized
influence over poorly coordinated groups.

So people who vote in isolation have less influence than people who organize
and vote as a bloc.

I think it also means that places where one party predominates would require
the minority party to be highly coordinated in order to have any chance with
one single silver “bullet” whereas the dominant party can expend multiple
“bullets” to counter.

~~~
godelski
This is democracy though.

The idea of a majority having more power than a minority is, as another user
puts it "a feature, not a bug". If your goal is to best represent your
population, then you want a system that counts people's opinions equally,
regardless of what group/s they belong to.

The problem here isn't the voting system so much as the structure. The way to
"better represent" minority groups is to have different weightings to those
groups. But then that's difficult because you have to specify which groups are
more equal than others. Clearly we like racial minorities and don't like
minority groups like white nationalists (at least as a public), but most lines
aren't this easy to differentiate.

The goal of voting systems like this is not so much to tackle this majority vs
minority problem but rather to reduce tribalism. In a first past the post
voting style your optimal strategy is not to pick the thing you like the most,
but to rather pick the thing that you think is most likely to win and more
closely aligns to your beliefs. These voting systems are more about finding
common beliefs. For example, republicans and democrats agree on many issues.
These systems are about anti-polarization, not about weighted representation.

~~~
EnderViaAnsible
Majorities being > than minorities is an aspect of democracy in its natural
state, for certain, but I would not go so far as to call it a feature. The
bicameral legislature of the U.S. was designed precisely to avoid this
"feature"!

~~~
dragonwriter
> The bicameral legislature of the U.S. was designed precisely to avoid this
> "feature"!

Not really, it was just made to weight the scales (in both houses, by
different mechanisms) so that a particular set of interests[0] would be less
likely be a political minority even if they were a numeric minority. It
retained the feature that political minorities were easily suppressed by the
political majority, so long as it was a political minority in both houses.

[0] The slave states of the South.

------
marricks
I always hate the framing as “polarized”. There’s tons of things Democrats and
Republicans agree on.

Military spending goes up every year. Save for Dodd-Frank, deregulation has
been common across presidencies for 30 years along with corporate tax cuts...

The establishment gets things done, they really do, it’s just not things that
help everyday people. I’m not sure how this would help that.

~~~
kro92kfmrzz
Basically they disagree on how to treat their fellow citizens.

Democrats are against outright hostility and blatant marginalization of
certain classes.

But both have largely been ok with everyone being exploited by feudal trade
economics, bombing other nations to satisfy global political norms, and
swindling developing nations out of their resources, while emotionally
coddling elites.

It means something to not be outright hostile to the truly marginalized, but
the Dems have not exactly been labors friend. And most people are laborers.
They’ve failed the majority plenty.

~~~
collegecamp293
"Democrats are against outright hostility and blatant marginalization of
certain classes."

There are tons of YouTube videos on college campuses that prove otherwise.

~~~
awinder
Reminder: having shitty ideas is not a protected class, and “free speech” does
not mean you get to say whatever batshit crazy thing comes to mind without
other people expressing themselves

~~~
ng12
Plenty of people on both sides have "batshit crazy" ideas, except one leans
more heavily on mob mentality thanks to the self-righteousness that comes with
the unshaken belief that you have the moral highground.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMc8pczn-
hs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMc8pczn-hs)

~~~
CamperBob2
_except one leans more heavily on mob mentality thanks to the self-
righteousness that comes with the unshaken belief that you have the moral
highground._

Well, Goldwater _tried_ to warn the Republicans about what would happen if
they kept sucking up to the evangelicals, and...

Oh, wait, were you talking about Democrats?

------
forinti
The greeks had two institutions we could use: ostracism and lottery.

We should be able to vote on those we want out of politics and the most voted
would have to seat it out.

And a small portion of representatives should be chosen by lottery. Maybe 5%
or 10%. These representatives, obviously, would not have to answer to their
sponsors.

~~~
breuleux
Actually, why not choose _all_ representatives by lottery?

I don't think representatives need to have any particular competencies beyond
being representative of the interests of the population. Hired staff can take
care of things that require particular abilities.

I reckon that a wholly random set of representatives would act like a direct
democracy where every voter is free to fully focus on the issues, is allowed
an entire staff to help them, and can consult and coordinate effectively with
other voters. I think that could work pretty well.

