I think this could be fun. An advantage here is that voters have to think about the relative value of different charities, rather than just deciding which are better or worse. This could also be an important aspect when we want people to discuss how they plan to vote/how others should vote.
If you want to be explicit about this, you could also consider designing the user interface so that users enter these relative differences of charities directly (e.g. “I vote charity A to be 3 times as good as charity B” rather than “I assign 90 vote credits to charity A and 10 vote credits to charity B”).
Note however, that due to the top-3 cutoff, putting in the true relative differences between charities might not be the optimal policy.
A technical remark: If you want only to do payouts for the top three candidates, instead of just relying on the final vote, I think it would be better to rescale the voting credits of each voter after kicking out the charity with the least votes and then repeating the process until there are only 3 charities left. This would reduce tactical voting and would respect voters more who pick unusual charities as their top choices. This process has some similarities with ranked-choice voting. Additionally, users should have the ability to enter large relative differences (or very tiny votes like 1 in a billion), so their votes are still meaningful even after many eliminations.
Approval voting:
I think voting either “approve” or “disapprove” does not match how EAs think about charities.
I generally approve a lot of charities within EA space, but would not vote “approve” for these charities.
I worry that a lot of tactical voting can take place here, especially if people can see the current votes or the pre-votes.
For example, a person who both approves of the 3rd-placed charity and the 4th-placed charity (by overall popularity), might want to switch their vote to “disapprove” for the (according to them) worse charity.
For example, voters are incentivized to give different votes to the 3rd-placed and 4th-placed charity, because there the difference will have the biggest impact on money paid out.
Or a person who disapproves of all the top charities might switch a vote from “disapprove” to “approve” so that their vote matters at all.
Ranked-choice voting:
I am assuming here that the elimination process in ranked-choice stops once you reach the top 3 and that votes are then distributed proportionally. I think this would be a good implementation choice (mostly because proportional voting itself would be a decent choice by itself, so doing it for the top 3 seems reasonable).
Ranking charities could be more satisfying for voters than having to figure out where to draw the line between “approve” and “disapprove”, or putting in lots of numeric values.
Generally, ranked-choice voting seems like an ok choice.
how well will these allocate funds?:
I am quite unsure here, and finding a best charity based on expressed preferences of lots of people with lots of opinions will be difficult in any case.
My best guess here is that ranked-choice voting > quadratic voting > approval voting.
A disadvantage of quadratic voting here is that it can happen that some fraction of the money will be paid out to sub-optimal charities (even if everyone agrees that charity C is worse than A and B, then it will likely still be rational for voters to assign non-zero weight to charity C, corresponding to non-zero payout).
understandability:
I think approval voting is easier to understand than ranked-choice voting, which is easier to understand than quadratic voting. This is both for the user interface and for understanding the whole system.
Also, the mental effort for making a voting decision is less under ranked-choice and approval voting.
I think the precise effects of the voters choices will be difficult to estimate in any system, so keeping
general remarks:
Different voting mechanisms can be useful for different purposes, and paying 3 charities different amounts of money is a different use case than selecting a single president, so not all considerations and analyses of different voting mechanisms will carry over to our particular case.
The top-3 rule will incentivize tactical voting in all these systems (whereas in a purely proportional system there would be no tactical voting). Maybe this number should be increased a bit (especially if we use quadratic voting).
If there are lots of charities to choose from, it will be quite an effort to evaluate all these charities.
Potentially, you could give each voter a small number of charities to compare with each other, and then aggregate the result somehow (although that would be complicated and would change the character of the election).
Or there can be two phases of voting, where the first phase narrows it down to 3-5 charities and then the second phase determines the proportions.
My personal preferences:
Obviously, we should have a meta-vote to select the three top voting methods among user-suggested voting methods and then hold three elections with the respective voting methods, each determining how a fraction of the fund (proportional to the vote that the voting method received in the meta-vote) gets distributed. And as for the voting method for this meta-vote, we should use… ok, this meta-voting stuff was not meant entirely seriously.
In my current personal judgement, I prefer quadratic voting over ranked-choice and ranked-choice over approval voting.
I might be biased here towards more complex systems.
I think an important factor is also that I might like more data about my preferences as a voter:
With quadratic voting, I can express my relative preferences between charities quantitatively.
With ranked-choice voting, I can rank charities, but cannot say by how much I prefer one charity over another.
