🛠️ quadvote
QuadVote is an app for groups to decide on priorities, over time, based on the idea of Quadratic Voting.
More specifically, the app allows a group to add "topics" and vote on them, using a quadratic scale for the cost of votes (1 vote costs 1 token, 2 votes cost 4 tokens, 3 votes cost 9 tokens, etc.). When relevant, an admin removes a topic and the associated tokens. Participants can claim new tokens monthly.
Why quadratic? Turns out that the quadratic function is the function that makes the marginal cost of a vote match an individual's marginal benefit, which is the high-falutin' micro-economics way of saying it aligns incentives (see one of Glen Weyl's papers for a better explanation, p.27 onwards).
This project is a spiritual follow-up to Decidedly So, in that it's another experiment/exploration into "integrating individual preferences into collective choices".
Of various "social choice" mechanisms, quadratic voting quite elegantly balances the will of the majority and minority: issues of common interest rank highly, but so do issues of niche but passionate interest. More importantly, the "tyranny of the majority" is kept in check: a majority with weak preferences does not prevail over a minority with strong preferences.
"The literature" discusses various ways of making use of quadratic voting, for example, having citizens pay real money to vote on ballot issues, including the ability to cast negative votes (but without seeing what others are voting). QuadVote integrates quadratic voting into a system that makes a bunch of important choices that may make the overall mechanism more or less effective at enacting group will. These additional choices are:
- using fake currency
- only allowing positive voting
- keeping voting open continuously (not a one off "election")
- allowing voters to see results in real-time
- allowing voters to adjust their votes freely
These choices result in an application that could be used by groups to maintain a list of priorities...
- ex. a community to decide on funding priorities (from households to nation-scale)
- ex. a corporate board to prioritize discussion topics
- ex. a political party to decide on platform priorities
- ex. a regular board game group to decide on which game to play
I originally built it to use it with an ongoing discussion group to help decide on upcoming topics, but I didn't end up forming the group, and left the project at 95% completion (from late 2022 to late 2025).