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This is really interesting. I do fear it'll cause exhaustion techniques. This may not happen in isolated experiments, but if you build a political system on that concept, let it run for decades, in a world where a political decision can shift tens of billions of dollars (e.g. a fiscal change for banks, an environmental law for the dairy industry, etc), you'll see the system get gamed. e.g. say I propose 100 bs bills to repeal gay marriage and abortion rights. I expect to lose, but opponents expend all their credits. Then I propose a law banning muslims and mexicans and put all my credits behind it. The end result is they get to keep what they had, status quo, and I get to pass something ridiculous. Of course it works both ways, but my point is that you're creating a system where volume of bills is a strategy. And strategic, efficient use of credits, starts to matter. Such that I may choose NOT to vote for something I care about, because that credit has a premium on an even more important bill I fear might be proposed, which I absolutely have to put my weight behind. And an incentive not to vote doesn't sound like a system we should work towards. At the end of the day, making something scarce like you propose does two things; 1) it makes things more efficient and meaningful, you don't play around with scarce things. That's great. But 2) It puts a cap on it, it's limited in amount, and in the context of exercising your vote, voicing your opinion, that's probably not something we should cap for people. We already have this with financing campaigns (credits being money, which is both scarce and to some extent capped for campaign contributions), but I don't think it's ultimately (although super interesting) the right thing to do for the actual act of voting. |
The particular strategy that you propose for gaming the system assumes that voting events are scattered throughout a term (I assume there is some period or term after which everyone's 100 votes are replenished?) rather than all being on the same day. If this is the case then another problem is the privacy issue that arises when the state has to track how many votes each citizen has left.
Both problems are solved if there is a single event each term, where you get a single ballot containing all the questions for that term and get to fill in at most N bubbles on the ballot, with zero or more for each question.
Such a system probably still has undesirable properties, though I'm struggling to contrive a good example of one at the moment.