Letting Diversity Fix the Voting Problem

A better way to more inclusive decisions.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Introduction

I’m sure you are well aware of recent events in regards to votes that have passed. The emotional state of many folks is high whether it be elated or dismayed. As opposed to echoing the same conversations occurring, I think it is important to take a step back and reflect not on the outcome but the process used to arrive to that outcome. More importantly, is this process really giving us confidence and validity we truly need given the enormous amount of folks it will affect in the years or decades to come. Spoiler: There is a better way.

I’m sure you know that the current model of voting that is prevalent is simply ‘which group raised the most hands’. While it’s easy to understand, is that really good enough? Aren’t we missing the contribution that diversity could make to establish confidence and validity of decisions from voting?

That better way involves incorporating the informational value from diversity of life experiences. Let me put it bluntly. Diversity is NOT a ‘nice to have’ nor is it optional nor is it belief. It is crucial to finding better solutions and is supported empirically as well as mathematically (See The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies by Scott Page).

Imagine you have 2 toolboxes, 1 filled with 5 hammers and 1 filled with a hammer, a wrench, a screwdriver, pliers, and a tape measure. Your friend asks you to come over and fix ‘something’. Which one are you going to take? The one with a variety of tools, right? That’s because the variety of tools will let you fix more problems more easily, quicker, and better. That’s why diversity is so important, and it’s imperative to include in the many facets of our lives, big or small, including when and where voting happens. By not including diversity, to say as gently as possible, is negligent and irresponsible.

What do I mean by information value from diversity? It’s to say that each additional person’s vote if they are not representing a different perspective or life experience is not providing as much information as the previous person. Let’s imagine that I all of sudden had an exact clone of myself, and we were participating in a vote. We would immediately sense the unfairness. My clone is going to think like me, have the same life experiences, and almost with certainly vote exactly as me. That vote is not adding any information to determining what is the right call. It would be like getting an extra vote for free. On the flip side, someone that is the exact opposite of me that agrees in a vote is pretty compelling that we are on the right track. See what I mean? So, what’s the informational value from diversity when a group of folks votes? Well… let’s see.

A Voting Mechanism that Incorporates Diversity

A voting mechanism that incorporates diversity should have three fundamental characteristics.

1. As homogeneity increases, each vote incurs diminishing or even negative value for their vote.
2. To increase the chance of winning, the mechanism incentivizes increasing diversity within each group. This is very important.
3. If both groups are completely homogenous at a near majority (e.g 5 to 4), then switching one member in the minority for a more diverse member across even1 attribute will swing the win to the other side. Otherwise, with diminishing returns, a near majority will always result in a tie.

Don’t worry. If that didn’t quite make sense, there’s pretty pictures a comin’.

Alright, let’s imagine we have 9 folks, and they are going to vote on something extremely important. So, it’s imperative to include diversity in order to establish confidence and validity in the outcome. On a normal day, each person would raise their hand for or against and the majority of hands wins. Today we are going to see a different approach.

Let’s go slow. First, imagine 5 people vote in favor, and we calculate the contribution of their votes in terms of diversity. We could imagine attributes of an individual are things like protected classes such as race, gender, or religion. But, to avoid detracting from the concept and to bring clarity, we will represent an attribute of diversity by shapes like squares, circles, or triangles and colors as specific attribute values.

A diversity attribute is represented by shapes and an attribute’s value is represented by color.

This looks good, we have some diversity and some similarity.

Now, we are going to use this magic formula to determine what each vote should weigh according to diversity or similarity.

Z will be the number of hands raised to establish majority under the ‘raise your hand’ system. For 9 people, that’s 5.

X will be the current times we’ve seen a specific color as we calculate each individual’s vote in succession.

By solving, Y will equal an individual’s weighted vote based on diversity.

This is what that equation looks like for 9 people voting.

Now, let’s go back to the group of 5 people and put that mathy stuff in.

The effective vote when diversity is incorporated is equivalent to 3.89. Notice that since we keep seeing blue, the weight of that vote diminishes from 1 downwards to 0. In fact, it could start to go negative if there’s too much homogeneity. That’s good. We want there to be huge incentives to increasing diversity and huge disincentives to increasing homogeneity.

If we rearrange folks, you will see the outcome is still the same. The order in how this is processed does not matter.

Also note, we are simply looking at differences of colors. Those shapes and colors could represent anything as long as appropriate to the context. In one scenario, race and gender may make lots of sense. Maybe, though, in another scenario, t-shirt size and soda preference makes sense. See… the mechanism is a general approach and agnostic to the underlying specifics of what was chosen to represent diversity — it’s just that diversity matters, and as such, it is weighted.

Ok. Sound good so far? Now, let us expand by including more attributes for both sides that are either for and against. This scenario has some diversity sprinkled throughout which is unfortunately what many groups making decisions tend to look like.

We calculate each vote across each diversity attribute, then add and normalize.

That most notable thing here (which I’m sure is self-evident) is that the minority group of ‘raised hands’ actually wins the vote due to having a bit more diversity than the larger group. That’s what we want — to err on the side of diversity and not just ‘raised hands’.

Now, let’s look at the extremes. What happens when both groups are completely homogenous.

Woah!?!?! The group is simply tied and can’t make a decision. But… what if one group realizes that if they switch one member for one that represents even a smidgen of diversity?

The minority group wins with just a smidgen of diversity. Now… the other side already knows that diversity will easily swing the vote and since they anticipate that, they in turn will start switching members for more diverse members. It’s now a race for diversity to the win — back and forth both sides keep switching members until ultimately reaching a state where both sides are as maximally diverse as possible.

What does the vote look like now?

Oh my! Under maximum diversity, the vote looks exactly how it would today where it is simply which group ‘raised the most hands’. Well… of course, that’s the design — a voting mechanism that makes every vote count as much as possible only under maximum diversity.

Conclusion

This may not be the perfect voting mechanism. But, I wager there’s a 99.99% chance this is better than what’s currently out there. And, accordingly, there’s a 99.99% there are better ones than this. But, this is progress in the right direction and a place to start having conversations and debates to further improve.

So… Isn’t this what we would want? Scratch that. Isn’t this what we desperately need? We need the outcomes of a vote to be representative of the diverse groups that are affected by that outcome. Uh… duh, right? And… we need the voting mechanism to give strong incentives to continually increase diversity. In that, if you want your side to win then it is important to get support from people who are very different from yourself. Doesn’t that make sense? If that happens, whichever way the vote goes, it is then very strong evidence and confidence that it was indeed the right call. And… we should want to know that it was indeed the right call.