~~~
superkarn
Would this have a similar outcome as the "lottery" for jury duty? What happens
if somebody who really doesn't want to do it is chosen?

~~~
breuleux
That's a very good point. I currently lean towards requiring every citizen to
register for the lottery once every ten or so years (for one year of service).
If they are picked, they have to go, except for serious unforeseen
circumstances, but at least they would be able to plan for it to some extent.
This might also require a cultural shift for people to accept it, but maybe
not a radical one.

~~~
rolleiflex
For someone who doesn’t want to do it, a year is a very long time to come up
with ‘serious unforeseen circumstances’.

There is no point in trying to force people to do things - the best way is to
change the job in such a way that people will _want_ to take it.

Pay them well, in other words, in money, in prestige, or otherwise.

~~~
pdonis
_> the best way is to change the job in such a way that people will want to
take it_

This isn't a change, it's what we have now. The problem is that the _kind_ of
people that want to take it are not the kind of people you actually want doing
it.

------
pohl
This would be an interesting strategy to apply towards measuring how an open
source community feels about difficult tradeoffs in design where there is no
clear winner among many proposals, such as the recent survey meant to measure
how people feel about the various async/await syntax proposals in Rust.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/biw1ic/asyncawait_syn...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/biw1ic/asyncawait_syntax_status_update/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/bju8di/asyncawait_syn...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/bju8di/asyncawait_syntax_survey_results/)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I don't know about this particular issue, but in general there's something to
be said for beneficent dictatorship. My hypothesis is that sometimes the
choosing of individual parts that are measurably better on their own, when
combined produce something that is less than if the parts weren't optimally
chosen but were cogently chosen to meet a particular ideology or end.

------
Semiapies
The basic form of quadratic voting, with actual money, also makes trying to
protect yourself and your rights against hostile voting blocks expensive. Are
you black? Muslim? Transgender? The majority votes to screw you over in some
way, and you spend to vote harder against them and so manage to stop them. And
then you've spent quite a bit of money, which gets redistributed to all voters
(ie, everyone in your group sees little of it back)...and then they vote
_again_ to do the same damn thing you opposed before, and now you're fucked.

~~~
blunte
This assumes the majority would focus their energy on a narrow set of issues.
Unless you have studies to back up that assumption, I would not believe it.

And if the majority actually did feel so strongly about a narrow set of
issues, then it should be very expensive for a minority to counter that.

------
mbostleman
>>The purpose...is to determine “whether the intense preferences of the
minority outweigh the weak preferences of the majority”>>

Given this, apparently the problem is that strong minority preferences are
being snuffed out by majority preferences? Of course, this is the inherent
flaw in democracy.

In the US we have two guards against that - the first is the Electoral College
and the second is the Constitution. The former ensures that even the least
populated states have at least a minimum (as opposed to effectively none)
effect on the outcome and the second ensures that the government can't be used
for something evil just because a majority has voted to to use it for that
purpose.

So if there's a "zealotry" problem as the title implies, why can't these tools
be used to manage it? What is wrong with them such that we need this new,
additional layer?

~~~
ivanbakel
>Given this, apparently the problem is that strong minority preferences are
being snuffed out by majority preferences? Of course, this is the inherent
flaw in democracy.

That's not the problem Quadratic Voting tries to solve at all. The increased
cost of additional votes actually reduces the voting power of certain minority
groups, such as one-issue voters. The system tries to fix the opposite - a
strong minority preference winning a vote where it is not the first choice of
the majority.

~~~
mbostleman
Ah yes, got it. I missed that, thanks.

------
dsfyu404ed
In the US where the parties cling to stupid and outdated viewpoints and
agendas in order to differentiate themselves from the other party. Legislators
have to vote with the party if they don't want to find the party funding an
opponent in the next election cycle. This is an improvement insofar as it
allows legislators to nominally vote with the party while voting more strongly
in favor of things they actually care about.

This would probably work well in two party states because it would allow
lawmakers to vote as weakly as possible for stupid things just to say they're
towing the party line while not actually voting strongly for them. In single
party states this is probably a bad thing because it gives the people who ran
as the other party just to get their name on the ticket to only weakly vote
the way their platform says they should be voting.

If this system were used outside of the legislature (i.e. to actually elect
legislator) it would probably be a total shitshow because as other commenters
have mentioned it rewards coordination which basically just favors the status
quo. If there's anything we need it's less status quo in general elections.

