# Overview
Resources exploring how Web3 treasuries could handle governance # Voting power approaches Comparing the different voting power approaches that could be used when making network and treasury decisions within Web3 ecosystems The amount of voting power each person has will determine how much influence they have over the decisions to change network parameters and the decisions around how the ecosystems treasury should be used. The voting power approach will influence how easy it is to execute and scale the voting system and will also impact how fair the voting process is for the users of that network. **Differences between Web3 ecosystems and nation state currencies & governance systems** There are some important differences that Web3 ecosystems have with existing nation states that should be considered when thinking about what voting power approaches will be suitable: * **Easy to switch** - People can immediately sell their assets and move to another Web3 ecosystem in a very short period of time. In contrast people that live in a nation state need to abide by the governance rules in that country and pay taxes in the national currency. To switch to another country's system a resident would need to move to another country. In Web3 ecosystems the user currently has many choices and can easily move between them at a moment's notice. This difference heightens the importance that these ecosystems treat them fairly as people can easily move to the network that they prefer and that provides them the most value. * **Low commitment** - People do not need to have any commitment to a Web3 ecosystem and are not obligated to stay in one ecosystem over another. In contrast, residents of nation states are obligated to adopt the laws of that country and would often struggle to avoid the national currency. This is an important difference with Web3 ecosystems as it means no one is subjecting a person to use a Web3 ecosystem, it is entirely out of self choice. There is no obligation to continue using that network if they disagree with any of its parameters or approaches it adopts. This again increases the importance that ecosystems treat users fairly as otherwise these people would simply look for other ecosystems that do treat them fairly. * **Personal preferences & values** - People could choose an ecosystem based on their own preferences and values. This is not common for existing nation state governments that instead often have a single currency and a single set of rules and policies in how the population have chosen to govern the nation. People can more easily pick one or multiple Web3 ecosystems that are more aligned with their preferences and values. **Delegated voting power** Any of the voting power approaches mentioned below could have delegated voting systems introduced that enable a voter to delegate their voting power to other individuals. This is a highly useful feature for voters as it enables them to spend their time voting on areas they care about or areas where they are most well informed. For decisions that they are less interested in or have less expertise they would then be able to delegate their voting power to someone they would prefer to make that decision with their voting power. **Applying mathematical formulas & transformations** Any of these voting power approaches could transform the voting power by applying different mathematical functions to achieve a certain outcome. One approach that has been growing in popularity is the usage of quadratic voting where the cost of incremental votes on the same option increases quadratically. This approach and other formulas can be effective for reducing the influence of whales when wealth based voting power approaches are being used. **Dynamically changing voting power** For many voting power approaches the amount of voting power someone has could dynamically change as different variables and factors change over time. For wealth based voting power approaches this is a concern in situations where people are able to access a quick loan to increase their immediate voting power to swing a voting decision and then quickly repay that loan immediately afterwards. Voting systems will need to consider how voting power approaches could be abused or gamed and identify preventative measures that increase the difficulty for abusing or gaming the voting system. ## **Voting power approaches** The following are some example approaches that cover how voting power could be calculated and distributed between voters when making network or treasury decisions: * [One person one vote](/approaches/voting-power-approaches/one-person-one-vote) - Equal voting power is distributed to each person on the network. Each voting wallet would need to prove that they are a human. * [Wealth based](/approaches/voting-power-approaches/wealth-based) - Voting power is determined based on the amount of wealth that a voter has. * [Locked wealth based](/approaches/voting-power-approaches/locked-wealth-based) - Voting power is determined based on the amount of locked wealth the voter has. This could be staked or locked coins. * [Ecosystem contributions](/approaches/voting-power-approaches/ecosystem-contributions) - Voter power is determined by the amount of contributions that someone has made to the ecosystem. * [Financial contributions](/approaches/voting-power-approaches/financial-contributions) - Voting power is determined based on someone's financial contributions towards a voting option. * [Tax contributions](/approaches/voting-power-approaches/tax-contributions) - Voting power is determined based on the amount of tax a person has contributed to the network. To compare these decision approaches a number of [factors have been considered](/approaches/voting-power-approaches/voting-power-factors-for-consideration) and then applied to each approach to try and determine any strengths and weaknesses of each one.
**Other notable approaches** * **Age of wealth -** Holding a network coin over a long period of time could be one sign of commitment and support towards an ecosystem. This factor could be considered in addition to a wealth based voting power approach by factoring in how long someone has had their capital invested in the ecosystem. * **Expertise & skill based** - The skills and expertise that someone has when contributing to an ecosystem can be highly valuable for maintaining and improving a network. An approach focused on the amount of expertise and skill people have would likely not be very effective for being the predominant voting power approach for either the network or treasury based decisions due to it only focussing on a subset of the community who contributes. It also is very difficult to accurately assess each person's skills and expertise and then fairly allocate an amount of voting power to each person. This approach could be useful as a supplementary approach for certain decisions. Delegation of voting power could be seen as a form of expertise and skill based voting power as voters would select the representatives they are most aligned with and that they believe are the most competent at making decisions by applying their own knowledge and expertise. * **Reputation based** - Usage of the network and other forms of contributions could contribute towards a reputation score that is used as a form of voting power. Similar to ecosystem contributions it is difficult to capture and measure all of the different forms of usage and contribution that could be considered useful for the ecosystem and then quantify this into an accurate voting power score. It might not be effective or fair as a predominant way to distribute voting power however it could still be a potentially useful approach to combine with other more stable and suitable voting power approaches to encourage or reward certain usage behaviours that are beneficial to the ecosystem. **Key takeaways** * **One person one vote isn’t inherently fair for Web3 ecosystems** - People are able to easily move to other ecosystems at any point in time and no one is forcing someone to use a given Web3 ecosystem. This factor is important for Web3 ecosystems as this means it makes little sense to give everyone equal voting power. Instead it makes more sense to give people voting power based on the contributions they have made to the ecosystem that are aligned with the immediate and long term sustainability and success of the network. * **Wealth based approaches are a good starting point but are not fair over the long term** - In the short term a wealth based approach can make sense for changing network parameters and allocating genesis treasury allocations. Over the long term this approach makes less sense as it gives wealthy individuals perpetual control and influence over the network. Tax contributions become the most important contribution to the network for it to survive and grow. Wealth based voting power has an ongoing but decreasing importance for network parameter decisions and a decreasing importance for treasury funding decisions over time. * **Ecosystem contributions are not fair and are highly complex to execute** **-** Recording and measuring ecosystem contributions is extremely difficult and likely requires a moderation process with many checks and balances. Due to this it is unsuitable as a predominant voting power approach for most Web3 ecosystems. Elements of this approach could be considered in combination with other more stable approaches over the long term to achieve specific outcomes. * **Financial contributions could be unreliable and are the most unfair to the most giving individuals** - No individual is obligated to help with funding ecosystem initiatives that help to maintain and improve the network. This approach can increase the risk of stagnation for the ecosystem if it is unable to compensate for impactful contribution efforts. The people who contribute the most to support the ecosystem are disadvantaged with this approach by the people who contribute nothing financially but then receive all the benefit from the initiatives that do get funded by people that contribute. * **Tax contributions is one of the most aligned and fair long term voting power approaches** - Over the long term the most important contribution to the network's survival is ongoing transaction fees that pay for the validators. These same contributions could also help with funding an ecosystem treasury that helps to maintain and improve the network over the long term. It is fair for the people that contribute towards this treasury to have a proportional say in how their tax contributions are spent. * **Voting power approaches should ideally be combined to take into account multiple contribution factors** - Wealth based approaches make sense in the short term and are likely a part of a long term solution for network parameter decisions. Tax contributions based voting power is likely the most increasingly important approach over the long term. A hybrid approach would likely make sense that takes into account both wealth and tax contributions for both network and treasury decisions. Tax contributions could become one of the main approaches for treasury decisions over the long term as this would just mean the people that contribute to the network's treasury would have voting power to influence how that funding gets spent. One person one vote and both the financial and ecosystem contribution approaches could all be considered as supplementary approaches for certain decisions in addition to the suggested hybrid voting power system. * **Voting power approaches likely need to respond to market adoption** - The final outcome of what voting power approach is both fair and effective will be based on how the market evolves over time and the preferences of the users within each ecosystem. If the market consolidates to a handful of networks it will be more important to consider voting power approaches such as one person one vote as people might not have another alternative they can move to. If the market is more competitive over the long term and has multiple ecosystems being used across the world then the relevance of one person one vote would be reduced as no one is forcing a person to adopt one system over another. **Voting power approaches analysis** {% content-ref url="/pages/F5zaneXWoZazTQEsrFen" %} [Voting power factors for consideration](/approaches/voting-power-approaches/voting-power-factors-for-consideration) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/iNwiiW4GGxdYBd53cmzr" %} [One person one vote](/approaches/voting-power-approaches/one-person-one-vote) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/vuzJJLQciPY4sVT3rj1j" %} [Wealth based](/approaches/voting-power-approaches/wealth-based) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/5V12GYpT0BQCVrCg7fuk" %} [Locked wealth based](/approaches/voting-power-approaches/locked-wealth-based) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/sqkGWXytLTb9dScM6Ups" %} [Ecosystem contributions](/approaches/voting-power-approaches/ecosystem-contributions) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/Dxka0xCaC07Xas3fp6X8" %} [Financial contributions](/approaches/voting-power-approaches/financial-contributions) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/cu5IlKHKV1YSupAZOZ31" %} [Tax contributions](/approaches/voting-power-approaches/tax-contributions) {% endcontent-ref %} # Voting power factors for consideration The [methodology](https://docs.treasuries.io/analysis/approach-comparison-methodology) used for this approach comparison is documented separately. **Execution & scaling complexity** * **Description** - How voting power is calculated and distributed between voters can influence the amount of complexity there is to execute and scale a voting process. Many Web3 ecosystems will be looking to adopt a voting power approach that they can feasibly scale to millions of users. * **Maximum score** - 5, Very important. Replacing existing governance systems with emerging Web3 ecosystem technology will require solutions that can be feasibly executed and that can scale to handle millions of users. * **Scoring questions** - How complex is the voting power approach to execute? Can the approach be fully automated or does it require moderation? Can voters abuse or game the system in anyway to increase their voting power? Is it likely the voting power approach can scale and remain legitimate, secure and robust over the long term? * **Scoring** - Low complexity is good (Score - 5). High complexity is bad (Score - 1). **Fairness for network decisions** * **Description** - Network parameter changes can impact the entire networks user base. Network changes could lead to big improvements or catastrophic failures for these emerging ecosystems. Voting power could consider the wealth, usage and contributions someone has made to maintain and improve the network. Any adopted approaches will determine who has the most influence in network parameter decisions. * **Maximum score** - 5, Very important. These decisions can be of vital importance for the network. Making sure that users are treated fairly will be an important part of scaling these ecosystems to handle a large population of users. If the voting power approach is biased or unfair then people may decide to join or