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Comment by dvorak365 | Hacker News Reader

What if we took this idea, applied it to wealth instead of votes, and called it something like "progressive marginal tax rates"? Seems like it would be a more effective way to fight zealotry than to attack the democratic principle of all people getting the same amount of votes.

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Every voter has the same number of tokens, so it is fair.

The quadratic progression is per candidate (or issue or whatever object is being voted on).

If you have 91 tokens, you can vote once for each of 91 competing choices. Or you can vote 6 times for one option: 1 + 4 + 9 + 16 + 25 + 36 = 91. Or twice each for 22 options, with three tokens left to vote on three more.

But tokens aren't votes. A person whose ideology aligns with 100 options has 10x the ability to influence the outcome of the election towards their preferred outcomes than someone whose ideology aligns with only one option.

You mean, it does what it says on the box?

I'm not denying that this is a type of voting system that biases towards certain outcomes. I'm saying that the bias it attempts to accomplish is not desirable as it gives more political power to people with weak opinions than people with strong opinions. I think a good voting system would allow people to express the strength of their feelings on the options, but the system shouldn't reward weak opinions over strong opinions and vice versa. Most traditional cardinal systems accomplish this just fine.

Rather, it entrenches the power to the bland, indistinct body of politics as a whole, which expresses itself through numerous voting choices that are hard to distinguish from one another and are more less the same ideology, which can get large numbers of votes through choices that are only ostensibly distinct. It suppresses votes for choices that stand out from that group.

I don't think that is even necessary because the current voting systems already eliminate the fringes. For instance in many countries there is effectively a persistent two- or three-party system, even though other parties make an appearance.

But "votes" with tokens aren't votes either. Claiming that a spread of 100 votes has 10x the effect of 10 votes requires some model of the vote - you don't know that 10 votes on a single issue doesn't have an outsized effect on swinging a decision where 100 single votes just bump a number up across the board.

More than anything, the system just places power in compromise, which is nothing new - in a one-vote system, a person who is willing to vote for a centrist politician has more political power than me, a fringe voter, because their influence on the election result is better-felt.

There are other ways to construct a voting system that places power in compromise without incentivizing weak opinions over strong opinions.

There is a problem if there are 99 items to vote for, which are all aligned with each other, more or less, ideologically, and 1 item that is diametrically opposed to these. Someone casting 99 votes for those 99 items has political power over someone trying to concentrate on that one, only able to cast 6. This system works best if all the choices are very distinct.

If numerous choices are really just minor variations of the same choice, that tends to undermines the system with a rather gaping hole. The cynical observer might note that in fact that's the idea behind it: entrench the power of the bland, indistinct choice in leadership.

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