omniharmonicQuadratic Voting
Quadratic voting is a collective decision-making mechanism in which participants express the intensity of their preferences, not just their direction. Each voter receives a budget of voice credits. Casting one vote on an issue costs one credit, but casting two votes costs four credits, three votes costs nine, and so on — the cost increases quadratically. This means that people who care deeply about an issue can express stronger preferences, but at an increasing cost that prevents any single actor from dominating outcomes.
The significance of quadratic voting lies in its mathematical elegance for solving the tyranny of the majority. In one-person-one-vote systems, a passionate minority is overruled by an apathetic majority. In dollar-weighted systems like markets, the wealthy dominate. Quadratic voting finds a middle path: it allows preference intensity to matter while ensuring that concentrated power faces diminishing returns. The mechanism was developed by Glen Weyl and Eric Posner as part of a broader “radical markets” framework for making collective decisions more efficient and equitable.
Quadratic voting connects to quadratic-funding as a sibling mechanism design — both use quadratic cost curves to balance individual intensity against collective breadth. It complements liquid-democracy and participatory-democracy as tools for scaling democratic governance beyond simple majority rule. In the context of ethereum-localism and Web3 governance, quadratic voting has been implemented in decentralized autonomous organizations and community funding platforms, demonstrating how mechanism design can support collective-intelligence at scale.