start another network. * **Scoring questions** - Are people treated equally and fairly when voting power is calculated? Is the voting power approach suitable for network parameter decisions? Is the voting power approach egalitarian or does it result in certain people being disadvantaged? Is anyone excluded from the voting process who should be able to participate? Is participation permissionless? * **Scoring** - High fairness is good (Score - 5). Low fairness is bad (Score - 1). **Fairness for treasury decisions** * **Description** - Treasury decisions are concerned with how an ecosystem gathers and deploys its own assets to maintain and improve the network. Voting power needs to take into account who has contributed towards this treasury and how that voting power should be fairly distributed across the users of the network. * **Maximum score** - 5, Very important. It is highly important that users are treated fairly when voting power is calculated and distributed as this will determine how treasury funds will get spent. The ecosystem may want to respect who has contributed towards that treasury as those contributors could move their usage and contributions to another ecosystem if they are disadvantaged by the voting power approach. * **Scoring questions** - Are people treated equally and fairly when voting power is calculated? Is the voting power approach suitable for treasury decisions? Is the voting power approach egalitarian or does it result in certain people being disadvantaged? Is anyone excluded from the voting process who should be able to participate? Is participation permissionless? * **Scoring** - High fairness is good (Score - 5). Low fairness is bad (Score - 1). # One person one vote One person one vote for determining voting power
**Overview** A one person one vote voting power approach means that equal voting power is distributed to each person in the network. A process would be needed to verify that someone is a human so that people don’t create multiple accounts to greatly increase their voting power. **High execution & scaling complexity (Score - 2)** It is inherently complex to execute and scale a one person one vote voting system in a permissionless system due to the fact people could easily create multiple wallets and identities. Creating a voting system which is sybil resistant requires a sufficient amount of checks and balances to ensure that a voting wallet is in fact a human being and that other voting wallets are also not that same human being. AI and computer systems add further to this complexity as they could also be contributing towards this problem of creating multiple wallets to try and game the verification process with little human involvement. The cost of maintaining a verification process at any scale could be highly expensive for ecosystems. This approach may require the development of more novel approaches to help lower the costs of verification before this approach can feasibly scale to a large population. **Low fairness for network decisions (Score - 2)** The more Web3 networks that exist across the market that a user can choose from the more unfair it becomes to give every person equal say in how the network parameters should change. This is because voters would have no commitment or obligation to contribute through usage, capital or by helping to maintain and improve the network. At any time these users can also move to another ecosystem. A one person one vote approach does not take into account any of the contributions that other people have made that could have been paramount in making the ecosystem successful such as capital investment, ongoing usage and tax contributions and other forms of contribution such as code contributions. A situation where one person one vote is more important and potentially fair is when there are very few networks to choose from and a large population becomes dependent on a single or small handful of networks. In this scenario it could be argued that people are being somewhat forced to use the networks due to a lack of practical alternatives. One person one vote could potentially be considered as an effective supplementary voting power approach in these scenarios alongside other voting power approaches to give people more of a voice in how that network is changed over time. They would be given this voting power even though they might not be contributing much or anything to the network's success. **Very low fairness for treasury decisions (Score - 1)** One person one vote does not respect the contributions that other people have made to make the ecosystem successful such as the initial capital needed to start the ecosystem and make any initial genesis treasury allocation actually valuable. One person one vote also completely ignores the tax contributions that people have made to the ecosystem that have funded the treasury over the long term. Users that have contributed large amounts of their time and capital into using, maintaining and improving the network would be disadvantaged with this voting power approach. The users who have least contributed to the network and that can leave at any time would be given the most benefit from this approach and the users who contribute the most to the network to make it successful would have their contributions ignored if one person one vote was predominantly used. **Total score = 5 / 15** # Wealth based Wealth based approach for determining voting power
**Overview** Wealth based voting power is calculated using the amount of wealth a voter has. This type of voting power could be described as a plutocracy or a wealth based timocracy. Wealth based voting power can make sense in the earliest stages of a Web3 ecosystem where there are fewer use cases and transactions and a genesis allocation of community funds to use for growing the ecosystem. The users who invest in the ecosystem could have a proportional say in how those funds are used based on how much they have invested into the network. The problem with wealth based voting power is it becomes increasingly less fair over time as more people contribute to the network in terms of tax based contributions and other forms of contribution that help to maintain and improve the network. Those who already have wealth in the ecosystem would have no obligation to actively contribute to the ecosystem as they already have a large financial position and influence over how treasury funds are spent. Wealth based voting power is an important consideration for network based parameter decisions that can impact everyone in the ecosystem. For treasury funding decisions it is less important how much wealth someone has and more important to consider the contributors who have actually funded that treasury through transaction fees. **Low execution & scaling complexity (Score - 4)** A Web3 ecosystem can easily determine the amount of wealth that each wallet has and take this information into account in any voting system that is adopted. All of the required data is available on-chain meaning this approach is fairly easy to execute and scale. The main scaling and execution complexity for wealth based voting power is that the amount of wealth someone has can suddenly change. Voters could purchase more of the network's coin or use loans to suddenly increase their position and increase their influence on important decisions. After the vote they could completely sell their coins. This creates a risk for the network that someone will attack the network by voting maliciously and then suddenly sell their position and exit the ecosystem. **Low fairness for network decisions (Score - 2.5)** Wealth based voting power for network decisions is not very fair in situations where the people who are voting on these network changes can easily buy in and sell out of the ecosystem at a moment's notice. There is fairness in taking into account the wealth of each individual in the ecosystem when it comes to network parameters as all of these users have an amount of capital invested into the ecosystem and deserve the right for their capital to be respected and represented in a voting process. If their capital is not respected and there are many other ecosystems the wealthier individuals have no obligation to stay and could migrate towards where they are treated best. Another concern with a predominantly wealth based voting power approach is that it could give perpetual control to individuals who hold large positions in the network. These holders may provide no further value to the network beyond their initial investment but could be able to repeatedly extract value out of the network if they are able to vote on parameters that are self-serving to the wealthiest individuals. Wealth based voting power becomes less fair over time as transaction fees become the more important reason why the network survives and succeeds rather than the initial capital that people invested. **Low fairness for treasury decisions (Score - 2)** Wealth based voting power is at its fairest at the beginning of a Web3 ecosystem where the ecosystem benefits from investment that helps to increase the value of the ecosystem and any treasury funding that has been allocated at the genesis of the network. Investment can also be directed towards initiatives within the ecosystem that help to grow and improve the network. This voting power approach can make sense in the beginning as the initial treasury capital became valuable due to the investment of these original investors. Over time this approach becomes increasingly less fair for the users of the ecosystem as the treasury assets would be eventually replaced by tax based contributions. Wealthier individuals could end up having perpetual influence over how other people's tax contributions are being spent even though they might not be contributing much themselves. A wealth based voting power approach ignores the tax contributions that people make that actually keep the network alive and operational and that fund the treasury. Wealthy individuals that don’t contribute towards the ecosystem's treasury would still be benefiting from the contributions of others that lead to funded initiatives that maintain and improve the network. **Total score = 8.5 / 15** # Locked wealth based Locked wealth based approach for determining voting power
**Overview** Locked wealth based voting power is determined based on the amount of locked wealth the voter has. This is an improvement over a simple wealth based approach as it helps to prevent voters from suddenly buying and selling large amounts of the ecosystem's coin for the purpose of influencing the vote in a negative way and then quickly exiting the ecosystem. Locked wealth could come in the form of staked coins or a time based locking process that is used for certain treasury and ecosystem decisions. **Very low execution & scaling complexity (Score - 5)** All of the required data is available on-chain to calculate how much wealth each wallet has and a locked coin mechanism can also be introduced. Locked wealth based voting power for important voting decisions helps to remove the attack vector of suddenly changing wallet sizes. This approach can scale to handle a large population of voters. **Moderate fairness for network decisions (Score - 3)** Voters that have their coins locked when making important network decisions can help with making a fairer approach for voting power due to the fact that voters would face more of the benefits of consequences of their decision making. If voters aren’t able to maliciously vote and quickly exit the ecosystem by selling their assets there is a higher probability that voters will be more incentivised and aligned with making better decisions to maintain and grow the value of their locked assets. Apart from this the other factors are the same as the wealth based approach where this approach gets less fair over time as tax contributions become a more important part of why the network is able to survive and grow. **Low fairness for treasury decisions (Score - 2.5)** A locked wealth approach is slightly more fair than a wealth based approach without locked coins as now there is a reduced chance for malicious actors to suddenly influence a treasury decision with bad intent that potentially wastes the ecosystems treasury assets. However a wealth based approach still has the same issue that it is not fair over the long term as the wealthy individuals don’t have to contribute anything else to the ecosystem but would be given perpetual control and influence over how other people's tax contributions are spent rather than the people who actually contributed through their own transaction fees. **Total score = 10.5 / 15** # Ecosystem contributions Ecosystem contribution based approach for determining voting power
**Overview** Ecosystem contributions as a form of voting power would be determined by the amount of contributions someone makes to the ecosystem. Contributions could come in the form of code contributions, designs, documentation improvements or events hosted as some examples. **Very high execution & scaling complexity (Score - 1)** The complexity with using ecosystem contributions as a way to calculate voting power is there are a wide range of different contributions that someone could make that benefit the ecosystem. It will be difficult to capture all of these contributions and measure their value in a way that can scale up to a large population of users. This approach would need to take into account every person's contributions that happen across the ecosystem for it to be fair and legitimate as the predominant voting power approach. This type of approach would be very difficult to automate and would likely require an ongoing amount of moderation. At a large scale this could make it easier to game this system and abuse this voting power approach. There might be some value in introducing aspects of this approach into other voting power approaches for certain ecosystem contributions that can be more easily verified and considered in a relevant voting process. **Low fairness for network decisions (Score - 2)** People that make contributions that maintain and improve the ecosystem should ideally be compensated for their efforts. Assuming these contributors have been fairly paid for their contributions it makes less sense to give these contributors voting power to decide on network parameters as this approach would ignore the capital people have invested into making the ecosystem a success and the tax contributions people have made to keep the network running. Although ecosystem contributions are not a fair approach as the predominant voting power approach there are still elements of this approach that could be considered in certain voting decisions. **Low fairness for treasury decisions (Score - 2)** People that make contributions that maintain and improve the ecosystem should ideally be compensated for their efforts. Assuming these contributors have been fairly paid for their contributions it makes less sense for those contributors to then be deciding how genesis treasury funds are being allocated instead of the people who invested into the network to get it started. Over the long term transaction fees will play a more important role in funding the ecosystems treasury. A contribution based