[HN Gopher] The user experience problems of quadratic voting
___________________________________________________________________
The user experience problems of quadratic voting
Author : timdaub
Score : 129 points
Date : 2022-03-27 18:08 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (timdaub.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (timdaub.github.io)
| captainmuon wrote:
| I don'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'm not sure this is what people intended.
|
| It also seems to punish caring strongly for a certain issue,
| whereas I wonder if that isn't maybe an indicator that you are
| informed about a topic, and thus your vote should count more
| rather than less?
| ekelsen wrote:
| Collusion is prevented in the same way that vote buying is
| prevented now -- you can't verify how other people have voted.
| This means that you could tell your friend you'll vote for B,
| but actually still vote for A and A will get more votes.
|
| Since you can't verify that collusion has worked, the best
| strategy is to not do it.
| samatman wrote:
| I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss here.
|
| Collusion in 'linear' voting loses the voter their preference
| in exchange for some reward, double-dipping is a simple
| defection.
|
| GP is talking about personal force multiplication through
| collaboration, it's win-win so you have a genuine prisoner's
| dilemma. Being unable to verify cooperation doesn't mean it
| won't happen in other ways.
|
| I don't know that this is actually _bad_ just that a simple
| comparison to linear votes doesn 't hold up.
| ekelsen wrote:
| Let's say we agree to cooperate because it's win-win. Then
| I go into the voting booth, do I have any incentive _at
| all_ to not vote for my preferences as opposed to yours?
| No. Why would I not defect and gain more votes for my
| preferred causes?
| breuleux wrote:
| Some people don't like lying about what they are doing,
| even if they can't get caught. Small scale cooperation
| between honest people would probably work for that
| reason. On a large scale, it probably wouldn't be very
| efficient, but insofar that both sides would defect or
| cooperate at roughly the same rate, you would still
| expect it to be somewhat beneficial if the cooperation
| rate is nonzero (but maybe not enough to be worth the
| trouble).
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > Some people don't like lying about what they are doing,
| even if they can't get caught.
|
| Unfortunately, some people _do_ like lying, or at least
| they don 't mind it as much, and if you create a system
| which rewards liars more than honest people, you
| shouldn't be surprised if the liars end up winning _and_
| you create more liars.
| notahacker wrote:
| In certain scenarios (bloc votes) the defection is fairly
| obvious afterwards, so the standard conclusion that
| always defecting is a bad strategy if the prisoner's
| dilemma is iterated and [probable] defection can be
| established over time applies.
|
| The quadratic maths tends towards making the gains from
| collusion very large, which means there is incentive not
| to defect even if detection is uncertain.
|
| And bloc votes and ballots which aren't necessarily
| secret do represent some of the more plausible use cases
| for quadratic voting (corporate governance)
| comex wrote:
| This is the same situation as prisoner's dilemma and has
| the same possible answers. One is, as others have said,
| that some people will choose honesty for personal moral
| reasons. Another is superrationality:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality#Prisoner's
| _di...
| samatman wrote:
| My "defects reliably when protected by incomplete
| information" T-shirt is raising a lot of questions
| already answered by my T-shirt?
| lukifer wrote:
| Preference collusion in linear voting isn't completely
| unheard of. I've seen projects where voters in safe states
| swap with voters in a swing state [0]. (Obviously these are
| unverified, so they still contain a prisoner's dilemma.)
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_pairing#United_State
| s_pre...
| csense wrote:
| I came here to say this. The voting scheme described isn't
| Pareto efficient; it's possible for pairs of participants to
| make positive-sum private deals.
|
| In the base scenario, Alice votes for A with 4 credits and Bob
| votes for B with 4 credits. A, B each gets 2 votes.
|
| In the private deal scenario, Alice/Bob agree to each vote for
| A, B with 2 credits each. Then A, B each gets 2.818 votes.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| It's a good point; this article goes into detail about this
| issue in existing deployments, and potential solutions:
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/04/02/round9.html
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| _Builds MVP-quality product_
|
| _Announces that the world isn 't ready for the idea as a whole_
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Do you think it's never possible to determine the future
| success of a product by attempting to build an MVP?
