What is QV?
QV, or “quadratic voting”, is the mechanism at the heart of the Forum app. Don’t worry if that sounds a bit complicated! It’s quite straightforward. This article will walk through exactly how QV works, and why it’s so much more effective than other voting systems.
We promise, QV is not as complicated as predicting the stock market.
The big idea
If you’re familiar with spending and saving money, then you understand the first half of QV. If you understand that prices play a role in what people choose to buy, then you understand the other half.
Under QV, every voter in an election has ‘voting tokens’, which are turned into votes, which are then added up to find out how popular each of the options are. Why the extra step, of adding these tokens in? Because of the enormous gain in flexibility for voters, to express what they think, accurately and honestly. To see why this is useful, let’s first explore an election with ‘traditional’ voting rules.
Let’s say there’s an election, with candidates A, B and C. A and C represent bigger parties that have won more elections in the past, so most people think one of them will win. Candidate B is actually more popular overall, as they represent the views of most citizens better than A or C. But since B is not expected to win, even people who like B feel a pressure to vote for A or C, mainly to avoid ‘wasting their vote’, and letting their least-favourite candidate win. This is called ‘tactical voting’, and it’s a persistent problem in most systems.
How is QV different?
Under QV, voters can express their preferences in much more detail, than just putting a single cross in a single box. In a QV election, voters cast several votes, to give each candidate a score that reflects how much they like them. This captures a lot more information than a single vote, and allows citizens’ real preferences to shine through.
QV also allows for negative voting, which is the final nail in the coffin of tactical voting. If you dislike a candidate and want to stop them from winning an election, you can cast some votes against them, and some in favour of other candidates. This leads to outcomes that most people are happy with, and nobody is too unhappy with. In short, outcomes that are fairer and more balanced.
You might be wondering, won’t people just use all of their tokens voting for their favourite candidate, or against their least favourite? If this happens, we’d lose the extra information from people casting multiple votes. Fortunately, QV solves this by imposing a rising ‘cost’ on votes. This cost isn’t paid in money of course, but in voting tokens.
Votes get progressively more ‘expensive’, the more of them you cast. This means that people will cast more votes for a candidate, until it it wouldn’t be worth it, to cast any more. Thanks to this mechanism, the result shows how much a voter actually likes each candidate.
That’s it! That’s all the maths you need to understand, to use QV. With this simple mechanism, people are freed from the pressure to vote against their own interests. They’re able to express a lot more detail, about what they think of each of the candidates. This empowers people much more than even ranked voting systems, which in turn are a big improvement over ‘one person, one vote’.
Save now, spend later?
There’s one final piece of the QV mechanism that we’ve not yet covered, and that’s ‘budgeting over time’. We don’t technically need this, to get the benefits of QV, but it makes a good system even more effective.
This aspect of the system treats different elections as being connected over time, and aims to give people more influence on decisions that they both know and care a lot about. Everyone in a group gets a set amount of tokens per day (1,000 as standard), and is free to save or spend them as they please.
This final feature of QV respects the fact that not everyone cares about all issues equally. It gives people greater voice in influencing a decision that affects them directly, which is fairer than giving everyone equal influence. Budgeting over time also lets people vote more strongly on issues that they know more about. This means that in general, wiser and more reasonable decisions will be made.
Credit for first image: https://www.nyit.edu/degrees/data_science_ms