Quadratic Voting Plateform

In our democracies, the quest for the common good is central to consultation and voting systems. However, traditional voting remains binary, limited to a yes or no vote. Faced with today's global challenges, it is crucial to integrate the diversity of viewpoints to consolidate the common good. The challenge lies in aggregating preferences while taking into account their intensity. Indeed, a binary vote does not reflect the intensity of a yes or a no (a firm yes or a default yes, for example). What's more, decisions are made in a sequential and eliminatory manner, preventing the ranking of candidates or projects so as to consider, from the first round onwards, everyone's second choices.
Through its Chair in Decision Design, the Transition Design Lab is exploring the theme of decision-making in collaborative and participatory design approaches for transitions, and has designed and developed a digital platform for testing another voting format: quadratic voting.
Invented by Glen Weyl^[1], an economist at Microsoft Research, the quadratic voting method enables everyone to assign a specific weight to a series of proposals. As a political tool, quadratic voting can also be beneficial to companies, overcoming divisions between business units and fostering cooperation, particularly on cross-functional infrastructures.

The special feature of quadratic voting is the increasing cost of votes. The first vote for a candidate costs one credit. But voting twice for the same candidate costs four credits (i.e. two squared); giving three votes costs nine credits (three squared), and so on.

Quadratic voting is based on the principle of scarcity: voters are limited by their credits, forcing them to compromise between proposals^[2]. This distinction is crucial because, as Mullainathan and Shafir^[3] point out in their book on scarcity:

"When we experience scarcity of any kind, we are absorbed by it. The mind automatically and powerfully focuses on unmet needs... It changes the way we think. It imposes itself on our mind." (p.7)^[2]

With quadratic voting, participants have limited resources and choose accordingly.