|
| You could maybe try to argue that the implementation hadn't
| reached the minimum level yet, and therefore wasn't an MVP and
| it was too early to draw conclusions, but it sounds like you're
| just assuming that.
| timdaub wrote:
| Hey, despite your comment sounding mean, I want to meaningfully
| respond:
|
| Where do you set the personal boundry for evaluating an
| experiment as a failure or success?
|
| E.g. in the case of social networks and what consequences
| Facebook brought us. When is the right time for Mark Zuckerberg
| to announce conclusive failure or success for his actions?
|
| Pessimists say he should have admitted it years ago.
|
| He himself doesn't even accept the premise of the argument.
| Rather he sees it as his personal calling or responsibility to
| build (source: see Lex Friedman podcast).
|
| Who's right here?
|
| Anyways, it isn't my intention to negatively associate digital
| or quadratic voting. Rather the post is an attempt at adding to
| a currently inconclusive picture through critique.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| That was a weird criticism. In my mind this gives more
| credibility to both your article and your endeavors in
| quadratic voting. The article has more credibility because it
| isn't from somebody who has a bias against quadratic voting,
| and your quadratic voting efforts have more credibility
| because people see you are willing to see and address flaws
| in the system.
| timdaub wrote:
| Hi, OP here. I'm grateful for getting this exposure. Thank you!
|
| I wanna give a shout out to the commentators on /r/programming
| and that we had a meaningful discussion that may be relevant too:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/tptbzb/the_use...
| <3
| twic wrote:
| On the point of the results being hard to interpret, and sanity-
| check, i have a couple of thoughts.
|
| 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.
|
| 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 'wasted', 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.
| praestigiare wrote:
| This is fairly interesting, but I do have to note that counting
| the desire to not have pollution as the externality is...
| interesting.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| timdaub wrote:
| You're right. After publishing, someone on Reddit told me that
| fractional votes are technically OK.
|
| If you look closely for it, I mention it in a footnote that I
| added after publishing.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| If you're willing to edit the post, I suggest just removing
| that whole section, or at least boiling it down to a couple
| of sentences (here's a thing that went wrong, here's the
| fix). It seems like a rather shallow observation that just
| detracts from the deeper ones that follow.
| timdaub wrote:
| I had considered doing that.
|
| But I think it'd paint a false picture. In the half a year
| of developing the app, and me being mostly concerned with
| correctly implementing the voting algorithm and
| understanding the math - when reading Wikipedia and what is
| outlined in Weyl's book, it wasn't obvious that fractal
| votes can be used.
|
| As a single tech freelancer working for a federally-funded
| exhibition hall, I wanted things to be correct. So I stuck
| to the script (aka the most credible sources accessible).
|
| I've added the footnote in the article linking to a Reddit
| post where someone claims having talked to Weyl about
| fractal votes and that he positively reaffirmed it [1].
| Anyone could comment that though.
|
| But from a mathematical point of view, it isn't trivial (at
| least for me) whether fractal votes represent the same
| system as is currently laid as "quadratic voting".
|
| Sure, if I end up completely understanding why fractal
| votes are mathematically equal to natural-numbered votes,
| I'll do as you suggested.
|
| references:
|
| - 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/radicalxchange/comments/tprsg
| i/the_...
| ajot wrote:
| 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't voted for option A, your first vote
| costs 1. After voting for the first time, option A'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.
| bentcorner wrote:
| 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.
|
| It makes more sense if you'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).
| aimor wrote:
| 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.
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| Well put. This is the most important point. The ruling class is
| normally (and especially these days) far more organized than
| the working class. This is a voting system that will
| aggressively suppress the influence of working class voters.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| I've followed a few links that explain the mechanism of quadratic
| voting, but still haven't seen a simple explanation of why it
| might be a good idea.
|
| What makes quadratic voting better than just converting credits
| directly into votes -- one credit, one vote? ("Cumulative
| voting")
| jerf wrote:
| In this particular context it seems to just be one of a zoo of
| competing alternatives with nothing in particular to recommend
| it, and some serious drawbacks.
|
| I've seen in proposed for voting in the real world where you
| buy the credits with real money in some growing cost-per-
| credit, as an attempt to control for rich people being able to
| buy so much more voting power right now through lobbiests. It
| has a certain cryptonanarchist or radical libertarian appeal,
| but the engineer in me points out there doesn't appear to be a
| path from here to there, since among other things you have to
| figure out how to fully ban any other form of lobbying by the
| rich, which is simply not practical. Not even if I include
| "have a violent" revolution as an option, because no plausible
| violent revolution would adopt this system at the end of it
| either. I dunno if it's fair to say people are really hardcoded
| to "one person, one vote", but for whatever reason it is
| something that you can get people to generally agree as fair,
| possibly just because everyone can easily see that the instant
| you _visibly_ deviate from that there 's no longer in point in
| voting because you will never get to the voting phase; the
| voting body will never again do anything but argue about how to
| vote.
|
| While I think it's still hopelessly impossible, at least in
| this context there's some meat to discuss to the proposal,
| rather than just Yet Another Exotic Voting Method for small
| groups.
|
| (I have to add _visibly_ there because as previous sentences
| show in that paragraph, I 'm well aware we don't have a "one
| person, one vote" system in practice. In theory it's a
| Republic, after all, not a Democracy, and in practice, anyone
| who buys lobbiests has _vastly_ more voting power than you do.
| But it _looks_ like we do, so it 's stable enough for now. It
| can even be the case that everyone pretty much realizes it, but
| it's stable enough. But make it _visibly obvious_ that 's not
| what's happening and the fireworks will fly.)
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > you have to figure out how to fully ban any other form of
| lobbying by the rich
|
| In fact, if a society could work out how to do that, they
| should do that first, and then they might find that all these
| "let rich people have more voting power" proposals would
| coincidentally disappear.
|
| > it's a Republic, after all, not a Democracy
|
| Please don't perpetuate that awful meme. A country can be
| both, and the US is only "not a democracy" under the most
| idiosyncratic definition of "democracy".
|
| https://mises.org/wire/stop-saying-were-republic-not-
| democra...
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-11/is-
| u-s...
|
| https://thebaffler.com/latest/were-a-republic-not-a-
| democrac...
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| The idea as I've heard it is that with quadratic costs, you'll
| end up with people voting in proportion to how much they care.
| If you care 3x as much as I do, you'll spend 3x as many votes
| on it.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| The idea seems to be that if you care 3x as much, you'll keep
| buying votes until the marginal cost of each new vote is 3x
| greater. The marginal cost is linear, the total cost is the
| integral of that which is quadratic.
|
| The fact that you have a finite budget, so you can't just
| arbitrarily keep buying votes until some threshold is met,
| seems like a big flaw in the argument.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Yeah, the _goal_ is to have number of votes voted be
| proportional to how much you care. I don 't know how
| accurately that pans out when this is really used.
| timdaub wrote:
| The most-comprehensive argument that motivates its existence,
| I've found in Glen Weyl and Eric Posner's book "Radical
| Markets."
| jdwyah wrote:
| Lazy Q, but do you know if there is a reason that the votes
| need to be whole numbers? If I allocate 7 credits to
| something is there any reason not to just count that as 2.65
| votes?
|
| (And by "any reason" I guess I mean "any reason besides lack
| of comfort with non-whole numbers").
|
| From here it seems like the general principle of social cost
| still applies / doesn't have anything to do with the step-
| function nature of things.
| timdaub wrote:
| I'll attempt explaining in my own words with the risk of
| exposing my lack of understanding. I'm currently in the
| office, so I don't have the book with me. So this is from
| the top of my head.
|
| In Weyl and Posner's book "Radical Markets" they motivate
| quadratic voting as outlined as a way of preference voting
| where a voter's desire intensity is represented in the
| vote.
|
| Their argument is practically outlined in the pollution +
| city example I make in the original blog post and where,
| with the sloppy figure I have attached [1], they reason
| geometrically that "Nils" should "pay" for reducing the
| electricity plant's pollution. If you look closely at that
| figure (which is nicer in the book), you can see that the
| plane where the cost functions intersect is a triangle.