So yeah, this might work in a legislature but I don't see it working well to
elect the actual politicians themselves.

~~~
SubiculumCode
The more that politics become local the more this all goes away. States need
to be at the foreront again

~~~
ereyes01
I'd go further and argue that city-states make the most sense in today's
world, with a federal government to arbitrate resources and defense. US state
boundaries are quite arbitrary with respect to how actual communities are
organized on the map.

~~~
SubiculumCode
But you have an option to move to a new state that fits your beliefs. Much
harder to do when it is a Federal system with a single law for all thr lands.

------
crazygringo
It's clever, but it doesn't solve the problem.

Because the problem isn't with _strong_ preferences -- it's with _extreme_
preferences.

If there were 7 versions of a bill (A,B,C,D,E,F,G) ranging from ultra-
conservative (a "A") to ultra-liberal (a "G"), in a polarized community people
could still be spending the minimum 1 point each on the A's or G's and none on
B-F.

The problem with politics today isn't that people are single-issue voters
(because they generally aren't -- it's not a problem that needs to be
solved)... it's that the natural evolution of the two-party system has forced
us into choices that are more _polarized_ than ever before in the history of
the US -- in a two-party election, we're often only _given_ options A and G,
or maybe B and F, but rarely C through E.

~~~
jimhefferon
> the natural evolution of the two-party system

The US has a long history, almost all of it with a two-party system. Only
sometimes is there extremity. To my mind, 1860 is even more extreme than
today.

(My opinion is that an important common thread between then and today is a
class of people with a great deal of money who are deliberately driving the
political atmosphere. But in any event a claim that it is a natural outcome of
a two-party system needs to account for the historical fact that the US
experience is typically not extreme.)

~~~
crazygringo
Slavery was a particularly and uniquely intractable problem where a "moderate"
or "centrist" solution was particularly unappealing.

There's extensive literature on what's been driving polarization, but it
really is a new "era" for it and not a cyclical thing. Factors include:

\- More democratic/open primaries, which select extreme candidates

\- More statistically targeted media (including social media) to take
advantage of extreme views (including social media)

\- Increasingly partisan news media made possible by more fragmented media
(first cable, then the Internet)

None of these show any signs of going away, and all three are phenomena that
are fundamentally new in the past few decades.

~~~
dev_dull
> _Increasingly partisan news media made possible by more fragmented media
> (first cable, then the Internet)_

Isn’t the entire mainstream media owned by only like 6 corporations[1]?

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/these-6...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-
control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6)

~~~
greggyb
There used to be literally three channels. We've doubled!

~~~
nradov
Well 4 if you count PBS.

~~~
greggyb
We've 1.5x-ed!

------
gnomewascool
Since the link to the paper, at the end of the article, is subtly broken (at
least for me), here are the links to the abstract and directly to the PDF:

[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531)

[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID3092895_cod...](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID3092895_code1186331.pdf?abstractid=2003531&mirid=1&type=2)

Doi:

[https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2003531](https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2003531)

------
cabalamat
Let's say Alice only cares about proposition A. And Bob only cares about B.

Alice can spend all her 100 tokens on A, and she gets 10 votes on A. Ditto Bob
can spend all his 100 tokens on B, and he gets 10 votes on B.

But if each of them spends 50 on A and 50 on B, then A and B both get
2*sqrt(50) ~= 14 votes, so both Alice and Bob win by colluding.

What's to stop them doing this?

~~~
lhopki01
Oh no lawmakers actually cooperating to achieve their goals. What a tragedy!

~~~
kitsy
But does not support "across the aisle" cooperation, which is where the
concern is.

------
pauldix
This actually looks like it could be applied very effectively to open source
communities on a single project when setting priorities for future feature
development. For example, you have 20 features in the backlog and you're going
into a two month sprint in which you can only focus on 3. Might be an
interesting way to open up voting to everyone. On larger projects this would
be useful even if it's only the developers working on it that are voting.

~~~
skybrian
I'm skeptical about why volunteers should work on anything other than whatever
they feel like working on? Voting on free labor seems presumptuous.

------
lghh
If I were a politcal group with lots of members up for reelction, I would be
sure to flood the ballot with things the other side wants to vote against so
they'd have to spread out their tokens whereas my group could clump them on a
single issue/candidate.

~~~
weberc2
The other party(ies) could do the same, so I don't see how this is any worse
than the current system.

------
gyaniv
I have had so many discussions with people about finding better ways to vote
and hold elections.

It's nice to hear when there's a new approach that is actually being used,
even if it was only in a small community, although I would be interested in
seeing something like this used in large scales elections.

------
C1sc0cat
This is just deciding the order of business - not voting in the sense a
civilian understands it.

The other way this can be done in parliamentary systems is to have a lay
member body sort through and produce a draft order of business.

This body also decides which motions are in order which are duplicates and
which need to be composited (ie a merge in tech speak) and also works out any
conseqensionals (eg if Motion A passes then Motions G X and Y fall)

~~~
tialaramex
Yes the usual situation we're familiar with is picking a candidate in an
election (which is what millions of Brits were doing yesterday) but it's the
same for all these decisions. The key ingredients are more than two options
(if there are only exactly two options we can solve this nicely and if there's
only one option it's trivial) and wanting to incorporate preferences from many
different people (ie let's not have a dictator or use sortition)

Neutral arbiters (your "lay member body") are very expensive because they can
be captured so you need to defend against that, and even when they aren't
captured you'll have to put up with accusations that they /were/ by sore
losers who didn't get what they wanted from the neutral arbiter. For a
sovereign government you can't impose the neutral arbiter on them, so they'll
have to agree to suffer it, and such agreement is necessarily conditional. You
can do it (that's how the Speaker of the House of Commons in the UK works) but
it's fragile and I wouldn't advise it.

~~~
C1sc0cat
They are normally elected and yes it is like the Speaker of the HOC though
normally a bit more crunchy that the old softy that's currently in the
position.

------
dvorak365
What if we took this idea, applied it to wealth instead of votes, and called
it something like "progressive marginal tax rates"? Seems like it would be a
more effective way to fight zealotry than to attack the democratic principle
of all people getting the same amount of votes.

~~~
kazinator
Every voter has the same number of tokens, so it is fair.

The quadratic progression is _per candidate_ (or issue or whatever object is
being voted on).

If you have 91 tokens, you can vote once for each of 91 competing choices. Or
you can vote 6 times for one option: 1 + 4 + 9 + 16 + 25 + 36 = 91. Or twice
each for 22 options, with three tokens left to vote on three more.

~~~
dvorak365
But tokens aren't votes. A person whose ideology aligns with 100 options has
10x the ability to influence the outcome of the election towards their
preferred outcomes than someone whose ideology aligns with only one option.

~~~
ivanbakel
But "votes" with tokens aren't votes either. Claiming that a spread of 100
votes has 10x the effect of 10 votes requires some model of the vote - you
don't know that 10 votes on a single issue doesn't have an outsized effect on
swinging a decision where 100 single votes just bump a number up across the
board.

More than anything, the system just places power in compromise, which is
nothing new - in a one-vote system, a person who is willing to vote for a
centrist politician has more political power than me, a fringe voter, because
their influence on the election result is better-felt.

~~~
kazinator
There is a problem if there are 99 items to vote for, which are all aligned
with each other, more or less, ideologically, and 1 item that is diametrically
opposed to these. Someone casting 99 votes for those 99 items has political
power over someone trying to concentrate on that one, only able to cast 6.
This system works best if all the choices are very distinct.

If numerous choices are really just minor variations of the same choice, that
tends to undermines the system with a rather gaping hole. The cynical observer
might note that in fact that's the idea behind it: entrench the power of the
bland, indistinct choice in leadership.

------
Animats
Not so much zealotry, as N-way decisions. There's no perfect way to make N-way
democratic choices. Yet sometimes you need to make an N-way choice.

Brexit needs something like a ranked-choice vote. As in, rank these options -
a) no deal Brexit b) Theresa May / EU plan c) no Brexit, revoke Article 50 d)
Northern Ireland independence, border in Irish sea. None of those can get an
absolute majority in Parliament. They've tried and are deadlocked. A ranked-
choice referendum would provide a way out.

------
clarkevans
It's nice to see other ways to vote. One of the other newcomers is STAR Voting
([https://www.equal.vote/starvoting](https://www.equal.vote/starvoting))

Ka-Ping Yee's analysis showing odd discontinuities in Ranked Choice aka
Instant Runoff from 2005 is an interesting read
[http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/](http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/).

