Quadratic Voting — Why we use it
The DAO is using Quadratic Voting to get results that more accurately reflect the needs and wants of the voting community.
Majority rule based on individual person voting has the potential to lead people to focus on only the most popular policies. This means smaller important policies can and do get overlooked. Quadratic Voting allows people to allocate votes to express the degree of their preferences, rather than just the direction of their preferences. This all means the results of a vote reflect the intensity of people’s preferences in collective decisions.
The total number of votes for a given option is the sum of the strength of the preferences of the people who voted. The quadratic nature of the voting suggests that a voter can use their votes more efficiently by spreading them across many options.
This is useful because, a larger proportion of voters who vote for a policy even with lesser passion would be important to recognize. Similarly important, a minority proportion of voters who have higher preferences overall in a less popular option can compete with other options and rise in the results.
The DAO has an option to add written justification to your vote. This will become even more important in either of the above cases.
When the results better reflect the weighted preferences of the DAO members, Quadratic Voting gives the DAO better direction, security from neglecting understated necessities, security from being overburdened by unnecessary popular proposals and some resistance to Sybil attacks.
QV — How it Works
Voters receive budgets of “Influence Power,” which they allocate to different options on the ballot to signal the intensity of their conviction. Every “Recorded Vote” uses the number of votes, squared of influence power.
(Recorded Vote)² = Influence Power
So if you put 1 Vote on an option, that uses 1 Influence Power,
2 Votes on an option, uses 4 Influence Power,
3 Votes on an option, uses 9 Influence Power, and so on.
In the case of Stoner Cats, each individual member receives “100 Influence Power” for each Stoner Cat in their wallet.
Instructions or Video on how to use your NFT to vote: