Abstract
Cumulative and quadratic voting are two distributional voting methods that are expressive, promoting fairness and inclusion, particularly in the realm of participatory budgeting. Despite these benefits, graphical voter interfaces for cumulative and quadratic voting are complex to implement and use effectively. As a result, such methods have not seen yet widespread adoption on digital voting platforms. This paper addresses the challenge by introducing an implementation and evaluation of cumulative and quadratic voting within a state-of-the-art voting platform: Stanford Participatory Budgeting. The findings of the study show that while voters prefer simple methods, the more expressive (and complex) cumulative voting becomes the preferred one compared to k-ranking voting that is simpler but less expressive. The implemented voting interface elements are found useful and support the observed voters’ preferences for more expressive voting methods.
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Notes
- 1.
Available at https://github.com/DISC-Systems-Lab/SPB (last access: July 2023).
- 2.
This is implemented using a k-approval interface combined with a ranking step.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the other members of the Stanford Crowdsourced Democracy Team for the development of the Stanford Participatory Budgeting platform and their support to this project, in particular Ashish Goel, Sukolsak Sakshuwong and Sahasrajit Sarmasarkar. We would also like to thank Jasmin Odermatt, Lea Good, Sebrina Pedrossi and Joshua Yang for providing their insights on improvements to the cumulative voting interface. This work is supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (MR/W009560/1): ‘Digitally Assisted Collective Governance of Smart City Commons–ARTIO’ and by the SNF NRP77 ‘Digital Transformation’ project “Digital Democracy: Innovations in Decision-making Processes”, #407740_187249.
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Wellings, T., Banaie Heravan, F., Sharma, A., Gelauff, L., Fricker, R.H., Pournaras, E. (2024). Fair and Inclusive Participatory Budgeting: Voter Experience with Cumulative and Quadratic Voting Interfaces. In: Bramwell-Dicks, A., Evans, A., Winckler, M., Petrie, H., Abdelnour-Nocera, J. (eds) Design for Equality and Justice. INTERACT 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14536. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-61698-3_6
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