Download Free Storable Votes Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Storable Votes and write the review.

Storable votes allow the minority to win occasionally while treating every voter equally and increasing the efficiency of decision-making, without the need for external knowledge of voters' preferences. This book complements the theoretical discussion with several experiments, showing that the promise of the idea is borne out by the data: the outcomes of the experiments and the payoffs realized match very closely the predictions of the theory.
Democratic systems are built, with good reason, on majoritarian principles, but their legitimacy requires the protection of strongly held minority preferences. The challenge is to do so while treating every voter equally and preserving aggregate welfare. One possible solution is Storable Votes: granting each voter a budget of votes to cast as desired over multiple decisions. During the 2006 student elections at Columbia University, we tested a simple version of this idea: voters were asked to rank the importance of the different contests and to choose where to cast a single extra "bonus vote, " had one been available. We used these responses to construct distributions of intensities and electoral outcomes, both without and with the bonus vote. Bootstrapping techniques provided estimates of the probable impact of the bonus vote. The bonus vote performs well: when minority preferences are particularly intense, the minority wins at least one of the contests with 15--30 percent probability; and, when the minority wins, aggregate welfare increases with 85--95 percent probability. When majority and minority preferences are equally intense, the effect of the bonus vote is smaller and more variable but on balance still positive.
Storable Votes and Quadratic Voting are voting systems designed to account for voters' intensity of preferences. We test their performance in two samples of California residents using data on four initiatives prepared for the 2016 California ballot. We bootstrap the original samples and generate two sets of 10,000 multi-elections simulations. As per design, both systems induce minority victories and result in higher expected welfare relative to majority voting. In our parametrization, quadratic voting induces more minority victories and achieves higher average welfare, but causes more frequent inefficient minority victories. The results are robust to different plausible rules-of-thumb in casting votes.
The paper studies a simple voting system that has the potential to increase the power of minorities without sacrificing aggregate efficiency. Storable votes grant each voter a stock of votes to spend as desired over a series of binary decisions. By accumulating votes on issues that it deems most important, the minority can win occasionally. But because the majority typically can outvote it, the minority wins only if its strength of preference is high and the majority's strength of preference is low. The result is that with storable votes, aggregate efficiency either falls little or in fact rises. The theoretical predictions of our model are confirmed by a series of experiments: the frequency of minority victories, the relative payoff of the minority versus the majority, and the aggregate payoffs all match the theory.
The storable votes mechanism is a method of voting for committees that meet periodically to consider a series of binary decisions. Each member is allocated a fixed budget of votes to be cast as desired over the multiple decisions. Voters are induced to spend more votes on those decisions that matter to them most, shifting the ex ante probability of winning away from decisions they value less and towards decisions they value more, typically generating welfare gains over standard majority voting with non-storable votes. The equilibrium strategies have a very intuitive feature--the number of votes cast must be monotonic in the voter's intensity of preferences--but are otherwise difficult to calculate, raising questions of practical implementation. In our experiments, realized efficiency levels were remarkably close to theoretical equilibrium predictions, while subjects adopted monotonic but off-equilibrium strategies. We are lead to conclude that concerns about the complexity of the game may have limited practical relevance
This paper introduces a new storable vote mechanism (storable votes, pay-as-you-win-mechanism, SV-PAYW) where a fixed number of votes can be cast among different alternatives, and the votes spent (and redistributed) on each election depend only on the number cast for the wining alternative. The mechanism reduces the incentives for strategic voting and allows for minority view integration.A discretized version of the mechanism, is presented and simulated. The implementation ratio, which is a measure that positions the utility from the allocation of electoral victories produced by the mechanism between the random allocation (zero) and the social optimum (one) is high (between 0.7 and 1) when the minority group is larger than 10%; however, for small minorities, the implementation ratio is unstable and often low. In our view, both the qualitative arguments and the simulation results suggest that the SV-PAYW system is a promising new voting mechanism.
We model a procedural reform aimed at restoring a proper role for the minority in the confirmation process of judicial nominations in the U.S. Senate. We analyze a proposal that would call for nominations to the same level court to be collected in periodic lists and voted upon individually with Storable Votes, allowing each senator to allocate freely a fixed number of total votes. Although each nomination is decided by simple majority, storable votes make it possible for the minority to win occasionally, but only when the relative importance its members assign to a nomination is higher than the relative importance assigned by the majority. Numerical simulations, motivated by a game theoretic model, show that under plausible assumptions a minority of 45 senators would be able to block between 20 and 35 percent of nominees. For most parameter values, the possibility of minority victories increases aggregate welfare.