Universal suffrage snuffed out weighted voting in the real world but is it creeping back in online?
A couple of years ago I experimented with weighted voting. In this case the election of “the gamification guru of the year”.
The idea was that your vote was weighted according to your overall influence in the gamification community, as scored on the gamification gurus success tracking Rise board.
Now the idea of the board is to help spread the word about gamification by providing social media tracking to the top advocates. Each “guru” gets a score once a month which tells them whether they’ve had a good or bad month in terms of promoting gamification on their social media channels (Slideshare, Blogs and Twitter).
The obvious flaw in my weighted voting experiment was that the score that I used for weighting votes (your gamification guru score) isn’t actually that meaningful. It’s not really a measure of your influence, reputation or even your understanding of gamification — it’s simply a measure of how good you are at promoting yourself online.
That being said, I did collect some votes and weighted them accordingly.
The winner received 6 votes, and the two runners up got 5 votes each. Turnout was poor (6%) mainly due to my poor communications (I have only have emails for half of the electorate) and a far from frictionless ballot process (each person had to email me with their vote).
Despite these flaws it was still a more participatory way of choosing the guru of the year than leaving it to me to judge alone.
Interestingly the only difference to the outcome, the weighting made, was when you looked at candidates tied with the same number of votes. And since there was only a prize for the winner, it didn’t matter.
The winner was happy to receive the award though, see him dancing in this video!
With voting in the UK in full sway today, idly I have wondered would the outcome be different if we weighted our votes. Perhaps according to your understanding of the issues as answered in a quiz? Or our experience in civic life measured in reputation points?
There are lots of ways we could weight votes, the trouble is not that this isn’t an interesting idea, it is that weighted voting is fundamentally flawed. It creates winners who govern for the few not the many.
Weighted voting has been tried in general elections in the past, and found wanting.
In Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) weighted voting was used to enforce the rule of the white minority, making 50 parliamentary seats available to the votes of the 50,000 whites while leaving 8 seats available to the rest of the country.
It should hardly be a surprise to anyone that this unfair arrangement culminated in civil war and the end of white minority rule.
They weren’t alone. Before 1918, local councils in Sweden gave greater weight to businesses but this was abolished when universal suffrage was introduced in 1918.
So it has been wiped out in the real world.
Yet weighted voting is making its way back online.
Look at the annual StackOverflow moderator election that has been run since 2011.
You need to have accumulated at least 3000 points to put yourself forward for election.
Points are earned through good community behaviour such as helping others by answering their questions correctly. It takes time to earn points.
My own score stayed under 100 for the first three years I used the site.
So 2016 turned out to be the first StackOverflow election I could participate in.
In this election format you have to have earned 150 points before you can cast your vote in the primary.
And you need that 150 points to cast a vote in the election itself.
So while weighted voting seems to have been phased out from the real world. It has clearly resurfaced online.
The trouble with weighted voting is that it is fundamentally divisive as the Zimbabwe example above, although extreme shows.
Winning candidates will tend to care about the people with the most weighted votes, not the whole community. For example, which StackOverflow candidate who wants re-election is going to care about the newcomers to the community with a miserly 11 points?
A well designed election system should create winners who govern (or in this case moderate) for everyone, not just a ruling clique.
Universal suffrage enforces this, weighted voting discourages this.
We should continue to cherish universal suffrage, the alternative is far worse.
Vote well today.