voting power approach would not be fair to these contributing users as it would mean that a small handful of contributors would be deciding how other people's contributions are being spent. This approach would disadvantage the people who invested into the network initially and then also disadvantage the people who regularly use the network and financially contribute towards the network's operation and success over the long term. **Total score = 5 / 15** # Financial contributions Financial contribution based approach for determining voting power
**Overview** Financial contribution based voting power is determined by someone's financial contributions towards a voting option. Financial contributions could also be considered donations as these same funds can be used to directly fund an initiative. A large risk around using a financial contribution based voting power approach is the risk of a lack of funding being raised to support impactful ecosystem initiatives. A lack of funding could lead to a stagnating ecosystem that gets outcompeted by other ecosystems that have a more stable and well incentivised group of contributors that are paid to help with consistently maintaining and improving the ecosystem. **Moderate execution & scaling complexity (Score - 3)** From a technical implementation standpoint this should not be a complex voting power approach to execute as it relies on contributions being made from community members. The main complexity of this voting process is if assets are pooled together to make a decision there could be a risk that people suddenly contribute financially to influence the outcome of a vote. This would be especially important in situations where financial contributions are determining how other funds are being allocated. The scaling complexity with this voting approach is it requires people to donate their own funds to make decisions which could limit the number of people that are willing to engage in the process at scale. **Low fairness for network decisions (Score - 2)** A financial contribution approach would mean ignoring the capital that people invested into the network to make it successful and also ignoring the transaction fees that other people have contributed to maintain the network. A key issue with this approach is it would mean that anyone could purchase coins from the ecosystem to make a vote that changes the network with malicious intent. This action then forces other ecosystem holders to spend a large amount of aggregated capital to defend against this vote. It would also mean that the individuals with the largest amount of disposable wealth would have the most amount of control over the network. This approach might be an effective supplementary approach to use on top of another voting power approach where someone could increase their voting power a small amount based on their direct financial contributions to the voting option. This could help with enabling voters to express an increased level of preference towards a voting option. **Moderate fairness for treasury decisions (Score - 3)** If no ecosystem treasury funds are available and initiatives are only funded by people's financial contributions there is a risk that only initiatives that are supported by the wealthy will be funded. An approach focused on donations might be less reliable for funding meaningful contribution efforts as it can require ongoing voluntary donations from individuals who have disposable capital. This approach could lead to stagnation or negatively influence the direction of the ecosystem in what changes and improvements get prioritised. Wealthier individuals might also not even be the ones who are regularly using the network. In terms of fairness, the capital is owned by the individuals who are contributing it so it is difficult to say it is unfair for them to contribute their own capital to initiatives they want to support - these individuals can prioritise whatever they want to. Funding that requires donations instead of being captured through a taxation system could create a heightened problem around the initiatives being self-serving and not for the greater good of the network. It is also less fair for the people who contribute to the ecosystem financially to maintain and improve it when there also can be other individuals who also have a similar amount of wealth but decide to not contribute anything. The people who contribute little to nothing to the ecosystem would still benefit from the initiatives that are funded by the people that do regularly contribute. **Total score = 8 / 15** # Tax contributions Tax contribution based approach for determining voting power
**Overview** Tax contribution based voting power is determined based on the amount of tax a person has contributed to the network. Tax contributions could be described as a form of tax timocracy. Tax contributions towards a network's treasury become an increasingly relevant form of voting power over the long term as the network will eventually rely on the transaction fees to maintain itself and optionally these contributions could fund an ecosystem treasury. **Very low execution & scaling complexity (Score - 5)** The funds that a user has paid to the network in the form of transaction fees are available as on-chain data. This makes it easy to work out which users have contributed what amount to the network. The main execution consideration is ensuring that the voting power would expire once the users contributions have been spent or a voting power time limit is applied. **High fairness for network decisions (Score - 4)** Tax contributions are going to be less meaningful and less important in the earlier stages of a network when there are fewer use cases and transactions being made by users. Over the long term the importance of transaction fees becomes increasingly relevant for the survival and success of the network. Due to the growing importance of network fees for paying validators it is fair to increasingly weight the network decisions based on the people who are actually using the network and paying for it to be maintained. However tax contributions on their own is not a fair voting power system due to the fact there are also people who have invested their capital into the network. A fairer outcome would be to try and balance the need to respect the capital that people have invested as well as respecting the contributions that people make through transaction fees that help to maintain the network. **Very high fairness for treasury decisions (Score - 5)** In the short term the usage of a tax based voting power would not be immediately fair for situations where there is a genesis allocation to the treasury. The people who invested in the network to make that allocation valuable would have likely made more contributions towards making the coin valuable than any initial transaction fees would have. This is a short term factor as over the long term this initial allocation will be depleted. Over the long term tax contributions would likely be the main driver for funding any ecosystem treasury. Due to this the people that contribute to this are highly valuable for the network as they both pay for the validators and also for the treasury that gets funded. It is fair for these individuals to have voting power to decide on how their own contributions will be spent. This approach would mean the people that contribute the most in terms of transaction fees would just have a direct say in how their funds get spent. This is a fair outcome as they are the ones who contributed these funds and their voting power would just be used to decide how those funds should be best used to maintain and improve the network. A benefit with this approach is that wealthy individuals would not have any perpetual control over the treasury decisions, they would have to contribute financially to the treasury through taxation to have any voting power. Wealthy individuals that don’t use the network regularly would have far less voting power than those that actively use the network and contribute to the treasury. The users that don’t contribute much or anything to the treasury would still get the benefits of a maintained and improved network from the funds that do get spent from the users that have contributed. **Total score = 14 / 15** # Voting approaches Comparing the different voting approaches that could be used for making network and treasury decisions within Web3 ecosystems The voting approaches that are adopted in Web3 ecosystems will impact the level of accuracy and expressiveness that can be achieved using that voting system. Voters will often want voting systems that enable them to easily express their preferences and opinions. The adopted voting approach could also impact the total time it takes for voters to participate and the amount of complexity there is for making decisions. This analysis is mostly concerned with what voting approaches could be the most suitable for globally adopted Web3 networks. The larger a network becomes the more important it is to keep governance systems as simple as possible. Globally adopted networks have a high cost for voter participation and more risks around poor decision making due to the potential complexity of the voting process. **Execution and scalability considerations** Every voting process that is mentioned can be developed on-chain and integrated into a network's infrastructure and on-chain governance process. Due to this no comparison will be made about which approach is better based on execution complexity as all of these voting approaches could be developed as on-chain voting systems. In comparison, voting power is where execution complexity can vary drastically between the different approaches and analysis was more beneficial for the voting power approaches comparison. ## **Voting approaches** The following are some example voting approaches that cover different categories of voting systems. It should be noted that some of these voting approaches can overlap with other categories. These voting approaches could be used for a range of different decisions that are made in Web3 ecosystems: * [Plurality voting](/approaches/voting-approaches/plurality-voting) - The proposal with the most votes wins, regardless of whether they achieve a majority. * [Majority voting](/approaches/voting-approaches/majority-voting) - A proposal must receive a majority of the votes, either through an initial vote or a subsequent voting process. * [Proportional voting](/approaches/voting-approaches/proportional-voting) - The outcome from the vote is allocated based on the proportional number of votes that each proposal receives. * [Preference voting](/approaches/voting-approaches/preference-voting) - Preference based voting systems allow voters to rank proposals in order of their preference rather than selecting just one proposal. * [Score voting](/approaches/voting-approaches/score-voting) - Score based voting systems allow voters to express the intensity of their preferences by assigning a score to each proposal. To compare these decision approaches a number of [factors have been considered](/approaches/voting-approaches/voting-factors-for-consideration) and then applied to each approach to try and determine any strengths and weaknesses of each one.
**Key takeaways** * **Plurality voting is simple and could be useful for multiple option decisions** - Voters simply select the proposals they prefer with a plurality voting approach. This is simple and could be effective for some decisions. The main advantage of this approach is its simplicity though a key drawback with this approach is it lacks expressiveness by not capturing the intensity of someone's preferences. * **Majority voting is useful for binary decisions but gets less effective the more voting options there are and the larger the number of selected proposals** - Binary decisions are inherently a simple decision process that achieve a majority outcome. This voting approach is great for less complex decisions where a majority outcome can be expected and required. When the number of voting options increases the difficulty in achieving a majority outcome can also increase with it. Increasing the number of proposals that can be selected can also mean increasing the challenge of expecting all of those proposals to reach a majority. For multiple selection decisions it will be difficult to expect voters to read and understand every single proposal so that a majority decision can be achieved. * **Proportional voting is mainly useful for more specific decisions** - Most of the example decision use cases listed for Web3 ecosystems were not highly suitable for a proportional voting approach that is trying to create proportional outcomes. Certain situations such as group based contributor or delegated representative selection could be suitable however this approach can lead to more centralised decision making within those groups. * **Preference voting can be effective for decisions with a limited number of voting options** - Ranking proposals can be a highly effective way to maximise the accuracy of a decision process to identify the most preferred proposal. This could make sense in situations where the number of voting options is limited and the complexity in comparing the voting choices isn’t too high. Single selection decisions where a single winning outcome needs to be achieved is where preference based voting might be the most suitable. * **Score voting can be highly expressive and effective for every decision type** - Score based voting systems could be used across any of the decision types that have been compared. The key advantages with score based voting systems is that they enable voters to be highly expressive when sharing the intensity of their preferences to different voting options. This intensity of preference can even be useful in binary decisions so voters are able to express exactly how they feel about a proposal rather than a simple yes or no voting process. The main concerns to keep in mind with score based voting process is ensuring that it is simple for voters to understand the scoring system as allocating scores can be slightly more complex than a simple plurality approach. The opportunity with score based approaches is that they could be highly effective for every decision type and due to this could mean a similar approach could be adopted across a Web3 ecosystem. Fewer voting approaches could help with making it easier and faster for voters to understand and participate in ecosystem governance. **Voting approaches analysis** {% content-ref url="/pages/PwUe2BKvUtjdhMr0C1MG" %} [Voting factors for consideration](/approaches/voting-approaches/voting-factors-for-consideration) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/RO750MhUC9t97L8PBGMY" %} [Plurality voting](/approaches/voting-approaches/plurality-voting) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/whJ0rptpdQfUIkIlyROE" %} [Majority voting](/approaches/voting-approaches/majority-voting) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/6v8Xu8psDDvT7kLdCf0D" %} [Proportional voting](/approaches/voting-approaches/proportional-voting) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/Kmcf4GSO71jrM7Yr5eqY" %} [Preference