Whether online, via fingertips, the use of marbles, electronic phone-booth machines or old-fashioned ballots, people all around the world, have exercised their voting rights for over several decades. Voter turnout varies considerably between nations. In North America, Asia and Latin America, the turnout tends to be lower than in most of Europe and Oceania. Based on all parliamentary elections between 1945 and 1997, Western Europe averages a 77% turnout, and South and Central America around 54%. The differences between nations tend to be greater than those between classes, ethnic groups, or regions within nations.
Here in Malaysia, elections take place on two levels: federal and state. Most well-known are the General Elections. The last, formally known as the 14th Malaysian general election, was held on Wednesday, 9 May 2018 for members of the 14th Parliament of Malaysia. There were all 222 seats at stake in the Dewan Rakyat (the lower house of the Parliament of Malaysia) and 505 seats in 12 out of the 13 State Legislative Assemblies of Malaysia. The turnout for the 2018 General Election was 82.32%, a 2.52% drop from the previous General Election 5 years earlier. The three prior elections, however, saw a much lower turnout rate.
Modern democracies have generally used one person, one vote in their elections and legislative processes and as the world is now in a new decade and digitization is happening at a rapid pace, more complicated voting systems can now be adopted thanks to blockchain-enabled collective decision making that allows votes to be tracked in a transparent, public way which is likely to lead to an increase in the use of Quadratic Voting across many settings globally.
Quadratic Voting (QV)- a method of collective decision-making is one that involves a participant who votes not just for or against an issue, but also expresses how strongly they feel about it. Invented not by political scientists, but by economists and others, including Glen Weyl, an economist and principal researcher at Microsoft Corp, this type of voting method acts as a protection aid for the interests of small groups of voters that care deeply about particular issues, which allows them to express not just their preferences but also the intensity of these preferences. QV can be used under a number of circumstances that include democratic institutions, corporate governance, and blockchain-enabled collective decision-making.
A number of credits is given to each participant which can be used to vote for an issue in Quadratic Voting. The cost of casting more than one vote for an issue is quadratic, not linear, that is why the marginal cost of each additional vote is far higher than of the previous vote, which gives the Quadratic Voting formula as:
In quadratic voting there is a set of participants p1, … , pNwhere participant pi can make a vote of weight w for a given option on any given issue by paying a cost C(w)=w2/2 . On any issue, the option with the most total vote weight wins (source: ethresear.ch).
Quadratic voting has been proposed in many areas, including corporate governance in the private sector, allocating budgets, cost-benefit analyses for public goods, more accurate polling and sentiment data, and elections and other democratic decisions as it is a relatively new way of voting that makes zealotry expensive. In April 2019, Quadratic Voting was conducted in a successful experiment by the Democratic caucus of the Colorado House of Representatives where lawmakers used it to decide on their legislative priorities for the coming two years among 107 possible bills. The voting took place whereby each member was handed 100 virtual tokens that would allow them to put either 9 votes on one bill (as 81 virtual tokens represented 9 votes for one bill) and 3 votes on another bill or 5 votes each (25 virtual tokens) on 4 different bills. This resulted in Senate Bill No. 85, the Equal Pay for Equal Work, being declared the winner, with a total of 60 votes.
People have said that Quadratic voting is robustly efficient and that it would serve to rectify these pitfalls by enabling the strength of voters’ point of view on a position to be taken into account in the voting process and ensure that the cost of buying many votes is prohibitive so the ability for a small elite to disproportionately affect outcomes is limited. In addition, Quadratic voting can be used to supply better valuations that aggregate private information of dispersed multitudes. But the most important setting is democracy itself. An incredibly complicated system of institutional self-checking (separation of powers, federalism) and judicially enforced constitutional rights try to correct for the defects of one-person-one-vote, but do so very badly. Some, like Glen Weyl, the created Quadratic voting and Eric Posner, American Law Professor at the University of Chicago Law School argue that it could do better.
Although Quadratic Voting has not been proposed in various areas, it is still relatively new, only having been undertaken in limited settings. As the world experiences a technological revolution, not just in voting but in many other areas, the use of technology will no doubt affect the way things are done.
Quadratic Voting protects the interests of small groups of voters that care deeply about certain issues and the use of blockchain will no doubt lead to effective decision making and increase its practice across the globe in years to come.
Written by Yasuna Ogimura, Intern at 27 Advisory, Bachelor of Business and Commerce (Accountancy and Banking and Financial Management), School of Business, Monash University. Yasuna has an interest and passion for financial services and investment banking. After her internship she aims to pursue a career in finance.
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