Quadratic Voting (QV) is a redesigned voting method reflecting the intensity of people’s preferences in collective decisions. It greatly mitigates tyranny-of-the-majority and factional control problems.
Voters receive budgets of “voice credits,” which they allocate to different questions on the ballot to signal the intensity of their conviction. Their voice credits convert to “counted votes” according to their square root. So if you put one voice credit on an issue, that is one vote; four credits are two votes; nine credits are three votes, and so on.
In the simple example above, you can vote for any single proposal a maximum of 4 times – this gives you a total number of 4 votes for your 30 credits. However, if you spread your votes according to your preference between all 5 proposals, you can actually vote up to 10 times with the same 30 credits.
This mechanism is therefore designed to incentivise higher levels of engagement with a variety of different proposals, as voters can exert the most influence by distributing votes according to degrees of preference, rather than single choices. This also gives a more accurate picture of the preferences of a cohort writ large.