voting](/approaches/voting-approaches/preference-voting) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/Yh0lT3QqfNK64L7vmokP" %} [Score voting](/approaches/voting-approaches/score-voting) {% endcontent-ref %} # Voting factors for consideration Listing the different factors that will be considered for each voting approach The [methodology](https://docs.treasuries.io/analysis/approach-comparison-methodology) used for this approach comparison is documented separately. **Binary decision suitability** * **Description** - Decisions that have a single proposal and only two voting options. The outcome will either be yes or no. Binary decisions could have a number of potential use cases: * Taxation - A binary decision could be used to turn on or off any form of taxation in the network that might have been used for funding the ecosystem's treasury. * Protocol upgrade - Protocol upgrades could potentially be enabled by a governance decision after a new node version has been deployed. * Removing a node - A node could be slashed or removed automatically for certain bad behaviours however there also may be situations where a manual vote is beneficial for handling situations where malicious actors are not being dealt with automatically by the network and a fix for this problem is being developed. * Policy or constitution change - A document might exist on-chain that outlines how the ecosystem governs itself beyond on-chain parameters. This could be updated using a binary decision. * Enabling & disabling features - A number of different features could be added to a distributed ledger and blockchain network. These features could be toggled on or off based on the outcome of a binary decision. * **Maximum score** - 5, Very important. The examples provided are not exhaustive and just help to highlight some of the decisions that might be relevant for a binary decision. It is fairly likely that a Web3 ecosystem could have binary decisions that it needs to handle. * **Scoring questions** * Accuracy & expressiveness - How accurately can these types of voting systems gather peoples exact opinions and preferences? Are voters able to accurately express themselves in their vote? How accurate is the outcome? * Time required to participate - How long would it take for someone to participate in voting decisions if this type of voting system was adopted? What happens if there are many decisions that use this approach? * Voting complexity - How complex is it for a voter to make a decision with this voting approach? Does the decision complexity increase as the number of voting options increases or when the proposals become more difficult to read and compare? * **Scoring** - High suitability is good (Score - 5). Low suitability is bad (Score - 1). **Single selection decision suitability** * **Description** - Decisions that have multiple proposals but only a single proposal can succeed. Single selection decisions have a number of potential use cases: * Taxation amount - The amount or percentage that is charged in each transaction. * Number of validators - Staking rewards could be limited to a certain number of validators to balance decentralisation and network performance. Voters could determine what that optimal number of validators should be. * Block time & size - Time between each block being made and the size of blocks being stored on-chain. * Security parameters - Any parameters that help to secure the network such as rate limiting or voting thresholds. * Token supply - The amount of coins that exist in the network. * Inflation rate - The rate in which new coins are released into the network for people to use. * Lock up periods - Coins could be locked up for staking or other governance decisions. * Participation & usage rewards - The amount of rewards people receive for doing certain actions in the ecosystem such as voting. * Funding process parameters - Examples could focus around the duration and length of certain phases and any voting thresholds. * **Maximum score** - 5, Very important. The examples provided are not exhaustive and just help to highlight some of the decisions that might be relevant for a single selection decision. It is fairly likely that a Web3 ecosystem could have multiple single selection decisions that it needs to handle. * **Scoring questions** * Accuracy & expressiveness - How accurately can these types of voting systems gather peoples exact opinions and preferences? Are voters able to accurately express themselves in their vote? How accurate is the outcome? * Time required to participate - How long would it take for someone to participate in voting decisions if this type of voting system was adopted? What happens if there are many decisions that use this approach? * Voting complexity - How complex is it for a voter to make a decision with this voting approach? Does the decision complexity increase as the number of voting options increases or when the proposals become more difficult to read and compare? * **Scoring** - High suitability is good (Score - 5). Low suitability is bad (Score - 1). **Multiple selection decision suitability** * **Description** - Decisions that have multiple proposals to choose from and multiple proposals can also be selected. Multiple selection decisions can have a number of potential use cases: * Priorities - There are many priorities that an ecosystem might want to focus on and the community can choose to focus on as many of them as they believe is suitable. * Ideas - Many ideas can be executed to help with addressing different problems and opportunities. Communities can select and work on multiple ideas at the same time. * Contributors - Many contributors are needed to execute ideas in a growing ecosystem. A community would be able to select multiple contributors to help with maintaining and improving the network. * Delegated representatives - Voters could delegate their voting power to many different people across the ecosystem. Each delegated representative could have different areas of expertise and knowledge. * Budgeting - Different funding areas could be budgeted for through a community decision. * **Maximum score** - 5, Very important. The examples provided are not exhaustive and just help to highlight some of the decisions that might be relevant for a multiple selection decision. It is fairly likely that a Web3 ecosystem could have a range of different multiple selection decisions that it needs to handle. * **Scoring questions** * Accuracy & expressiveness - How accurately can these type of voting systems gather peoples exact opinions and preferences? Are voters able to accurately express themselves in their vote? How accurate is the outcome? * Time required to participate - How long would it take for someone to participate in voting decisions if this type of voting system was adopted? What happens if there are many decisions that use this approach? * Voting complexity - How complex is it for a voter to make a decision with this voting approach? Does the decision complexity increase as the number of voting options increases or when the proposals become more difficult to read and compare? * **Scoring** - High suitability is good (Score - 5). Low suitability is bad (Score - 1). # Plurality voting Plurality voting based approach for voting systems
**Overview** The proposal with the most votes wins, regardless of whether they achieve a majority. **Example plurality voting systems** * **First-Past-The-Post (FPTP)** - The proposal with the most votes wins, even if it doesn’t have a majority. * **Block Voting** - Voters have as many votes as there are positions to be filled. The proposals with the most votes will fill the available positions. * **Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV)** - Each voter casts one vote in a multi-option decision. The proposals with the most votes will fill any available positions. * **Limited Voting** - Each voter has fewer votes than the number of positions that need to be filled. The proposals with the most votes fill the available positions. This voting system is also a type of proportional based voting. **Very low binary decision suitability (Score - 1)** The simple execution of these voting approaches with just two voting options and one winner would turn these voting approaches into majority ones. A plurality voting approach is not a suitable match for a simple binary decision. Due to this the time required and voting complexity are not highly relevant to consider. **High single selection decision suitability (Score - 4)** * **Accuracy & expressiveness** - For some decisions there could be a large number of potential number based voting options that are relevant to decisions around taxation amount, token supply, inflation rate or lock up periods as some examples. For these decisions there is likely not a right or wrong answer and instead a set of trade offs and preferences. In these situations it could be more difficult to expect a majority based outcome and this can increase the reason to adopt a plurality based voting system. Plurality voting approaches could be effective in situations where the number of options could be large and diversity in voter preferences could be high. Where plurality approaches could be lacking is due to the fact they don’t take into account the intensity of voters preferences. In certain situations a proportional outcome could also be more beneficial than an outright winner using a plurality voting approach. * **Time required to participate** - This approach should take the least amount of time due to the fact that a majority isn’t required for a proposal to win. This means that voters would just select the options they prefer and an outcome could be reached from that single voting round. * **Voting complexity** - These voting approaches would be one of the least complex out of the other approaches as votes are simple yes or no decisions on whether to vote on a proposal. Plurality voting doesn’t require voters to rank or score the available options, voting is very simple with this approach. The complexity also doesn’t greatly increase as the number of voting options increases. **High multiple selection decision suitability (Score - 4)** * **Accuracy & expressiveness** - Voters would be able to select any of the proposals that they prefer. Expressiveness would be limited as voters would only be able to indicate the proposals they support but not the intensity in which they prefer them. * **Time required to participate** - Voters would just need to select the options they prefer and would not need to rank and understand every proposal to participate in the decision. * **Voting complexity** - The complexity would only linearly grow as the number of options increases. Voters would not be required to review every proposal. Voters would only need to read and understand the proposals that they want to review and when they have the capacity to do so. **Total score = 9 / 15** # Majority voting Majority voting approach for voting systems
**Overview** A proposal must receive a majority of the votes, either through an initial vote or a subsequent voting process. **Example majority voting systems** * **Two-Round System (Runoff Voting)** - A voting system where if no proposal wins a majority of the votes in the first round, a second round is held with the top two proposals. * **Binary Voting** - A voting system where voters can choose between two options, usually “yes” or “no”. * **Exhaustive Ballot** - Voters cast a single vote for their preferred proposal. If no proposal achieves a majority, the proposal with the fewest votes is eliminated. Further rounds of voting are then held until one proposal achieves a majority. * **Contingent Voting** - Voters rank proposals in order of preference. A proposal wins if it receives more than 50% of the first-preference votes. If no proposal achieves a majority, all but the top two proposals are eliminated. The second-preference votes of those who voted for the eliminated proposals are then counted and added to the totals of the remaining two proposals. This voting system is also a type of preference based voting. **Very high binary decision suitability (Score - 5)** * **Accuracy & expressiveness** - A binary voting system is the exact type of voting system that will often be used for a simple binary decision that requires a “yes” or “no” outcome. The decision is simple so majority voting approaches are suitable and have high accuracy and expressiveness. * **Time required to participate** - The binary voting approach is simple by design so this voting approach would be one of the fastest voting systems to participate in. * **Voting complexity** - Voting is very simple. No complex comparisons or rankings are involved and instead the voter is always just considering a single proposal and deciding between a yes or no outcome. **Moderate single selection decision suitability (Score - 3)** * **Accuracy & expressiveness** - A two round system could help to increase the accuracy however this would come at the cost of voting complexity and voter participation time required. Majority voting approaches might be more beneficial in situations where the outcome of the vote will have a large impact on the users of the network and due to that it might be important that a decision eventually leads to a majority outcome. * **Time required to participate** - The problem with majority voting systems for a single selection decision is that there might not be a majority preference for a single proposal. The voting process could require multiple rounds to force a majority outcome. This could greatly increase the time required for people to participate in voting if multiple voting rounds were needed. * **Voting complexity** - The larger the number of options there are the more complex it could become to get to a majority outcome. Using preference or score based voting can help with making it quicker to identify a winning proposal instead of using multiple rounds of voting to reach a majority. **Very low multiple selection decision suitability (Score - 1)** * **Accuracy & expressiveness** - If there are many proposals to choose from and many proposals can be selected as part of the outcome there is a decreased probability that a majority outcome will be achieved for every proposal. Multiple rounds of voting could be required to achieve a majority outcome. Voters would also be limited in being able to express the intensity of their preferences without being able to score or rank the proposals in some way. * **Time required to participate** - If multiple rounds were required to reach a majority outcome this approach would likely take a large amount of time for voters to participate. If voting was done in one round it might not be sufficiently expressive enough for voters to reach a consensus about which proposals should be selected without accepting a plurality approach or using score or ranking based approaches. * **Voting complexity** - It would be more difficult to reach a majority decision with a multiple selection decision that has many proposals that can be selected. The larger the amount of proposals the lower the probability that every proposal will reach a majority. Plurality voting is more practically feasible than majority approaches in these situations due to the complexity for voters of reading and understanding