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Comment by eridius | Hacker News Reader

Just reading the linked summary (and not the paper itself), it seems like this doesn't take wealth disparity into account. If the cost for your votes is the square of the votes you want to cast, then that means people with a lot of money can trivially buy significantly more votes than people with very little money, even if they don't necessarily care more about the issue than the people with very little money. It seems like this would change tyranny of the majority into tyranny of the wealthy.

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The thing is, we already have the tyranny of the wealthy. The Tullock paradox is basically that the cost of lobbying is dwarfed by the returns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tullock_paradox

I'm still getting my head around it, but it seems that Quadratic Voting would actually increase what wealthy people pay to influence public policy.

Edit: Just as an example, the largest "outside money" spender in the 2012 election was Crossroads, which spent about $57M. I have no idea how many votes they were able to get for that money. With Quadratic Voting, they'd get 7,550. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

> spent about $57M. I have no idea how many votes they were able to get for that money. With Quadratic Voting, they'd get 7,550.

Doesn't that make it seem likely that they would prefer to continue with their current strategy rather than use the money to buy votes then? It seems likely that they ended up with more than 7550 votes for their 57M, especially considering that 7550 votes would be a smaller proportion of total votes in a system where people could get more than one vote.

While very interesting, I don't think a system like this really addresses the main problems which are more to do with the need for an educated and informed populace than anything else.

This is a great point. We address it in great depth in the paper with Posner, Voting Squared (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956). QV helps here, a lot we hope, because most current expenditure on advertising is useful because it targets very indifferent swing voters who feel a duty to vote but do not care one way or the other. They can easily be swayed by noisy and wasteful advertising. But under QV they would not matter much as they would never cast more than a very small vote in either direction. On the other hand persuading those who really know an issue to feel a bit more strongly or less strongly would have a lot of value. This would make the sort of public discourse that was encouraged much more intelligent and mature, like investigative reports rather than slanderous or vacuous ad copy.

Here's another interesting thought: QV might reduce the influence of PACs by solving the principal-agent problem. PACs like Crossroads are not, in fact, wealthy people. They're pools of donations from many politically sympathetic individuals. People donate to PACs because they want to do more than cast their one vote on a particular issue.

But donating to a PAC is a really inefficient way to have a political effect. The rules governing PACs are so loose that the people controlling them can do anything they want with the money, including flying a private jet to Tahiti and drinking MaiTais during the election. Even more responsible PACs will probably not spend the money exactly the way the donor would. They might, for example, concentrate their spending on certain "key" elections and ignore the donor's favourite candidate. Or they might support all the candidates from a given party, when the donor only really cares about one of them.

With QV, the donor can put his money to work in exactly the way he wants. That might leave PACs with much less money to spend.

> With QV, the donor can put his money to work in exactly the way he wants. That might leave PACs with much less money to spend.

We can hope. I expect though that in general having your dollars have - by design - a quadratically decreasing power in vote purchasing is quickly going to give you less bang for your buck than spending it on manipulating the perceptions of others. There'll be some cross over position in value, and people will spend $x on votes and the rest on manipulating/persuading others which is what PACs are for.

To reiterate kybernetikos's point:

if Crossroads can get more than 7,550 votes today for their $57M, they can get more than 7,550 votes tomorrow for the same $57M without skipping a beat, by pre-bribing the electorate to make 1 vote each.

So this doesn't seem to change much from Crossroads' point of view.

It doesn't look as though Quadratic Voting should have any effect on lobbying.

The paper has examples with dollar amounts starting around page 30.

If ten thousand poor people buy one vote each for $1, the wealthy would-be tyrant needs to buy 10,001 votes to win, at a cost of $100,020,001. If the tyrant goes ahead and does this, after the election all the poor people will receive $10,001 each.

It would probably be cheaper for the would-be tyrant to just promise $5000 to each of the poor people (not necessarily in cash - i.e. "if I am elected I will institute a new support program for the people with the budget of $5000 per capita", etc.) - that's how it is done nowdays and works quite frequently.

