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> "I'm not sure that is correct. Assume that you have only 101 people in the voting pool. The one person who is wealthy pays $1,000 for 100 votes. To match that voting power, you'll only need a handful of the other hundred to pay $4 for more votes. What I think you are overlooking the fact the wealthy person's $1,000 is going to get distributed to everyone which gives them more voting power. Everyone gets at least $10 at the end of the vote. If a few people are willing to invest the $10 back into their vote, they can easily overcome the rich persons' vote even though a vote was purchased for each person in the system." Two points: 1. You've chosen a value that's too small for the wealthy voter. $1000 is the cost of eating out at an expensive restaurant (e.g. https://financesonline.com/10-most-expensive-meals-from-mich... ), not the amount someone with money will spend to gain influence in an election. 2. There are cheaper ways to multiply the vote. Let's assume quadratic voting was in place in the 2016 US Presidential Election, and you're a wealthy person who wants to see the Democrats win. You have $1,000,000 you're willing to spend. What's the cheapest way to maximise your influence? Reach out to other Democratic voters to give them money to multiply their votes. On your own, the $1,000,000 may only net 1000 votes, but spreading the $1,000,000 around to people who were going to vote Democrat anyway could see that number skyrocket. Let's say you give $100 to 10,000 voters, now you're looking at 100,000 votes. Even if those without the most money win, quadratic voting stacks the odds against them. |
Yes to make it simple to intuitively see how rich people paying more gives more voting power to everyone else IF they choose to spend it that way. If you want to think about US presidential elections, you'd need to increase the total number of people by 3,000,000. Based on my math, this would just further amplify the effect I was trying to illustrate with my numbers.
> Even if those without the most money win, quadratic voting stacks the odds against them.
As I understand the math, it doesn't necessarily do this. The goal was a voting system that takes into consideration not just how many people want a particular outcome, but how badly they want a particular outcome. Today the way that is done is by donating money to be spent on advertising to sway votes or get people to go to the polls. Quadradic voting is designed to be more fair than the current way of allowing people to magnify the strength of their preferences for a particular outcome.
My initial reaction was the same as yours. After looking at how the math actually plays out and considered how money is currently spent on influencing votes I think it is probably a lot fairer than it looks at first for the goals it is trying to achieve. (Still could be a really bad idea for other reasons.)