a large number of proposals. Proposals about priorities, ideas, contributors or delegated representatives could have large amounts of information attached to the proposal. This can increase the difficulty for voters to read these proposals and reach a majority decision. Requiring a majority outcome could make it difficult for voters to feasibly participate in these decisions due to the complexity. **Total score = 9 / 15** # Proportional voting Proportional voting approach for voting systems
**Overview** The outcome from the vote is allocated based on the proportional number of votes that each proposal receives. **Example proportional voting systems** * **Party-List Proportional Representation (Closed List)** - Voters select a party rather than ranking individual candidates. The seats are then allocated to parties proportionally based on the votes received, and the party determines which candidates take the seats. * **Mixed-Member Proportional Representation (MMP)** - Voters typically have two votes: one for a candidate in a single-member district and one for a party list. The party list vote determines the proportional allocation of seats, but it does not involve ranking candidates. This voting system combines proportional representation and first-past-the-post elements. It aims for more strict proportionality and may increase the total number of seats to ensure that the distribution of seats closely matches the proportion of votes that each party receives. * **Additional Member System (AMS)** - Similar voting system to MMP however this voting system looks to strike a balance between direct local representation and overall proportionality and generally works using a fixed number of seats. **Very low binary decision suitability (Score - 1)** A proportional voting approach is not suitable for a simple binary decision. A yes or no outcome is required which means a proportional outcome would not be relevant as it would be the equivalent of a majority decision outcome. **Very low single selection decision suitability (Score - 1)** The example use cases that are listed for single selection decisions are not well suited for a proportional voting approach as all of these examples are looking for a single outcome from the decision and not a proportional one. Most of these decisions couldn’t have multiple winning outcomes using a proportional allocation. **Low multiple selection decision suitability (Score - 2)** * **Accuracy & expressiveness** - Proportional voting would make sense in situations where people are voting on different groups of contributors or delegated representatives that they prefer. Then the allocation of budget or voting power those groups receive is based on the proportion of the voting power they receive from voters. The problem with this is it encourages party politics where voters receive less expressiveness to pick the individuals they prefer. If individuals are selected by voters then a plurality system would be more effective or a score or ranking based on that helps to better capture the intensity of each voter's preferences for different candidates. A proportional outcome might not be as suitable for the decision examples listed as the other approaches. * **Time required to participate** - The time required to participate could be similar to other score based voting approaches as the voter would indicate the groups they prefer and what proportion of their voting power should be allocated to them. * **Voting complexity** - The main complexity with proportional voting is the issues with accepting a proportional outcome and how that might not be an effective approach for many multiple selection decisions. It also might even be problematic for selecting delegated representatives and contributors as it gives the decision of who will be selected within that proportional outcome to the group itself or it would require a further round of voting. This centralises part of the decision making process for who actually gets selected. **Total score = 4 / 15** # Preference voting Preference based voting approach for voting systems
**Overview** Preference based voting systems allow voters to rank proposals in order of their preference rather than selecting just one proposal. Ranking helps to provide a more nuanced expression of voter choices, allowing the voting system to consider not only the most preferred proposal but also secondary and further preferences. **Examples of preference based voting systems** * **Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) & Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV)** - Voters rank proposals in order of preference, and if no proposal wins a majority of first-choice votes, the proposal with the fewest votes is eliminated. Votes for the eliminated proposal are transferred to the remaining proposals based on voters' next preferences. This process repeats until one proposal has a majority. This approach is also a type of majority based voting system. * **Bucklin Vote** - Voters rank proposals in order of preference. All first-choice votes are counted, and if no proposal has a majority, second-choice votes are added to the totals. This process continues with third choices, and so on, until a proposal achieves a majority. This approach is also a type of majority based voting system. * **Condorcet Method** - Voters rank proposals, and the proposal who would win a head-to-head comparison against every other proposal is declared the winner. * **Supplementary Vote (SV)** - Voters mark their first and second choices. If no proposal receives a majority of first-choice votes, all but the top two proposals are eliminated, and the second-choice votes are added to the totals of the remaining two proposals. This approach is also a type of majority based voting system. * **Borda Count** - Voters rank proposals, and points are assigned based on the rankings (e.g., 1 point for last choice, 2 points for second-last, etc.). The proposal with the highest total points wins. This approach is also a type of majority based voting system. * **Coombs’ Method** - Voters rank proposals in order of preference. In each round, the proposal with the most last-place votes is eliminated, and the process repeats until one proposal remains or a proposal achieves a majority of the remaining votes. * **Single Transferable Vote (STV)** - Voters rank proposals in multi-option decisions. Proposals must achieve a certain quota of votes to be selected. Votes are initially allocated to first preferences, and excess votes for selected proposals are transferred to other proposals based on preferences. This process continues until all available positions are filled. This approach is also a type of proportional based voting system. **Very low binary decision suitability (Score - 1)** A preference voting approach is not very suitable for a simple binary decision. A yes or no outcome is required which means a preference based outcome would not be relevant as any ranked outcome of just two options would just be translated into a binary yes or no majority decision outcome. **High single selection decision suitability (Score - 4)** * **Accuracy & expressiveness** - Preference based voting would be effective at accurately ranking the proposals based on the voters preferences. The main issue with preference based voting would be that not every set of options could be easily ranked into a single ordered list. A voter might have a similar amount of preference for different groups of proposals where they prefer these options equally. Preference based voting can be highly effective when there is a limited number of proposals to rank and in situations when it is fair to expect that the voter will be able to read and understand each proposal - which would be required for them to make an informed decision when ranking each proposal. * **Time required to participate** - For decisions that have a limited number of proposals the time it takes to rank them would still take a moderate amount of time but this should not be too excessive. If the number of proposals is high then the participation time required could be much higher and become excessive. A preference approach could be suitable for many of the example use cases listed which would likely have a limited number of proposals to select from. * **Voting complexity** - Preference voting approaches become increasingly complex as you increase the number of proposals that the voter is required to rank. This also can make it very difficult for a voter to make an informed voting decision unless they understand each of the proposals in enough detail. Preference voting will be more suitable in situations when there are a limited number of proposals that need to be compared and ranked so that the complexity for voters doesn’t become excessive. **Low multiple selection decision suitability (Score - 2)** * **Accuracy & expressiveness** - The complexity with decisions where multiple proposals can be selected is that the difficulty in ranking those proposals will likely increase as the number of proposals increases that the voters need to compare and rank. For a voter to rank the proposals accurately they will need to have a sufficient understanding of the proposals and be able to compare those proposals against each other. This approach can be useful for getting a more exact outcome on which proposal is most preferred, however it also could be far too complex to expect voters to rank proposals about priorities, ideas, contributors and delegated representatives. In these example decisions the proposals could have a large amount of information and be difficult to compare at scale. A voter might want to express their opinion that there are a number of proposals that they equally prefer and a number of proposals that they equally disapprove of. A preference based approach would prevent them from being able to express that. Preference voting approaches could be effective when high accuracy is required at the expense of the expressiveness and time required for voters to participate. * **Time required to participate** - It would be extremely time consuming to rank a large number of proposals that had any reasonable amount of complexity to read and understand. Out of the different voting approaches that exist this one would be one of the most time consuming for a multiple selection decision with numerous proposals that need to be considered. * **Voting complexity** - The complexity for voters to rank a large number of proposals that have moderate to large amounts of information to digest is very high. It is unlikely an effective way to make decisions due to this complexity. If voters want to make an informed decision they are forced to read every proposal and understand them enough to make a comparison between each of them. This becomes less feasible in situations where there are many proposals of moderate length. For the examples of ranking priority, idea, contributor and delegated representative proposals this complexity could likely be excessive. **Total score = 7 / 15** # Score voting Score based voting approach for voting systems
**Overview** Score based voting systems, also known as evaluative or cardinal voting systems, allow voters to express the intensity of their preferences by assigning a score to each proposal. Instead of choosing a single proposal or ranking proposals in order of preference, voters rate each proposal independently on a predetermined scale. **Example score based voting systems** * **Approval Voting** - Voters can vote for (approve) as many proposals as they like. The proposals with the most approvals win. * **Disapproval Voting (Veto Voting)** - Voters can vote against (veto) as many proposals as they like. The proposals with the fewest negative votes win. * **Balanced Approval Voting** - Voters can vote "yes" or "no" on each proposal. The final outcome is determined by calculating the net approval (yes votes minus no votes) for each proposal. * **Score Voting (Range Voting)** - Voters score each proposal on a scale (e.g., 0 to 5). The proposals with the highest total score win. * **Majority Judgment** - Voters grade each proposal on a scale (e.g., Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor, Very Poor). The proposal with the highest median grade wins. * **Spend Voting -** Voters have a certain number of votes they can distribute as they see fit. Voters can only spend their points once. A flexible number of votes is another variant that is occasionally used that enables voters to decide the total number of votes they want to allocate. * **Average Voting** - Each voter selects a numerical value, and the outcome is determined by calculating the average (mean) of all the votes. * **Median Voting** - Each voter selects a numerical value, and the outcome is determined by finding the median (the middle value when all votes are ordered from lowest to highest). * **Cumulative Voting** - Voters have multiple votes that they can distribute among one or more proposals as they choose. The proposals with the most votes win. The number of votes that can be distributed is often tied to the number of positions that are being filled. * **Quadrating Voting** - Voters are given a budget of credits that they can use to buy votes for proposals. The cost of each additional vote for a proposal increases quadratically, meaning the cost of a vote is equal to the number of votes squared. * **Conviction Voting -** Voters allocate points to candidates over time, reflecting the strength of their conviction. Voting participants can continuously express their support or opposition to proposals. A proposal's voting power could increase or decrease based on changes in voter support. The proposal with the most points at a given decision threshold wins. * **Weighted Voting** - Votes are weighted based on certain criteria, such as the number of shares held in a company, the population of a constituency, or other factors that assign different voting power to different voters. This approach is also a type of plurality based voting system. * **STAR Voting (Score Then Automatic Runoff)** - Voters score each candidate, such as from 0 to 5, and the top two candidates enter an automatic runoff. The candidate preferred by the majority wins in the runoff. This approach is also a type of preference based voting system. **Very high binary decision suitability (Score - 5)** * **Accuracy & expressiveness** - A score based voting system could be a highly effective voting approach for a binary decision as it could capture the intensity of someone's preference. For instance if a scale of 1 to 4 was used someone could express their degree of confidence in their decision where 1 and 2 are disapproval outcomes with 1 being the highest intensity of disapproval and 3 and 4 are approval outcomes where 4 is the highest intensity of approval. Score voting could be one of the most effective approaches for increasing voter expressiveness. * **Time required to participate** - Score voting would be slightly more time consuming for voters as they would be able to express a more exact opinion. However this is still a simple approach as the voter still only has one proposal to consider and then only needs to indicate a score so the time required would not be much higher than a simple