~~~
obelos
STAR voting has the added benefit of simplicity and being possible on paper
ballots. This quadratic system has neither and would be rife with errors,
confusion, and likely fraud when used among people who don't vote for a
living.

------
naasking
Does a fixed token count work when the voting is iterated and future bills are
not yet known? It seems challenging.

For instance, you could incentivize your opponents to spend their tokens early
on things they care about, and reserve your voting block for a later bill. So
while it does cost you considerably more to spend your tokens this way, you've
already weakened your opposition so that you might be able to pull it off.

------
chapium
"Success" seems to be defined unclearly here. "Held and election and got a
result" seems to be the only outcome.

"Quadratic voting was invented not by political scientists but by economists
and others..."

Not much of a point here, this is clearly within the domain of economics.

It worked with 41 lawmakers, it seems like an interesting voting method for
small scale. Can it scale up?

~~~
elliekelly
> Can it scale up?

A long while ago when I was in college we attempted to implement a less
complicated version of this system for allocating budgets to student
organizations and it was nothing short of a shit show. I'm not confident in
the voting public's ability to understand the process.

------
localhostdotdev
> An intriguing new tool of democracy just had its first test in the real
> world of politics, and it passed with flying colors.

how can you even measure if a voting system is a success?

~~~
weberc2
Specifically, how does one measure _democracy_? I hadn't thought about this
before, but I'm intrigued and no good answers are springing to mind.

~~~
localhostdotdev
there is a democracy index:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index)

there is something similar for voting systems but it isn't as elegant:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems)

------
ajmurmann
It's unclear to me if this addresses the spoiler effect which I see as the
single, biggest issue in US elections right now.

~~~
jakamau
1\. End "winner-take-all" allocations of electoral votes

2\. Any party that gains the minimum population/electoral vote (Wyoming puts
that at ~200k) in any state is guaranteed at least one electoral vote in that
state

3\. All remaining electoral votes are allocated proportionally based on
general election votes

4\. If no majority winner exists, the party with the least number of electoral
votes casts their vote to other party/ies and this repeats until a winner
obtains 270.

Wouldn't this remove the spoiler effect, function within the current voting
system, and off-set any perceived _difficulty_ in rank voting to the actual
parties?

------
glangdale
Seems like a recipe for horse-trading.

As an abstraction, say we have a group of 400 fairly development-minded people
who are mostly indifferent or OK with projects A, B, C, and D, with the
exception that each 25% of this group _really_ likes one of these projects
(the classic single-issue voter). Without horse-trading we get them spending
their 100 points on their pet issue, getting 10 votes per voter, yielding
1,000 for each. With horse trading, they agree to split their votes with all 4
of the cabal's issues, which means that they can each contribute 25 points to
4 different projects, or 4x5 votes per voter, yielding 2,000 total.

So a disciplined party 'bloc' can exert outsized control in this scheme. Of
course, the usual problems of maintaining discipline arise, especially with
secret ballots where you can't prove that you kept faith with the cabal.

Another element of this (and any scheme where people's ability to express
preferences is "rationed") would be the issue of what makes it on to the
ballot to begin with - there's obviously some real prospects for mischief and
vote-splitting. If you have the resources, the idea of creating a lot of
moderately trivial proposals to draw away votes from things that you're
opposed to might be effective - so if you want to get some huge development
through that's opposed by environmentalists, you might attempt to jam the zone
with a gazillion minor environmental proposals (all of which look fairly good)
to try to suck away voting power from your political opponents.

------
breuleux
Couldn't this sort of incentivize efforts to polarize the public? If I want to
get my way on issue X, but I don't care about issue Y, a good strategy for me
would be to rouse everyone else about Y so that they waste their tokens on Y
and can't oppose me as effectively on X. For example, I could push abortion as
the most important issue of all, even though I really don't care either way,
and then put all _my_ tokens towards tax cuts for the rich.

------
benj111
The Polarity of Brexit throws up some interesting results, depending on how a
possible poll is conducted.

Would be interesting to apply this methodology to the problem.