|
| I can't fully reproduce the mathematical reasoning here,
| but how I understood it is that dependent on Nils's choice,
| the externality he imposes has quadratic cost given that
| the triangle's change is affected quadratically. In an
| isosceles triangle, where volume V is defined dependent on
| two same length sides, I can see that work out. But I've
| never worked through that.
|
| More intuitively, an example, I'm just making up is if
| you're annoyingly snorting during a visit to the cinema.
|
| If you're the only person snorting and you think that's OK,
| but nobody else can understand the dialogue - you're not
| only wasting your money but everybody else's. It's
| quadratic because of the opportunity cost of everybody
| wasting 2 hours but having all paid for the film. So both
| the cost of the cinema running the movie for two hours and
| everybody paying but not understanding makes your snorting
| square the cost. Does that make sense? Please correct me if
| I'm wrong.
|
| So essentially, if Nils is picky with anti-pollution, his
| pickiness costs the town's society quadratically - which is
| why he should pay the quadratic cost of his pickiness
| during governance.
|
| references:
|
| - 1: https://timdaub.github.io/assets/images/cost-of-
| externality....
| twic wrote:
| The comment you're replying to asks one question - why do
| votes need to be whole numbers? It doesn't seem to me
| that this addresses that question at all.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Is there a good summary anywhere besides just reading the
| book?
|
| I'm curious but skeptical. I would have thought that if there
| is a good and straightforward justification, it would be in
| the wikipedia page, but it's not. It simply says:
|
| _Quadratic voting is a variant of cumulative voting in the
| class of cardinal voting. It differs from cumulative voting
| by altering "the cost" and "the vote" relation from linear to
| quadratic._
|
| Apart from that there's no comparison to cumulative voting,
| which seems a lot simpler and more robust against concerns
| like collusion and sybil attacks. The only other mention of
| "linear" is in a rather opaque paragraph marked "citation
| needed".
|
| If it's purely a way to allow people to buy votes without
| having rich people completely corner the market, I guess it
| makes some sense, but it still seems rather wrongheaded. If
| you're going to give everybody the same number of virtual
| tokens, there are no rich people to begin with. If you insist
| on using an actual currency, there are other possible
| mechanisms like a universal basic income.
|
| _Edit to add:_ Aha, I 've found a (the?) paper:
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956
|
| _Rational agents maximize their utility by setting marginal
| cost equal to marginal benefit. This means that if John
| values being able to incrementally move the outcome in his
| favor twice as much as Sue values being able to incrementally
| move the outcome in her favor, John will pay twice as much at
| the margin as Sue does. For example, John buys 16 votes while
| Sue buys 8 votes. The exact number of votes that John and Sue
| buy depends on their estimates of how likely they will be
| pivotal voters, as explained below, so if John buys 16 votes
| for $256 (162 ), this does not mean that he values the
| project at $256. But it does mean that he values the project
| twice as much as Sue, who buys 8 votes._
|
| This emphasis on marginal cost seems to ignore the fact that
| John and Sue will be working with finite budgets -- the
| overall real cost of the vote is important too! Unless I
| misunderstand, the implication is that if the cost were
| linear, John would buy an unbounded number of votes (as the
| marginal cost never goes up) which seems absurd.
|
| Particularly in the cases where quadratic voting is actually
| being used in government, when e.g. lawmakers are given 100
| tokens to split among different possibilities, I don't think
| any of the above analysis applies at all, and it's not clear
| that quadratic voting has any advantages over cumulative
| voting.
| afiori wrote:
| I will be specifically talking about this demo
|
| https://www.economist.com/interactive/2021/12/18/quadratic-
| v...
|
| I don't think that quadratic voting is relevant for the
| case of "Many people need to answer a few shared questions"
| as it happens it elections. I believe it is for the case
| "one person needs to answer many questions" as it happens
| in polling.
|
| Of course it can be used in elections as a sort of
| preference voting, but its effect is to punish extreme
| opinions (you might be extremely opposed to Statement A but
| might also want to keep some credits to express your milder
| opinion about B, C, and D.
|
| (of course this also opens more venues for manipulating
| polling by adding duplicated similar questions...)