binary voting approach. * **Voting complexity** - No complex comparisons or ranking is involved and instead the voter is always just considering a single proposal and deciding on what score to give that proposal. The complexity is only slightly higher than a simple yes or no binary voting approach however the advantage is that the voting expressiveness is much higher. **Very high single selection decision suitability (Score - 5)** * **Accuracy & expressiveness** - A high level of accuracy and expressiveness can be achieved with score based voting as voters are able to indicate their intensity of preference using different scores. Score based voting could be more effective than preference based voting in situations where the voting options are very different from each other as in these situations it can be more difficult to compare and rank these proposals accurately. A voter would be able to express a similar amount of preference to multiple options if they wanted to. * **Time required to participate** - Using a score based approach means that voters can select and score any of the options they want to and can choose to ignore the remaining ones. As the voter doesn’t need to compare every single proposal with other proposals this approach is effective for minimising the amount of time required for a voter to participate. For instance they could decide to just vote on a small handful of options and might prefer to leave the rest. Voters would be able to decide themselves how much time they want to spend on voting and would still be able to accurately share their preferences towards the proposals they did have time and capacity to read. * **Voting complexity** - The complexity for score based voting remains low for a single selection decision with multiple options as the scores will be aggregated to generate a fair outcome. The voter doesn’t need to rank or compare every voting option which helps to limit the complexity involved in voting. **Very high multiple selection decision suitability (Score - 5)** * **Accuracy & expressiveness** - Voters could allocate their points to whichever proposals they believe are the most important. Voters can be highly expressive about their exact opinions which could be that they heavily prefer one proposal over others or that they equally prefer a number of proposals over the rest. This allocation of votes should be effective at accurately determining which proposals should be selected in a multiple selection decision. * **Time required to participate** - Voters are not forced to read and understand every proposal in the decision process to participate. They can express their preferences towards the proposals that they have read. Voters would decide themselves how much time they want to spend voting. The amount of time required would be slightly higher than a plurality voting system as the voters would also need to indicate the level of preference they have for each proposal through the score that they allocate to each proposal. * **Voting complexity** - Voters do not need to rank and compare every proposal to participate in voting. They roughly need to make comparisons to indicate their intensity of preference towards each proposal as this will determine the score they allocate to each proposal. The voter can allocate equal scores to similar proposals they prefer or they could rank them by incrementing the score as their preference increases. The complexity is slightly higher than plurality systems due to the allocation of scores to proposals, however this comes with the benefit of creating a more accurate and highly expressive voting system. **Total score = 15 / 15** # Score voting approaches Comparing different score voting approaches that could be used for making network and treasury decisions within Web3 ecosystems There are a number of score voting approaches that were highlighted in the voting approach comparison. These scoring approaches can be better understood by breaking down how points could be allocated and used by voters and what voting options could exist. These approach comparisons have helped to identify some of the more suitable score voting approaches that a Web3 ecosystem might want to consider. The comparisons mainly focus on decisions where there are multiple proposals and a single proposal or multiple proposals are being selected. **Points allocation approaches** The following compares the different ways that voters could be allocated points that they would then use to vote on proposals. A single point per proposal emerged as one of the most effective approaches for maximising simplicity and speed for voting whilst also being a more resilient solution for preventing bad actors from getting an advantage. {% content-ref url="/pages/yUMdSyII1ddcK4ZeRgQo" %} [Points allocation approaches](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches) {% endcontent-ref %} **Score voting options approaches** Voting options determine how a voter is able to allocate their points and voting power. Points could be allocated to approval or disapproval options or a combination of the two. For both decision based and proposal based points allocation approaches the combination of approval and disapproval voting options can be problematic as it can give bad actors an edge by being able to downvote competing proposals. Due to this approval and disapproval only options are preferred for voting systems that need to scale to a very large audience as they can be more effective at preventing bad actors from gaining an advantage in the decision process due to other people's voting behaviours. * **Approval option only** - Points can only be allocated to an approval option. This is a simple and quick voting approach for voters. A big benefit of this approach is that for single point allocation approaches it prevents bad actors from getting any advantage over honest voting behaviour. * **Disapproval option only** - Points can only be allocated to a disapproval option. A disapproval option has similar advantages and disadvantages as an approval only option. A disapproval option approach could be effective in situations when there are more fillable positions than there are submitted proposals. In these situations it might make more sense for voters to disapprove the worst proposals rather than voting on a larger number of proposals that they need to approve. * **Approval & disapproval options** - Points can be allocated to either an approval or a disapproval option. This slightly increases the voting time required as now voters need to consider both upvoting and downvoting the proposals. This approach is more expressive as it enables voters to indicate which proposals they approve or disapprove of. The main problem with having approval and disapproval options is that bad actors would be incentivised to downvote any competing proposal which can give them more influence with their voting power. Normal voting behaviour wouldn’t counteract malicious voting behaviour. Approval & disapproval voting could be suitable in situations where the voters are public or there is more confidence that voters will not vote maliciously against other proposals. **Victory condition approaches** Points could be aggregated in a few different ways to determine the winning proposals. A total score approach that only has a single voting option would be the most effective at preventing game theory risks. Due to this a total score approach with only approval or disapproval voting would be preferred to prevent these game theory issues. * **Total score** - An approval only voting option would not be at risk from bad actors as the score is only improved by any point that is allocated. If there was both an approval and disapproval option then the total score could be negatively influenced by bad actors who disapprove of any of the competing proposals. * **Average score** - Has game theory risks for any multiple points approaches as bad actors could allocate the minimum points to a proposal just to drag the average score down. * **Median score** - Has game theory risks for any multiple points approaches as bad actors could allocate the minimum points to a proposal just to drag the median score down. **Applying the score voting examples to these approaches** The different score systems listed in the voting approaches analysis have been mapped to the score voting approaches that have been outlined above: {% content-ref url="/pages/GnCeA0yrWey91SMikoSz" %} [Applying the score voting examples to these approaches](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/applying-the-score-voting-examples-to-these-approaches) {% endcontent-ref %} ## Suggested score voting approach **Initial suggestion** The score voting approaches that have been compared led to the following suggested approach: * **Single point per proposal** - Voters would allocate a single point towards the proposals that they approve. This approach is simple and quick for voters. It also prevents bad actors from getting more influence over the decision due to certain voting behaviours as everyone would always be applying their full voting power. * **Approval option only** - Voters would only be able to select an approval option to prevent bad actors from downvoting all other proposals apart from their own. * **Total score** - The winning condition for this approach would be determined by the proposals that have the highest total score. **Score voting approach improvement ideas** The initial suggested score voting approach has a few key problems that could be addressed. The first is that the suggested approach is far less expressive for voters than alternative points allocation approaches. Voters would struggle to share the intensity of their preferences. It is also not effective for sharing dissenting opinions. A few improvement ideas can be explored to help remedy these problems: {% content-ref url="/pages/LQmlpN1URDxTd3y6JsR2" %} [Voting approach improvement ideas](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/voting-approach-improvement-ideas) {% endcontent-ref %} **Suggested score voting approach** After applying the suggested improvement ideas with the initial suggestion an updated suggestion can be documented. Expressive approval voting with decision disapprovals could be an effective score voting approach for Web3 ecosystems to adopt at scale: {% content-ref url="/pages/eO7zYHAVVAw9dtDaB8BH" %} [Expressive approval voting with decision disapprovals](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/expressive-approval-voting-with-decision-disapprovals) {% endcontent-ref %} # Points allocation approaches Comparing different points allocation approaches that could be used for determining how many points a voter will receive and how they can use them Voters could be given a varying amount of points to allocate to each proposal in a given decision. This number of points that voters can allocate will influence the expressiveness and accuracy of the decision process and can also impact the voting complexity and time required to participate. Points could be used in a per decision or a per proposal allocation approach: * **Per decision** - Voters distribute their allocated points across any of the proposals they prefer. For example, 100 points per decision means that a voter could allocate 100 points across any of the submitted proposals. If the number of allocated points was less than the total proposals submitted this would mean the voter would not be able to allocate a point to every proposal. * **Per proposal** - Voters receive a number of points for every proposal. Voters can then allocate to the ones they prefer. For example, 100 points per proposal means that a voter could allocate from 0 to 100 points on any proposal. **Per decision & per proposal main differences** The main approach differences to consider when comparing per decision and per proposal allocation approaches are: * **Per decision has higher accuracy** - Encourages more comparison and ranking between proposals. This is good for encouraging voters to compare proposals through how they allocate their points but comes at the cost of increasing the complexity and time required for voters to make an allocation decision due to the need to compare multiple proposals. * **Per proposal has lower voter complexity and time required** - Voters can vote on the proposals they are interested in and score them independently without the need to do as much comparison. The number of points a voter allocates to each proposal could be the same across the proposals in a decision. It is quick and easy to learn this approach as the number of points to allocate is always the same for each proposal. **Maximum proposal allocation approaches** A maximum points allocation cap could be applied to proposals in the per decision allocation approaches. A fixed maximum points allocation was one of the simplest and more effective approaches for reducing game theory risks whilst allocating points across proposals in a decision. A fixed maximum points allocation approach will be used when comparing the per decision points allocation approaches. {% content-ref url="/pages/GXDZwMp4vPgzAETiCnCS" %} [Maximum points allocation approaches](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/maximum-points-allocation-approaches) {% endcontent-ref %} ## Approaches for allocating points A number of approaches exist that could be used to determine the total number of points a voter will get to allocate across each proposal in a decision: * [**Voting power per decision**](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/voting-power-per-decision) - Points are allocated based on someone's voting power. * [**Number of proposals multiple points per decision**](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/number-of-proposals-multiple-points-per-decision) - Points are allocated based on the number of proposals that have been submitted. * [**Available positions single points per decision** ](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/available-positions-single-points-per-decision)- A point is allocated for each available position that can be filled. * [**Available positions multiple points per decision** ](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/available-positions-multiple-points-per-decision)- Multiple points are allocated for each available position that can be filled. * [**Multiple points per decision**](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/multiple-points-per-decision) - A fixed number of points are allocated to voters for each decision such as 100 or 1,000 points. * [**Multiple points per proposal**](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/multiple-points-per-proposal) - A fixed number of points are allocated to voters for each proposal such as 5, 10 or 100 points per proposal. * [**Single point per proposal**](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/single-point-per-proposal) - A single point is allocated to voters for each proposal. To compare these points allocation approaches a [number of factors have been considered](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/points-allocation-factors-for-consideration) and then applied to each approach to try and determine any strengths and weaknesses of each one.