Here's a good write-up: [https://www.politics.co.uk/comment-
analysis/2019/04/23/the-c...](https://www.politics.co.uk/comment-
analysis/2019/04/23/the-crazy-polling-of-soft-brexit)

------
youdontknowtho
"intense preferences of the minority" are enshrined in the constitution. The
senate, the electoral college, and the states themselves are designed to
protect the minority of property onwers. It's designed to slow progress. Read
Madison.

Also, I'm sure Bloomberg writers LOVE attempts to replace Democracy with some
weird economic neo-market model.

Coins...get a grip, man. EDIT: Sorry. "Tokens". Whatever.

~~~
heraclius
I quite understand that there is a tendency to marketise decision-making in an
unhelpful fashion, but I’m not entirely sure how this scheme is too much of a
problem, beyond using the word “tokens”. Could you elaborate as to the
specific problems of this scheme as opposed to those of general attempts to
marketise?

And “quadratic voting” may have uses beyond the areas governed by the US
constitution. Even within those areas, there are minorities other than
property owners. Blacks, for example, do not seem to have been very successful
as a minority in preventing the various things that the state does to them
that are plausibly unhelpful (though the quantification thereof may well be
intractable). The particular use case here, however, seems to be to make the
specific institutions you describe more effective, as opposed to relying on
their being pitted against each other to make things work. I think that it is
more desirable to have a single institution that works well, where possible
(which it generally isn’t) than multiple institutions that operate against
each other in an attempt to avoid pitfalls, because one generally falls into
more pitfalls in the process, even if the balance of advantage lies with the
latter case.

~~~
youdontknowtho
I'm not sure how to put this in a way that won't sound offensive. Please cut
me some slack in that regard, because I'm honestly not trying to be offensive.
I think your description of this is naive in a very serious way.

Here the "marketing" is a big part of the point. Proposing solutions to
democratic problems with something derived from economics provides theoretical
cover to people who are seeking to undermine democracy in service of capital.
The idea that democracy needs to be "more effective" because of some
structural issue, not with society but with democracy itself, is incredibly
dangerous.

EDIT: I'm rambling, but I think that the article was a type of propaganda. I
was also trying to point out that the constitution enshrines some very extreme
positions for at least one minority that actually benefits from things like
what are described by this article. I don't take it's claims seriously because
I believe that it actually exists to present aspects of capitalism as superior
to democracy.

------
joerickard
The book this is from, Radical Markets[0], provides a unique perspective and
is worth a read. It contains some very creative solutions to real problems and
helped me to realize how small the box is for current policy debates.

[0]
[https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11222.html](https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11222.html)

------
kazinator
I have a much better, simpler idea: you can't vote for the same candidate
twice in the same election, period.

Another better algorithm is to have a single ballot with, say, ten blanks on
it. You can fill it however you like, possibly with ten duplicates.

The blanks are weighted: the top blank carries more weight than the bottom,
according to some geometric progression, like:

    
    
      1> (mapcar (op expt 0.8) (range 0 9))
      (1.0 0.8 0.64 0.512 0.4096 0.32768 0.262144 0.2097152 0.16777216
       0.134217728)
    

This quadratic concept requires too many tokens. If you actually want people
to be able to vote for one candidate half a dozen times, you need to give them
91 tokens. But that then allows people to vote 91 times for different choices.
If there aren't anywhere near that many choices, then people have tokens
remaining which encourages them to vote for duplicate choices. It's just a
mess where people get wrapped up in the token accounting and lose sight of the
issues.

~~~
newen
Do you really think some variant of lisp along with the op function is the
best way to communicate with a wide audience? For normal people, that code is
printing the result of 0.8^i for i=0..9.