| iainmerrick wrote:
| That UI is excellent, but it doesn't explain _why_ it
| should be quadratic and not linear. At first glance, it
| seems actively bad, as I 'm penalised for focusing on
| just a few issues!
|
| Unfortunately the linked article is paywalled.
|
| The motivating example in the QV papers I've just skimmed
| is more about people voting on a sequence of yes-or-no
| questions, buying some number of votes and being
| compensated afterwards each time. That's totally
| different from this one-shot, multiple-questions, fixed-
| budget example.
| timdaub wrote:
| There's also all the academic literature of Weyl et al.
| that makes the basis of the book, but I've found that to be
| less accessible [1].
|
| references:
|
| - 1:
| https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pandp.20181002
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I wonder if there'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.
|
| For example, we'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
| "fraudits" where various groups try to undermine the confidence
| in elections that have already taken place.
|
| 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.
|
| That doesn't mean that current systems are perfect, or that FUD
| is an unbeatable strategy for opposing reforms, but it does mean
| that it's not enough for a proposal to offer elections that are
| more convenient or that have better psephological properties.
| dwighttk wrote:
| 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).
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Do you really think that countries which use FPTP for elections
| have a better political culture and public satisfaction than
| countries which use more proportional systems?
|
| It's not like electoral reform is some wild untested idea that
| we don't have any data about, globally.
| malfist wrote:
| Quadratic voting seems like a very convoluted way to say: "The
| rich should have all the votes"
|
| 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.
|
| This is just poll taxes 2.0, now with extra feudalism.
| gs17 wrote:
| Quadratic voting does not require the credits to be purchasable
| with real money. Many implementations simply give every voter a
| fixed number of credits to spend with no way to gain more.
| malfist wrote:
| That's interesting, I did not get that from the article. It
| talked about voters who wanted less air pollution had to pay
| the economic costs of voters that didn't care about air
| pollution, but wanted lower electricity bills.
| mdavis6890 wrote:
| There is a chapter in the excellent book "Why Flip a Coin"
| 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.
|
| See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > adding a 3rd candidate should not change the relative order
| of the first two
|
| This is, I think, the least justified requirement, since humans
| do naturally reframe situations when extra information is
| given, which can cause them to change their mind about previous
| decisions.
|
| To give a trivial example, suppose you were in a district which
| historically had a Democrat and a Republican candidate, and you
| always voted Democrat, but one year a far left independent
| candidate became popular and you feared they would attract most
| Democrat voters over to their camp. Given that scenario, it
| might make sense for you to vote for a moderate Republican
| instead.
|
| In any case, I think that the significance of Arrow's
| impossibility theorem is generally over-estimated (and it
| spreads as a meme because people like to think that all voting
| systems are bad so there's no reason to change the terrible one
| they have).
|
| For example, the theorem only applies to ordinal (ranked)
| voting systems, not cardinal (rated) ones, and only proves that
| the system cannot output "a community-wide (complete and
| transitive) ranking", so it is still possible to elect a small
| set of politicians who collectively embody the same preferences
| as the voters, and in direct proportion to them.
| twic wrote:
| But all along, this person's preference is Democrat >
| Republican > Independent. That doesn't change. The fact that
| their best interests are served by casting a ballot which
| doesn't reflect that is exactly the problem!
| couchand wrote:
| > their best interests are served by casting a ballot which
| doesn't reflect that is exactly the problem!
|
| You may be interested to hear about the Gibbard-
| Satterthwaite theorem then. Any non-dictatorial system with
| more than two alternatives is subject to tactical voting.
| Whoops!
| wtallis wrote:
| You've described an example where the addition of a third
| candidate causes a voter to strategically change who they're
| going to vote for, based on the expected outcomes under a
| particular voting system. That's not the same thing as the
| voter's actual preferences changing, it's just a
| manifestation of a limitation of a particular voting system.
| couchand wrote:
| What exactly do you mean by "the voter's actual
| preferences"?
| NathanielLovin wrote:
| Arrow's impossibility theorem only applies to ordinal voting
| systems. Quadratic voting is a cardinal system. Cardinal voting
| still isn't perfect, but it does get around some of the
| problems with ordinal systems.
