Quadratic Voting
= "a collective decision-making procedure where each voter is endowed with a budget of vote credits to spend to influence the outcome of a range of decisions".
Description
Julien Carbonnell:
"Quadratic Voting is a collective decision-making procedure where each voter is endowed with a budget of vote credits to spend to influence the outcome of a range of decisions. It has been imagined by Stephen P. Lalley, professor of Statistic and Mathematics at the University of Chicago, and Glen Weyl, economist and principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England.
Created in the context of governing crypto-currency leaned communities, the term quadratic refers to the possibility to buy supplementary votes for the cost of the square of the number of the votes bought. It means: 1 vote costs 1 credit, 2 votes cost 4 credits, 3 votes cost 9 credits, 4 votes cost 16 credits, etc. In this model, participants express how strongly they feel about an issue rather than just if they are in favor or opposed to it. The quadratic nature of the voting means that a voter can use his votes more efficiently than by spreading them across many issues. For example, with a budget of 16 credits, a voter can apply 1 vote to 16 issues or if he feels very concerned by a single issue, apply 4 votes, at the costs of 16 credits, to this unique issue. In bigger communities, or in the sense to shorten the delay of voting phases, it’s possible to implement a model in which the network nominates a random number of voters for each voting proposal. This scenario would avoid the speculation behaviors too, and prevent strategic alliances because it make the voters prevision uncertain.
The beauty of quadratic voting is that the cost of buying votes increases very rapidly, which prevents the temptation by the richest members to continuously steal the decision-making to the others. But it keeps subject to the collusion attack, in which multiple voters conspire to achieve a specific outcome. Finally, the major problem in the application of this voting model is that it could work only with a secured validation identity system while most of the blockchain and crypto-currency users operate under pseudonymity or anonymity." (https://medium.com/@julien.carbonnell/civil-society-futures-of-citizenship-and-democracy-through-digital-era-24e28c27276)