**Key takeaways** * **Voting power per decision adds voting experience differences and complexity** - The voting experience for each individual could change for every decision as their voting power changes and each voter would also receive a different voting experience as everyone would have a different amount of voting power. It could be simpler for the voter if a standardised amount of points is used for applying their voting power in a decision rather than using the voting power amount itself. * **Number of proposals with multiple points per decision could become overly complex** - The number of proposals submitted could change drastically between decisions and result in a very different number of points for voters to allocate. This large number of points and level of expressiveness is likely not necessary in a decision with a large number of voters due to the added complexity and time it would take to allocate a changing amount of points in each decision. The number of proposals submitted will often not influence the amount of available positions that can be filled, meaning voters could often have a very large number of points to allocate but fewer available positions to fill. * **Available positions add some execution complexity** - The number of available positions can’t always be known ahead of time. Proposals could be competing for an available pool of funding and each proposal could be requesting a different amount. In these cases the available positions would need to be estimated. This adds some complexity for the voter as they could be given an estimated number of points to allocate that changes for every decision they participate in. The outcome of a decision would actually decide how many positions are actually filled and this might not equate to the original estimated number of available positions. * **Available positions single point is more straightforward though lacks expressiveness** - Voters only receive points for the estimated positions that need to be filled. This could be very restricting as the voter could have multiple proposals that want to support equally with their voting power. Voters wouldn’t be able to do this due to the limit in the number of points they can allocate. The benefit of this approach is it will be quicker for voters to participate as they won’t need to vote beyond the estimated number of positions that they need to allocate for. * **Available positions with multiple points is more expressive but adds complexity** - If voters have multiple points for each available position they could spread those points across more proposals than there are positions. This approach is more expressive for the voter for indicating the intensity of their preferences. The complexity that is introduced however is that voters have an ever changing amount of points that they need to allocate in each decision that is also based on an estimate of what available positions can be filled. Bad actors could be given an advantage in situations where voters spread their votes too thin across multiple proposals as this would dilute their voting power influence over the decision. * **Multiple points per decision is highly expressive and accurate but adds some voter complexities and game theory risks** - Having a large number of points to allocate across the submitted proposals is effective for giving voters a large amount of expressiveness and also for increasing the accuracy of the outcome as voters are forced to compare and decide which proposals will be allocated the most points. The issue with this approach is that the number of points might not be suitable for the ever changing amounts of proposals in each decision. It also has the same game theory risks as the other approaches in situations where points are spread too thin across many proposals. * **Multiple points per proposal is expressive, simple and easy however this still has some game theory risks** - Having multiple points that can be allocated towards each proposal means that process is still expressive but might be less accurate if proposals don’t need to be compared when allocating points. The benefits of having a fixed number of points per proposal is it means that the process is more simple and straightforward for the voter to participate. The voters just need to indicate the intensity of their preference for each proposal. This approach has the same game theory issues as some of the other per decision approaches where voters could dilute their voting power using too few points on each proposal. This would give bad actors who always apply the maximum voting power an advantage over that type of voting behaviour. * **Single point per proposal is not expressive but it is very simple and quick for voters and it also removes game theory risks** - Voters receive a point that they can allocate to each proposal. Voters would be able to vote on any proposals that they want to approve however they wouldn’t be able to indicate the intensity of their preference. This approach is not very expressive for voters. The main advantages of this approach are that it is simple and quick for voters to participate in a decision. It also removes game theory risks by not giving bad actors any extra advantage with their voting power as everyone would always use their full voting power regardless of their voting behaviour. This approach is one of the most effective for ecosystems that are looking to increase voter participation to a very large number of people due to its simplicity and effectiveness at preventing bad actors from getting an advantage from certain voting behaviours. **Points allocation approaches analysis** {% content-ref url="/pages/GXDZwMp4vPgzAETiCnCS" %} [Maximum points allocation approaches](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/maximum-points-allocation-approaches) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/aG04OVX3JfJn09OkLElo" %} [Points allocation factors for consideration](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/points-allocation-factors-for-consideration) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/WXH2EtTA3fMDQqwKJTpr" %} [Voting power per decision](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/voting-power-per-decision) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/Ljew9yMFoCql6BKJtd1T" %} [Number of proposals multiple points per decision](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/number-of-proposals-multiple-points-per-decision) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/kFRAaxBzLxFn8sapzU1w" %} [Available positions single points per decision](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/available-positions-single-points-per-decision) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/OS19Hp1whlcOx16gE1Ug" %} [Available positions multiple points per decision](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/available-positions-multiple-points-per-decision) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/As3x9nJaziUEPU8XGl3I" %} [Multiple points per decision](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/multiple-points-per-decision) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/4lYnEFsMwljwYrolNteS" %} [Multiple points per proposal](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/multiple-points-per-proposal) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/verdLeFqiEiNAJFBz6Hc" %} [Single point per proposal](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/single-point-per-proposal) {% endcontent-ref %} # Maximum points allocation approaches Comparing different maximum points allocation approaches that could be used for limiting how voters can use points in per decision points allocation approaches Points can either be allocated per proposal, meaning that voters have the same amount of points to allocate with each proposal, or they can be allocated per decision, meaning voters receive a single set of points that they then allocate across all proposals. Per decision based points allocation approaches need to decide whether they are going to add a maximum number of points constraint on each proposal to limit the number of points that can be allocated to each one. Proposals that have no maximum points allocation cap can be a simple and quick approach for voters to understand however a lack of a maximum allocation can mean introducing a large amount of game theory risk where bad actors could increase their decision influence by not diluting their voting power across multiple proposals and only allocating their points towards one proposal. Some approaches that can help with reducing some of the game theory related risks are quadratic based allocations and fixed maximum allocations. These approaches each have their own impact on the expressiveness & accuracy of the voting process, the simplicity and speed in which voters can participate and the game theory risks that can still exist due to that maximum allocation approach. ### **Approaches for handling maximum points allocations** The following are some approaches that could be used for allocating points across proposals in a single decision: * [**No maximum allocation**](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/maximum-points-allocation-approaches/no-maximum-allocation) - Voters can allocate all their points on one proposal or across multiple proposals. * [**Quadratic allocation**](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/maximum-points-allocation-approaches/quadratic-allocation) - The cost of allocating points increases quadratically when more points are allocated to the same proposal. * [**Fixed maximum allocation**](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/maximum-points-allocation-approaches/fixed-maximum-allocation) - Voters can allocate a maximum number of points per proposal. To compare these points allocation approaches a [number of factors have been considered](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/maximum-points-allocation-approaches/maximum-proposal-allocation-factors-for-consideration) and then applied to each approach to try and determine any strengths and weaknesses of each one.
**Key takeaways** * **No maximum allocation is simple and quick but gives bad actors a simple attacking strategy** - This is the most simple approach for voters as they can simply allocate their points exactly how they like. The problem with this approach is any dilution of points across multiple proposals would mean bad actors could be given an edge if they always consolidate their voting power on a single proposal. * **Quadratic allocations reduce some game theory risk but also introduce complexity** - The impact of bad actors should be reduced with a quadratic allocation approach however if normal voters consolidate their points or spread them out too thin there could be opportunities that emerge for bad actors to exploit those behaviours with their own voting strategy. Quadratic allocations also give voters this ongoing complexity of considering how they want to allocate their points and how their voting power can be diminished based on any increased allocation of points on a single proposal. Voting power is diminished for voters that want to express any intensity of preference. * **Fixed maximum allocations help to reduce game theory risks but can limit a voter's expressiveness -** This approach reduces voter expressiveness as voters can’t easily indicate the intensity of their preference beyond the maximum allocation limit. Voters would be encouraged to hit those maximum points limits on any proposals they want to support. This approach reduces the impact of overly consolidated points from bad actors as now they would need to spread their points over multiple proposals. This approach still faces the risks around situations where voters spread their points too thinly across many proposals as this would give bad actors an increased influence by consolidating their points. Fixed maximum allocations are a simpler approach for voters to understand and also help to slightly further reduce the game theory risks over a quadratic approach. Fixed maximum allocations are a suitable approach for voting systems that need to be scaled to a very large user base due to the need for maximum simplicity and stability. **Maximum proposal allocation approaches analysis** {% content-ref url="/pages/NcElGyiRLWetmX7m8d3m" %} [Maximum proposal allocation factors for consideration](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/maximum-points-allocation-approaches/maximum-proposal-allocation-factors-for-consideration) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/hoYsBKa1hagfAZwED4yF" %} [No maximum allocation](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/maximum-points-allocation-approaches/no-maximum-allocation) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/wFQyHDMUh6Nconvf6r4q" %} [Quadratic allocation](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/maximum-points-allocation-approaches/quadratic-allocation) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/mhcHpnoMPr105hPZYuYc" %} [Fixed maximum allocation](/approaches/score-voting-approaches/points-allocation-approaches/maximum-points-allocation-approaches/fixed-maximum-allocation) {% endcontent-ref %} # Maximum proposal allocation factors for consideration Listing the different factors that will be considered for each maximum proposal allocation approach The [methodology](https://docs.treasuries.io/analysis/approach-comparison-methodology) used for this approach comparison is documented separately. **Accuracy & expressiveness** * **Description** - Encouraging or limiting how voters can allocate their points can influence the accuracy and expressiveness of the voting system. * **Importance score** - 5, Very important. A loss in expressiveness and accuracy can lead to decision outcomes that do not fairly represent the preferences and opinions of the voters. Adding a points allocation cap to each proposal could prevent important information from being shared due to how voters are able to allocate their points. * **Scoring questions -** How does the maximum proposal allocation approach influence how voters can allocate their points? Does it encourage or prevent voters from voting in certain ways that might be a normal or desired behaviour? Can voters express their exact preferences and opinions? What accuracy in outcome could this lead to? * **Scoring** - High accuracy & expressiveness is good (Score - 5). Low accuracy and expressiveness is bad (Score - 1). **Voting complexity** * **Description** - The number of points a voter can allocate to each proposal and how those allocated points can impact someone's voting power can influence the complexity of the voting process. * **Importance score** - 5, Very important. Increases in voting complexity could lead to a reduction in participation due to voters not having enough capacity or interest to vote on many proposals across many decisions. * **Scoring questions -** How complex is it for a voter to allocate their points across proposals in each decision? Does the maximum proposal allocation approach negatively influence or limit how voters can participate? * **Scoring** - Low complexity is good (Score - 5). High complexity is bad (Score - 1). **Time required to participate** * **Description** - The number of points a voter can allocate to each proposal can influence how long it takes to participate in the voting process. * **Importance score** - 5, Very important. Reducing the time required to participate in voting will be very important for maximising the amount of people that can feasibly participate due to their own capacity and time constraints. The larger the number of voters the more important this factor becomes. * **Scoring questions -** How long would it take for someone to participate and allocate their points in a decision? What happens if there are many decisions that use this approach? * **Scoring** - Low time required is good (Score - 5). High time required is bad (Score - 1). **Game theory risks** * **Description** - How voters are able to allocate their points could give bad actors an edge in the voting process and increase their chances of influencing a decision. * **Importance score** - 5, Very important. Making a robust voting process at scale will need to think about how it can prevent bad actors from abusing the voting process due to how they could allocate their points whilst voting in an attempt to get an edge over normal voting behaviours. * **Scoring questions -** How could bad actors take advantage of the voting process based on how the average voter participates? Could bad actors be given an advantage if people vote in a certain way? * **Scoring** - Low risk is good (Score - 5). High risk is bad (Score - 1). # No maximum allocation No maximum allocation approach for per decision points allocation approaches
**Overview** No maximum allocation means voters can allocate all of their points on one proposal or across multiple proposals. The voter is able to allocate their points exactly as they want to. **Very high accuracy & expressiveness (Score - 5)** Voters can allocate their points exactly as they want to whether that’s equally across a number of proposals or incremental amounts over different proposals. This approach is the most expressive as it gives voters full control over how they allocate their points. In terms of accuracy the main issues with this approach is it does not encourage people to vote on enough proposals that would mean filling the available positions. This may or may not be a problem as it would depend on people's voting behaviour in aggregate. **Very low voter complexity (Score - 5)** This approach is very simple for voters to understand as they are given a number of points and they simply allocate them towards any proposals they prefer. **Low time required (Score - 4)** Voters can allocate their points allocation exactly how they want to across the proposals they prefer. This allocation of points would represent their entire voting power so it will be easy for them to utilise all of their points regardless of how they decide to vote as long as they allocate their points. **Very high game theory risks (Score - 1)** Normal voting behaviour could often include people that vote on many proposals that they prefer. This behaviour dilutes their voting power across multiple proposals and gives bad actors a potential advantage where they can consolidate their voting power on one proposal or a small handful of proposals to give themselves the highest probability of influencing the decision outcome. Bad actors could achieve increased influence in many decisions using this simple strategy of consolidating the points they can allocate. **Total score = 15 / 20** # Quadratic allocation Quadratic allocation