With approval voting, I can put charities in only two categories.
some thoughts on different mechanisms:
Quadratic voting:
I think this could be fun. An advantage here is that voters have to think about the relative value of different charities, rather than just deciding which are better or worse. This could also be an important aspect when we want people to discuss how they plan to vote/how others should vote. If you want to be explicit about this, you could also consider designing the user interface so that users enter these relative differences of charities directly (e.g. “I vote charity A to be 3 times as good as charity B” rather than “I assign 90 vote credits to charity A and 10 vote credits to charity B”). Note however, that due to the top-3 cutoff, putting in the true relative differences between charities might not be the optimal policy.
A technical remark: If you want only to do payouts for the top three candidates, instead of just relying on the final vote, I think it would be better to rescale the voting credits of each voter after kicking out the charity with the least votes and then repeating the process until there are only 3 charities left. This would reduce tactical voting and would respect voters more who pick unusual charities as their top choices. This process has some similarities with ranked-choice voting. Additionally, users should have the ability to enter large relative differences (or very tiny votes like 1 in a billion), so their votes are still meaningful even after many eliminations.
Approval voting:
I think voting either “approve” or “disapprove” does not match how EAs think about charities. I generally approve a lot of charities within EA space, but would not vote “approve” for these charities.
I worry that a lot of tactical voting can take place here, especially if people can see the current votes or the pre-votes. For example, a person who both approves of the 3rd-placed charity and the 4th-placed charity (by overall popularity), might want to switch their vote to “disapprove” for the (according to them) worse charity. For example, voters are incentivized to give different votes to the 3rd-placed and 4th-placed charity, because there the difference will have the biggest impact on money paid out. Or a person who disapproves of all the top charities might switch a vote from “disapprove” to “approve” so that their vote matters at all.
Ranked-choice voting:
I am assuming here that the elimination process in ranked-choice stops once you reach the top 3 and that votes are then distributed proportionally. I think this would be a good implementation choice (mostly because proportional voting itself would be a decent choice by itself, so doing it for the top 3 seems reasonable). Ranking charities could be more satisfying for voters than having to figure out where to draw the line between “approve” and “disapprove”, or putting in lots of numeric values.
Generally, ranked-choice voting seems like an ok choice.
how well will these allocate funds?:
I am quite unsure here, and finding a best charity based on expressed preferences of lots of people with lots of opinions will be difficult in any case. My best guess here is that ranked-choice voting > quadratic voting > approval voting. A disadvantage of quadratic voting here is that it can happen that some fraction of the money will be paid out to sub-optimal charities (even if everyone agrees that charity C is worse than A and B, then it will likely still be rational for voters to assign non-zero weight to charity C, corresponding to non-zero payout).
understandability:
I think approval voting is easier to understand than ranked-choice voting, which is easier to understand than quadratic voting. This is both for the user interface and for understanding the whole system. Also, the mental effort for making a voting decision is less under ranked-choice and approval voting. I think the precise effects of the voters choices will be difficult to estimate in any system, so keeping
general remarks:
Different voting mechanisms can be useful for different purposes, and paying 3 charities different amounts of money is a different use case than selecting a single president, so not all considerations and analyses of different voting mechanisms will carry over to our particular case. The top-3 rule will incentivize tactical voting in all these systems (whereas in a purely proportional system there would be no tactical voting). Maybe this number should be increased a bit (especially if we use quadratic voting). If there are lots of charities to choose from, it will be quite an effort to evaluate all these charities. Potentially, you could give each voter a small number of charities to compare with each other, and then aggregate the result somehow (although that would be complicated and would change the character of the election). Or there can be two phases of voting, where the first phase narrows it down to 3-5 charities and then the second phase determines the proportions.
My personal preferences:
Obviously, we should have a meta-vote to select the three top voting methods among user-suggested voting methods and then hold three elections with the respective voting methods, each determining how a fraction of the fund (proportional to the vote that the voting method received in the meta-vote) gets distributed. And as for the voting method for this meta-vote, we should use… ok, this meta-voting stuff was not meant entirely seriously.
In my current personal judgement, I prefer quadratic voting over ranked-choice and ranked-choice over approval voting. I might be biased here towards more complex systems. I think an important factor is also that I might like more data about my preferences as a voter: With quadratic voting, I can express my relative preferences between charities quantitatively. With ranked-choice voting, I can rank charities, but cannot say by how much I prefer one charity over another. With approval voting, I can put charities in only two categories.