A Proposal For Democracy: Cardinal Voting

linear or quadratic?

There are many problems with democracy, one of which is “irrational” voters. I’m not going to address that in this post. Instead, I’d like to address some of the problems posed by Arrow’s impossibility theorem, which states that when voters have three or more distinct alternatives (options), no ranked voting electoral system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide (complete and transitive) ranking while also meeting the specified set of desirable criteria: unrestricted domain, non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, and independence of irrelevant alternatives.

The obvious solution to the conundrums posed is to throw out ordinal systems in favor of cardinal voting, e.g. quadratic voting, cumulative voting, etc. You can read the articles I linked to learn about those voting systems, but I’m here to propose an idea that I believe isn’t widely known.

Here’s the gist:

(1) Allocate 100 (the number is arbitrary) continuous votes to each voter per election

(2) The voters can now choose to allocate those votes whichever way they like among the outcomes, though they must not exceed their “given number” of votes

(3) Voters can also choose to save, invest, buy, sell, lend, or borrow votes across “voting markets”; let the free market do the allocation, votes may even be traded for different elections

In essence, this is just a modified form of score voting, which Kenneth Arrow suggested was optimal. I like the idea for various reasons: (1) it allows voters to trade or make use of their votes, thus (2) efficient mechanisms like this can be used, and (3) it’s really fucking cool. There can also be various additions to the proposal. For example, votes can be “given” to politicians every election and that politician may use those votes in some decision-making process.

Any potential problems with the system, e.g. lack of information, inequality, utility monsters, special interest groups, etc. can be addressed through other means, such as conducting trades using artificial rather than real currency. After all, it’s better to consider the whole rather than the sum of its parts.

Admittedly, I’m uncertain of the effects such a system would bring about, and it doesn’t even necessarily satisfy preferable properties like the Condorcet criterion. The way I outlined it makes the name “linear voting” sound fitting, but quadratic voting has been proposed as a better solution for many reasons; I’m somewhat inclined to agree, though linear voting is easier to sell or understand. The only plausible conclusion is that more discussion and research need to be done. Be the change you want to see in the world. Vote for linear cardinal voting! Or quadratic voting, I guess…