Additionally, the $5000 per capita program can be financed with budget income and not private cash, making it virtually free for the would-be tyrant once he's elected. Of course, the budget is limited so you have a cup on how much you can offer, and people more adept in economics would figure out it's ultimately their own money that they are being promised, but usually the margin between competing politicians is small enough that people who would vote on the promise of getting "free money" have a good chance to tip it over.

Two wealthy would-be tyrants taking the same position on a view would only require a combination of 10,001 votes, at a combined cost of $50,010,001. And it only goes down as more wealthy people decide to vote in the same way.

It also seems really quite repugnant to tell people "your vote was overruled by one wealthy person, but it's ok because here's some money!" Why should being given some money automatically be assumed to make up for the fact that someone else was able to overrule your vote?

But it only grows with the square root of the number of wealthy individuals. See the paper with Posner; we go through many such calculations: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956

A bit offtopic, but what's your (or the field's) take on buying/bribing/bullying voters?

Even if 10 000 poor person just needs to amass 10K USD, a sufficiently brazen party can just organize for 10 000 other easily mobilized people to vote against the other poor folk. (A common theme around the smaller villages here is the election day free meals, or course the place in full party colors to remind the people who to thank for.) Or is this not so common/significant in practice?)

And so? My $100m made me lord tyrant ruler of the universe. Is existing inequality enough that quadratic voting realistically dismantles rather than reinforces existing power structures?

Has QV been used in any practical context? If so, I'd welcome replies as I didn't pick up on this.

Your $100M got you 4 years in Congress. Let's say you can pass a key bill that'll make you more than $100M. It had better not piss people off very much, because in the next election they'll buy TWO votes each and you'll have to spend $400M to keep your law in place. In the meantime, all those poor people you outvoted are $50,000 richer.

The interesting thing about this is that the more votes you buy, the more you fund your political enemies.

No, you miss the point.

Being $X richer is now meaningless. Whoever is in power controls the currency and the time value of money sufficiently that they can manipulate the next round of voting.

Right, but the money paid into the system gets redistributed equally. So the poor get paid for their troubles, and under some probably hefty assumptions they show this leading to equilibrium.

The cost per vote increases quadratically. If the first vote costs $1, then buying one million votes would cost one trillion dollars. If there are 50 million voters, then this trillion dollars would be distributed among them: $200,000 each.

It would be extremely difficult to buy massive numbers of votes without paying hugely to the rest of the electorate.

It would be extremely difficult for one single person to do this. But we're talking about a wealthy minority, not a wealthy individual. If 25% of the population is significantly wealthier than the other 75%, does that mean the 25% should be able to pay on average 9x more than the 75% in order to get their way on an issue?

it increases quadratically not exponentially

Yeah, obviously. Thanks.

That's why the cost is the square of the number of votes. Then someone with 100x the wealth would be able to only buy 10x the votes. If you consider the act of lobbying for policy to be equivalent to purchasing votes then currently the cost is linear. Of course by that analogy there's no real way to enforce quadratic cost on lobbyists, but perhaps if there was an alternate "legitimate" means for individuals to purchase voting power then they might follow such a scheme if the alternative were illegal and strictly policed.

Theoretically, this could be fixed by making the cost of votes expressed as a percentage of your income and/or wealth.

Some european countries like Switzerland are applying this principle to traffic tickets. It's not uncommon for rich people in fast cars paying few hundred thousand dollars for a speeding ticket.

Really? I'd argue 1% of my income making minimum wage is far less disposable and than a 1% of the one percents salary. And so I would be far less inclined to buy more votes. Then taking your Euro analog, is it right/fair to make someone pay more (even say in proportion to their salary) than any other person for a vote? Who decides how much I should pay for my vote? Is it based on current salary? Because if it is there are a whole load of very rich people who technically have a very small salary. Is it based on net worth? Sounds like a nightmare to me.

Approximate solutions are better than clearly wrong solutions.

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As paper describes, quadratic is the unique function with linear derivative and thus the only one that reveals true preferences.

Distributing the money to other electors gives them a lot more voting power in the subsequent election. Edit: unless that makes wage-earners negotiate to less income.

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