~~~
kazinator
I think that, well, HN comments aren't a good platform for someone looking for
a wide audience.

~~~
newen
And by wide audience, I mean people who don't program in lisp 100% of the
time.

------
mindslight
This approach is the direct opposite of what we need societally, which is
_less_ of the feeling of "throwing your vote away" from voting a strong
preference, as in Instant Runoff.

Political division is a symptom, not the root problem. It is being driven by
people already being made to cede to the "center", where "center" really means
authoritarian warmongering surveillance as pushed by the press. Discouraging
"zealotry" is just quashing dissent even harder.

Left and Right are merely two different manners of reasoning (inductive versus
deductive, open world versus closed world, etc). Reacting against the
totalitarianism, people try to escape in whichever direction they tend to
think in. Parties then herd them into blaming the "other side" by focusing on
the most outlandish of that groups's conclusions, which of course are totally
alien.

------
_bxg1
What we need isn't necessarily centrism, but lowered emotions. Emotions are
what skew reason and then catch like wildfire. It happens that they tend to
push people to the extreme ends of the political spectrum, but that itself
isn't really the problem. It's not about sheer distance from the center, it's
about voting based on anger and hatefulness and fear. Anti-fascists in Nazi
Germany would've been "extreme" relative to the center at the time, but they
wouldn't have been "extreme" with regards to how hate-based their stance was.

Edit: Or more accurately - since many of them probably did develop hatred for
the nazis - the anti-fascists' stance made the most sense when hate and fear
are removed from the equation; were a person in that context to consider
things stoically, there would've been little motive to side with the fascists.

To summarize: fear and anger warp your decision-making. It happens that they
lead to polarization, but that's a red herring. What we need is to reduce the
inflammation of society (largely thanks to social media), instead of tackling
the symptom.

~~~
heraclius
It’s tempting to think that we can operate politics without emotion. However,
it is unclear what the foundations of our political beliefs are if not
intuitive reactions of the sort that emotions are as well. For example, most
people who oppose torture oppose it because they have an intuition that it is
unacceptable and value that intuition. We can construct “objective” methods to
derive political claims from other claims, but ultimately they involve a value
judgement—politics without value judgement has no way to decide between
competing objectives. “Reason” does not provide a coherent morality, as the
failure of the Enlightenment project shows; “emotion” is quite capable of
justifying a centrist view—I should imagine most have negative emotional
reactions to the Leninist and Hitlerite states. I imagine that one reason for
the decline of the liberal order is its abandonment of emotional claims and
pretence to objectivity as if that were possible. Those who continue to use
emotion, to appeal to our intuitions as to what is right, instead of simply
referring to empirical concepts whose connexion to such intuitions is severely
dulled, appear to have the most success; unfortunately they do not seem to be
particularly constructive at the moment. Anger and fear are not entirely
unreasonable as emotions go: we fear and are angered by the spectres of
poverty and dictatorship, and those are not unreasonable positions to hold.

Attacks on morality and value judgements in politics often take the form of,
to take an example, Sir Humphrey’s utterances in Yes Minister. Government, in
his view, is about order, and the prevention of chaos. Hacker, the minister,
suggests that it is about doing good. Why is Sir Humphrey so scared of chaos?
His fear thereof is the same sort of fear that drives morality; we might even
call it a moral belief. It is not an implausible belief—chaos has its
problems. Most of the time what seems “objective” is no longer on demanding a
further reason. “Lowered emotions” should not really be the end; a sensible
method of dealing with competing emotions is the need of the hour.

------
yboris
A really excellent 2-hour podcast on the topic of voting:

 _Politics is so much worse because we use an atrocious 18th century voting
system. Aaron Hamlin has a viable plan to fix it._

[https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-
voting-...](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-
reform/)

------
netcan
Say I have a party/club/whatever. We're going to handle all sorts of decisions
by voting and/or similar means.

Is there an app we can use that'll handle voting, and do a good job?

~~~
tokai
doodle.com

------
duxup
Within a caucus I think this makes sense.

I do worry about any wider use though. California has shown with its
proposition system that issue voting can get really messy / absurd. A
political caucus can maybe recognize that voting to (just an example) dedicate
%60 of all revenue to X while understanding that they can't then dedicate ...
%60 of all revenue to Y too. The general electorate is not so inclined or
consider things past step 1 of governance (or really think about governance at
all).

------
dctoedt
Sounds like just a new name for cumulative voting, which has been a thing in
closely-held corporations for decades. From a (U.S.) Securities and Exchange
Commission Web site:

<quote>

Cumulative voting is a type of voting system that helps strengthen the ability
of minority shareholders to elect a director. This method allows shareholders
to cast all of their votes for a single nominee for the board of directors
when the company has multiple openings on its board. In contrast, in "regular"
or "statutory" voting, shareholders may not give more than one vote per share
to any single nominee.

For example, if the election is for four directors and you hold 500 shares
(with one vote per share), under the regular method you could vote a maximum
of 500 shares for each one candidate (giving you 2,000 votes total—500 votes
per each of the four candidates).

With cumulative voting, you are afforded the 2,000 votes from the start and
could choose to vote all 2,000 votes for one candidate, 1,000 each to two
candidates, or otherwise divide your votes whichever way you wanted.

</quote>

[https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answers-
cumulativevotehtm.h...](https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answers-
cumulativevotehtm.html) (extra paragraphing added)

More analysis:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_voting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_voting)

------
iambateman
If you’re a developer and you’re into voting, we’re working on building an
open source app for Ranked Choice Voting with a nonprofit called FairVote. The
old version is at rankit.vote.

Angular app, Firebase, couple different voting mechanisms.

It’s an attempt to help people understand how alternative voting systems can
make the world a better place.

Email me if you’re interested in contributing!

------
heraclius
Is there any reason that 2 is the best of all possible indices? It sounds,
prima facie, reasonable, but it is unclear whether it is the best, what the
best is, or even whether it can reasonably be calculated given that people
behave irrationally in different ways.

------
c3534l
If the results showed people voting normally, spreading their votes across
their options, isn't that a failure? What's the point of switching to
quadradic voting when you get the same results as the old system of selecting
15 bills?

------
kevin_thibedeau
> Quadratic voting “is the one vote pricing rule under which voters who intend
> only their own gain are led, as if by an invisible hand, to advance the
> interests of society,”

What's so special about n^2? I'd suspect n^phi is optimal.

