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.
This seems to be the obvious problem. If I only care about X, and you only about Y, we could vote individually (100 tokens -> 10 votes for X, 100 tokens -> 10 votes for Y), or we could collude and make that vote (2 * 50 tokens -> 2 * 7 votes X, 2 * 50 tokens -> 2 * 7 votes Y).
I don't see the problem with that, because it would require me to convince you to vote for Y although you want X.
And in addition, seeing as this is an anonymous (I'm assuming) vote, then I could lie to you and vote my way (to get more votes for Y), but then if everyone will do it, the colluding wouldn't work, so we need to be able to trust each other and work together, which is exactly what we in the end, for people to work together and not against each other.
Coordinated groups have voting power of sqrt(total money)*sqrt(number of individuals), uncoordinated ones have sqrt(money). If you are for some cause, you should just find like-minded individuals and pool your total money. They have very limited incentive for keeping the money for themselves because they also agree with you on the issue.
Then the other side should also coordinate tightly in this manner, and now you have a new problem: polarization.
Yeah but you're assuming people naturally line up in two camps. It's possible that you've been inadvertently trained to think this way if you inhabit a duopolistic society.
“Your religion, your salvation, requires that you allocate tokens as your local Party Organizer assigns. Only then can we combat the godless agenda the elites have shamelessly created this quadratic system to perpetuate. Do not let them bait you from deviating from our coordinated plan to stop them.”
Anonymous voting doesn’t help when independent thought itself is trained away from an early age.
This is just persuading your compatriots to vote, which is normal and part of democracy. That's not "collusion" (an increasingly vacuous word these days).
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.
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"!
> 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.
What comes to mind to me is highly organized is, for example, a NIMBY crowd; a pro crowd is not as tightly coordinated, they get trounced, even if in polling the pros are in majority.
How do you define coordinated? Let's say you define coordinated as a group who on average spends a greater % of their voting budget on an issue than the other side. You also have a situation where the minority is coordinated and the majority is disorganized. In this situation, each individual in the majority would have to allocate a smaller percentage of their budget to an issue than an individual in a minority in order to have the same amount of influence on an issue. This is because.
1) You are spreading the vote credit cost across a larger population
2) Because of quadratic voting, if you hold the total number of a group's voting credits put towards an issue constant as you add additional people to a group, the impact that a group has on a particular issue grows.
Because of these two factors, the majority can be quite a bit more disorganized than the minority and still control the issue.
> The primary positions of power within a republic are not inherited, but are attained through democracy, oligarchy or autocracy.
We're a democratic republic. Just saying the US is not a democracy but rather a republic is a woefully uninformed statement. They are not disjoint. Now let's stop parroting this phrase once and for all.
Wikipedia is not a source. It's a spot to see what random people wrote about something. Maybe it's useful to find something, often I find it useful to see what is not said, but citing it is pointless unless you drill down to the edit and cite the editor.
The important point is we protect minority positions via inalienable rights. That is not guaranteed in a pure democracy. It takes a near impossible situation to disarm a minority in the Unites States. It is what sets up apart from traditional democracies. I'm fine with the term Democratic Republic, but if you are concerned about parroting It's not the word republic that gets parroted.
Yes, I remember when our teachers used to hound this into us. But frankly Wikipedia has been as verifiable as the Encyclopedia Britannica. If you're going to say Wikipedia (the most commonly cited resource) isn't providing a good definition, provide a good source that counters. Your reply has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
Also, see [0] (a good source) 1b and the discussion below.
If you're going to act high and mighty, do some background research. No one likes an armchair scholar. And if you're going to be a combative armchair scholar, you better do some actual fact checking.
a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law
Calling it a Democracy without mentioning the more important word misses the point; your original comment:
The idea of a majority having more power than a minority is, as another user puts it "a feature, not a bug".
That is exactly what our Republic protects against. The minority has the same inalienable rights as the majority.
In theory, more of a federal republic whose constituent members are democratic republics than a democratic republic itself. In practice those members are more oligarchic (specifically plutocratic) than democratic, though, but most of the people saying “republic not a democracy” probably don't want to come out and say “federation of plutocracies.”
The voting method breaks down entirely when you consider strategic voting by groups, and multiple-repetitions game strategies.
100 players would form a voting cartel, and each member would spread their votes out among all the members' favorite issues. Reneging on the cartel's rules means that the entire cartel retaliates on the next vote.
So each party has exactly 100 issues in their platform, and no individual voter can do anything to stop them.
You're assuming votes are public, which is not usually the case. If there's no way to check someone else's vote, there's no way to enforce a voting block.
If the votes aren't public enough to see the ballots, how do you know if a voting district cast the correct number of votes for the number of ballots cast? How do you know if the number of quadratic votes match the sum of sqrts of the individual votes? How do you check to see if anyone's cheating?
If you can see the ballots, you can filter for the ones that match the cartel platform, and count to 100. There may be a voting coordination strategy to find out who cheated. Maybe instead of 100 members, you have 99, and each member votes 2 for a different issue.
If there are enough candidates, you can encode a unique ID in the pattern of your individual votes to prove who you are to somebody reading anonymous ballot papers. I've heard this is possible in Australia with a huge list of candidates and multiple votes.
I like the idea of voting quadratically with money. Every vote scales with cost. Instead of hiding the reality, just expose it and limit it with quadratic scaling.
And people with no disposable income get zero representation, and aren't even worth pandering lip service.
Doesn't sound sustainable, but it's an interesting idea to play with. You could adjust the price-point to make it more or less price-competitive with lobbying and conventional bribery, and to serve as a sort of tax. Might make for a good cyberpunk setting.
The US is already feeling the pain of bloc voting though - the two party system has managed to heavily entrench itself - we need to look at voting systems that may experimentation free or cheap.
I'd much rather see IRV gain traction to remove the spoiler effect and disincentivise negative campaigning.
Here is some back of the envelope math that I did:
Assume you have two groups who are each 100% focused on a cause which the other group has no opinion of.
n = people in each group
b = individual vote budget
Each Group Votes Independently: n * sqrt(b) votes
If a group colludes s.t. group A gives (1/2)b votes to group B's issue and vice versa you get: 2 * n * sqrt((1/2)b)) votes which simplifies into Sqrt(2) * n * sqrt(b).
Yet coordinating between these two groups becomes more difficult and costly, growing somewhere between n (perfect coordination) and n^2 (total decentralization). Thus, regardless of how you coordinate it will always be more expensive than the influence you gain which grows at sqrt().
Even in this simple assumption collusion becomes a negative value decision.
There are some additional assumptions you need. First that people are transparent. Second, that they are honest. Third that they are consistent. So, while voting in isolation has a cost — wasted votes — so does coordinated voting — misinformed votes. The wasted votes problem will never make you miss your favorite, but the misinformed vote problem could be catastrophic.
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.