| notahacker wrote:
| This form of cardinal voting has a particularly egregious
| equivalent of the "additional candidate affects preference
| ordering" issue in ordinal voting systems though. Unlike the
| weird edge cases with preference ordering in ordinal votes,
| the effects of adding additional votes on reducing certain
| voting blocs' influence on other issues where ppeoplemust
| divide a budget across multiple issues often lead to
| intuitive (trivially simple, even) strategies to manipulate a
| particular outcome.
|
| If you can add a proposition to the ballot paper which
| sufficiently threatens a particular group, they're forced to
| waste votes defending themselves against it, which means they
| have less influence on other issues they might also care
| about. As far as I can see the quadratic nature makes it
| worse, by making it more plausible a minority could actually
| lose a vote that threatens them if they only spent _most_ of
| their credits defending themselves against it.
|
| That's a bigger UX issue than non-sophisticated voters not
| really grasping the budgeting detail.
| contravariant wrote:
| I'm not sure quadratic voting is the best cardinal voting
| system though. In particular it still fails to satisfy
| independence of irrelevant alternatives. So sure Arrow's
| impossibility may not apply, but the conclusion isn't
| actually different.
| baoyu wrote:
| Here's a quadratic voting demo that looks nice and provides more
| intuition:
| https://www.economist.com/interactive/2021/12/18/quadratic-v...
| karaterobot wrote:
| This is great!
|
| And it reveals another (probably unsolvable?) UX problem with
| quadratic voting: it takes so much longer to allocate votes by
| comparison to a thumbs-up / thumbs-down vote.
|
| For myself, I did a pass through the issues, supporting or
| opposing each issue with a single vote. Then, I did another
| pass to add additional votes to each issue in proportion to how
| much I cared, while carefully paying attention to how many
| issues were left to be voted on, and my remaining "budget" of
| votes. Then, I did a final series of passes to rebalance
| everything, trying to make it as reflective of my positions as
| possible, while using as many votes as I could (so as not to
| leave any crumbs of democracy on the table, so to speak).
|
| The whole thing was actually really complex, and not done in
| "linear time" like a traditional ballot. And it wasn't because
| I thought more about the issues, but purely because the rules
| of the system introduced so much more overhead.
|
| Not saying I dislike the idea of quadratic voting, just that
| you can really feel the difference.
| timdaub wrote:
| thanks for sharing, I love the UI!
| jdwyah wrote:
| That UI really is good.
|
| The large number of votes (100) and issues (10) seems to
| reduce the issue around not being able to "spend" all your
| votes as well. When I've only got 25 it feels particularly
| wasteful to not be able to spend 7. But with 100 and 10
| choices I really had a lot more degrees of freedom.
|
| I run a small ranking app and have previously landed on
| Schulze method for calculating the rankings.
| http://blog.forcerank.it/counting-votes-is-hard I'm going to
| have to think about adding quadratic as an option though.
| dllthomas wrote:
| For the example given, it seems like the majority criterion
| is actually not desirable.
|
| Picking a talk topic that everyone will like a lot _is a
| better outcome_ than picking another slightly preferred by
| most but completely uninteresting to the rest.
| amelius wrote:
| Why do the questions never include my purchasing power, given
| my current financial situation?
|
| This is what 50% of the population cares about, yet their votes
| are stolen away by focusing on things like immigration and
| terrorism.
|
| The mismatch in these questions is why lower social classes
| often vote for populist right wing parties, instead of in their
| own best interest.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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 _of the other party_
| 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.
|
| 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 _their_ voters simply care a
| lot more about the topic than yours do.
| shonenknifefan1 wrote:
| I had assumed when reading this that the voting credit budget
| would be allocated per question rather than across the entire
| ballot. However I don't think the article gave an example of a
| ballot with multiple questions.
|
| I'd be interested to learn which way this being implemented in
| practice for multi-question ballots.
| thechao wrote:
| I was confused by GP's post, as well! I have only seen
| quadratic voting used to decide amongst non-binary questions:
| positions with at least 3 (or more) possible outcomes. It
| seems weird to mix voting across a bunch of different issues.
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