~~~
dane-pgp
Why phi?

------
inflatableDodo
Sounds like approval voting only with limited votes -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting)

------
whowhatwhy
Isn't this basically the world congress system from Civilization V?

------
a1369209993
Link is broken; gives fraudulent error message:

> We've detected unusual activity from your computer network

> To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot.

Does anyone have a link to the actual article?

------
aiyodev
In a real election, couldn’t you just run multiple candidates with identical
positions and then have all but one drop out during the runoff?

------
rcpt
Get ready for regulatory capture on steroids

------
burtonator
I _fundamentally "_ believe in democracy and think that the way forward might
be to experiment with these at the local level.

Either city/state elections or your own political parties.

If they REALLY work we would be HIGHLY competitive.

For example, instant run-off / ranked choice (or other voting systems) could
be used in the Democratic primaries WITHOUT having to convince Republicans.

If they really work the Dems will have much better candidates better
representing the people and should win more elections.

------
jhales
This can be gamed easily by running N-1 clones of any given candidate, where N
is the total number of votes allotted.

~~~
Jolter
For some loose definition of "easily", assuming human candidates.

------
ouid
This is a huge misrepresentation of this voting system. It makes zealotry
possible, not expensive...

------
JulianMorrison
Simple approval voting works. Pick only one outcome? Sure, but you lost the
chance to pick others.

------
magissima
And people complain that ranked-choice voting is too complicated for the
average voter...

------
drinane
I first heard this described in a book written by Eric A. Posner and E. Glen
Weyl. The book has a lot of other cool reasonably doable ideas.

[https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-
Capitalism-...](https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-Capitalism-
Democracy/dp/0691177503/)

------
cerealbad
if voting was mandatory in america for all adults you would get more competent
people running and third parties carrying elections until the major parties
shifted away from extreme positions. you don't need to feed into madness,
americans are sane people who want unity and common sense.

it's not hard to do, make voting day a public holiday or put in on a weekend,
use stamps on peoples hands or use name-residence registries and discount
multiple votes.

this would make american elections harder to buy, and the dollar doesn't buy
you what it used to anyway...

~~~
screye
3rd parties actively hurt progress towarss their goals by splitting votes
between them and the larger party with platforms closer to theirs.

The 1st past the vote system, will always end up in a 2 party system. Unless
that gets replaced by a ranked choice voting or another decent alternative

------
amiune
I propose something better than any voting method: try to achieve perfect
information

------
terryschiavo22
The only problem with elections right now is Citizens United. Does anyone
honestly believe that the Democratic nominees on the left are all running
because they think they can win? Or can we agree that the ability to raise
endless money and garner publicity under the guise of an election could be
what they're after?

~~~
bdamm
Is this exclusive to the Democratic candidates? I think this was the case for
the Republican candidates of 2018 as well.

~~~
terryschiavo22
I'm saying this more in regard to the current crop of candidates because it's
more obvious and egregious that there are some running for President right now
that are doing it for attention and money.

Although you're right. This is by no means exclusive to one side of the aisle.

