A joint Politics and Economics series |
Social choice and electoral systems |
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Mathematics portal |
Quadratic voting is a voting system that encourages voters to express their true relative intensity of preference between multiple options or elections.[1] By doing so, quadratic voting seeks to mitigate tyranny of the majority by enabling participants to trade influence over issues they don't care about for influence over issues they do.
Quadratic voting works by having voters allocate "credits" (which are either real currencies or artificially distributed tokens) to various issues. The number of votes to add is determined by a quadratic cost function, meaning that to vote times for a given option, credits are required to be allocated (for example, 3 votes would cost 9 credits).[2] Because the quadratic cost function makes each additional vote more expensive, voters are incentivized to allocate their credits to reflect their true relative preferences between different options, as opposed to previous proposals for storable votes where voters may choose to allocate all their votes to a single cause and not accurately represent their true preferences.[3]
Number of votes |
"Vote credit" cost |
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1 | 1 |
2 | 4 |
3 | 9 |
4 | 16 |
5 | 25 |