approach for per decision points allocation approaches
**Overview** A quadratic allocation approach means that the cost of allocating more points to a single proposal increases quadratically. Voters could allocate their points on one proposal or across multiple proposals. This approach can be effective for encouraging people to spread their points across multiple proposals whilst also not forcing them to do so. **High accuracy & expressiveness (Score - 4)** Voters are still able to express their exact preferences when allocating their points across multiple proposals. The voter is encouraged to spread their votes across numerous proposals due to the fact that they will diminish their own voting power if they consolidate points on a single proposal. This approach can be effective for encouraging people to not consolidate their points to just one or a few proposals; however it does so by punishing the voters that do consolidate their allocated points. This could be problematic for certain voting behaviours where a voter only has the time and capacity to vote on a few proposals or when they don’t necessarily agree with the other proposals. A benefit of this approach is it encourages voters to compare proposals to allocate points between them which can help with increasing the accuracy of the result as a larger proportion of voters might choose to allocate their points across more proposals. **High voter complexity (Score - 2)** The voter needs to consider how they allocate their points and how much of their voting power they are willing to lose if they want to consolidate any of their allocated points across any of their preferred proposals. If voters don’t want to lose their voting power they would need to allocate their points evenly across many proposals. This could make voting more complex as the voter would need to identify a number of proposals they can equally support which might not exist in that decision. In those situations a voter is forced to dilute their voting power by consolidating their points across fewer proposals that they do approve of. The concern for loss of voting power would be a constant complexity that a voter needs to take into account with every voting decision. **Low time required (Score - 4)** Voters can allocate their points however they like however due to the loss of points from using a quadratic allocation approach the voters would likely need to spend more time considering how they spread their points across their preferred proposals to improve their usage of their voting power in the decision. **High game theory risks (Score - 2)** If a bad actor has enough voting power to influence a decision by consolidating their vote on a single proposal they could still do that however with quadratic allocations this is not very likely due to the increasing loss of voting power from consolidating points. One incentive that a quadratic approach creates for bad actors is to create as many proposals as needed to then allocate their points across them. Increasing the number of proposals to match the amount of points they need to allocate would maximise the impact of their allocated points. If normal voting behaviour had a number of voters that partially or fully consolidated their points across a small number of proposals the bad actors could be given an advantage as their usage of points could be more effective at influencing an outcome as their points could be spread across multiple proposals they submitted. If voters were instead spreading their points across a wide range of proposals this could give bad actors another reason to ensure they have a large number of proposals submitted as they might be allocated some of these points from normal voting behaviour. Voters that feel encouraged to vote in this way to maximise the usage of their voting power may be doing so even though they don’t have enough capacity or interest in reading all of the submitted proposals in enough depth. This behaviour could be another positive outcome for bad actors as they could receive more points due to this. Voters that spread their points out too thin across many proposals could create an opportunity for bad actors to slightly consolidate their points to improve those proposals chances of succeeding. **Total score = 12 / 20** # Fixed maximum allocation Fixed maximum allocation approach for per decision points allocation approaches
**Overview** Voters can only allocate a fixed number of points per proposal. Each proposal would have a limited number of points that can be allocated to it. This forces voters to either spread their votes across multiple proposals or not utilise all their points. **Moderate accuracy & expressiveness (Score - 3)** A limited allocation on each proposal means voters can only somewhat express their full intensity of preferences towards each proposal. If a multiple points option is used then the intensity of preference can be indicated by reducing the points allocated to a proposal below the limit. Voters are still able to spread their points across as many proposals as they wish and can consolidate them up until the limit across the proposals they prefer. Using the number of available positions to be filled could be a suitable approach as a limit per proposal to encourage voters to spread their votes across a large enough number of proposals that could fill the positions. **Low voter complexity (Score - 4)** This approach is simple for voters to understand as they are given a number of points and they simply allocate them to any proposals they prefer up until the limit on each proposal. This approach would encourage voters to spread their points across more proposals which does add some extra complexity for the voters to handle if they do want to allocate all of their points. Regardless of how someone votes their full voting power would be utilised which keeps the voting process simple for the voter as they don’t need to think about how their voting behaviour impacts their usage of voting power. **Low time required (Score - 4)** Voters could allocate their points mostly how they want to up until they hit the limits on each proposal. Voters who were going to consolidate their votes might need to spend some more time than they were intending to so they can identify other proposals that they might want to vote for. **Moderate game theory risks (Score - 3)** Bad actors could create multiple proposals to better utilise their own points by allocating them across these submitted proposals. Voters that consolidate their points on proposals will utilise their entire voting power and not give bad actors any increased amount of influence over the decision outcome. If voters distribute their points more broadly across many proposals and don’t allocate points up to the maximum threshold there is a risk this behaviour could reduce the voters influence over the decision outcome. Points that are spread too thin across multiple proposals could give bad actors an increased influence on decisions as they can always consolidate their points on their proposals up to the maximum cap to generate the most impact. If voters do generally allocate points up to the limit on most proposals the bad actors would not get any added influence over the decision outcome. Consolidation of points is not a concerning voting behaviour with this approach, spreading points too thinly is the main concern as bad actors could look to consolidate their points as much as possible. **Total score = 14/20** # Points allocation factors for consideration Listing the different factors that will be considered for each maximum proposal allocation approach The [methodology](https://docs.treasuries.io/analysis/approach-comparison-methodology) used for this approach comparison is documented separately. **Accuracy & expressiveness** * **Description** - Decisions need to have accurate outcomes and voters want to be able to express their exact opinions and preferences. * **Importance score** - 5, Very important. A loss in expressiveness and accuracy can lead to decision outcomes that do not fairly represent the preferences and opinions of the voters. Poor voting approaches could also prevent important information from being shared that could better inform future decision making. * **Scoring questions -** How does the points allocation approach impact how voters are able to express their exact preferences and opinions? What accuracy in outcome could this lead to? * **Scoring** - High accuracy & expressiveness is good (Score - 5). Low accuracy and expressiveness is bad (Score - 1). **Voting complexity** * **Description** - The number of points a voter has to allocate can influence the complexity of the voting process. * **Importance score** - 5, Very important. Increases in voting complexity could lead to a reduction in participation. Voters might not have enough capacity to vote on many proposals if the complexity is too high. * **Scoring questions -** How complex is it for a voter to make a decision with the points allocation approach? Does the decision complexity change as the number of points to allocate increase or decrease? * **Scoring** - Low complexity is good (Score - 5). High complexity is bad (Score - 1). **Time required to participate** * **Description** - The number of points a voter has to allocate could influence how long it takes for a voter to become familiar with a voting process and also how long it takes them to vote in each decision. * **Importance score** - 5, Very important. Reducing the time required to participate in voting will be very important for maximising the amount of people that can feasibly participate due to their own time constraints. The larger the number of voters there are, the more important this factor becomes. * **Scoring questions -** How long would it take for someone to participate and allocate their points in a decision? What happens if there are many decisions that use this approach? * **Scoring** - Low time required is good (Score - 5). High time required is bad (Score - 1). **Game theory risks** * **Description** - Voters could use their allocated points in a way that gives bad actors an advantage in the voting process. The differences in how people vote could create opportunities for bad actors to gain an advantage in the decision process. * **Importance score** - 5, Very important. Making a robust voting process at scale will need to think about how it can prevent bad actors from abusing the voting process due to how they can allocate their points when voting and how they can take advantage of people's voting behaviours. * **Scoring questions -** How could bad actors take advantage of the voting process based on how different voters may behave? Could bad actors be given an advantage if people vote in a certain way? * **Scoring** - Low risk is good (Score - 5). High risk is bad (Score - 1). # Voting power per decision Voting power based points allocation approach
**Overview** Each person's voting power would determine the amount of points they receive to allocate. **Moderate accuracy & expressiveness (Score - 3)** Some voters could be restricted in how they can express their preferences if the number of points is determined based off someone's voting power. Some voters could have far less voting power than others. One benefit of this approach is the simplicity for finding out how much influence a voter has over a decision based on the amount of points, equivalent to their voting power, they have to allocate. If a voter had a small amount of voting power they might not be able to split their points across multiple proposals, where as someone with a large amount of voting power points could be far more expressive with how they allocate their points across many proposals. A disparity in voting power could be problematic for decreasing some voters ability to express their preferences in enough detail compared to the voters who have more voting power. **High voting complexity (Score - 2)** The main issue with the voting power determined points allocation approach is the experience would be different for each voter as each voter would likely have a different amount of voting power. Voting power can also change over time so someone's own personal voting experience would also be changing as their voting power changes. This can add some complexity to the voting process as the voter now needs to recalibrate how they allocate their points in each decision based on what their voting power is at that given point in time. **Moderate voting time required (Score - 3)** Someone with very little voting power would need less time to allocate their points as they wouldn’t have as many points to allocate. Someone who has a very large amount of voting power may need to spend a larger amount of time considering exactly how they want to distribute their points. A very large number of points to allocate means the voter would have a lot of influence and also could be more precise and expressive about how they want to allocate those points. The time required to vote would vary and likely increase on average as the number of points someone is allocating is increased. It should be noted that the voters with the largest voting power could decide to over allocate to a small number of their own preferences in a short period of time and not spend a lot of time considering the other options in much depth! **Moderate game theory risks (Score - 3)** If this approach adopts a fixed maximum allocation approach it would mean that the consolidation of voting power across a number of proposals would not give bad actors an increased influence. Bad actors could benefit from voting behaviours where voters dilute their voting power by allocating their points across more proposals than there are fillable positions. Not allocating points up to the maximum limit could mean bad actors get an advantage by always consolidating their voting power on their own proposals to increase their influence over the decision. **Total score = 11 / 20** # Number of proposals multiple points per decision Number of proposals based points allocation approach
**Overview** The number of proposals would be multiplied by a number of points per proposal, such as 10 or 100. This would result in the total points that each voter is allocated. **Very high accuracy & expressiveness (Score - 5)** The number of proposals based approach would mean that each voter would get the same number of points to allocate. Having a large number of points could be effective for giving voters a more expressive way to allocate their voting power across a wide range of proposals. There would always be enough points to allocate as the number of points would increase as the number of proposals increase. Although this is a highly expressive approach it does not mean it is necessarily more effective as it could give voters many more points than are necessary to express their preferences. **High voting complexity (Score - 2)** The number of proposals could vary significantly from one decision to another. This is problematic as it would mean that the voting experience could be quite different each time due to the different amount of points a voter has to allocate in each decision. One benefit of this approach is that each voter would receive the same voting experience in a given decision, however the main complexity is that each decision would likely have a different amount of points to allocate. **High voting time required (Score - 2)** The number of proposals that get submitted for each decision could vary drastically over time. This could increase the amount of time it takes for every voter to participate as they might end up having a very large number of points to allocate. The number of points would also likely change each time they participate in a decision which could increase the time it takes for a voter to make an informed decision. To speed up their own participation, voters might decide to allocate their points very quickly without much consideration about the exact weighting they are allocating to each proposal or they might simply give a similar weighting to the proposals they prefer. **Moderate game theory risks (Score - 3)** If this approach adopts a fixed maximum allocation approach it would mean that the consolidation of voting power across a number of proposals would not give bad actors an increased influence. Bad actors could benefit from voting behaviours where voters dilute their voting power by allocating their points across more proposals than there are fillable positions. Not allocating points up to the maximum limit could mean bad actors get an advantage by always consolidating their voting power on their own proposals to increase their influence over the decision. **Total score = 12 / 20** # Available positions single points per decision Available positions using single points based points allocation approach
**Overview** The number of positions that can be filled determines the total amount of points that each voter gets to allocate. Each available position would result in a single point to allocate. In many funding decisions a rough estimation of the available positions would be required as each proposal could request a different amount of funding. In these situations the total budget could be divided by the average requested budget to get an estimation of the available positions. **Low accuracy & expressiveness (Score - 2)** Voters would not be able to easily express their exact preferences as they would only be able to allocate one point to indicate that they approve a proposal. The intensity of their preference would not be captured with this approach and they also might have other proposals that they equally prefer that they cannot select due to the limited number of points they can allocate. Compared to the other approaches that use multiple point allocations this approach is one of the worst for being expressive but the limited number of points can help with encouraging comparison between proposals which could increase the accuracy of the outcome. Each voter would be treated equally and would have the same voting experience in each decision. **Low voting complexity (Score - 4)** The complexity is relatively low due to the limited number of points a voter needs to allocate. The main complexity is determining which proposals will fit into the voters approval list. This could be difficult in situations where there are many proposals that a voter would like to approve but are prevented from expressing this due to the limited number of points they have to allocate. **Very low voting time required (Score - 5)** A larger number of positions would increase the amount of time it takes to vote however this approach should result in the minimum amount of votes being needed to make a decision so this approach could be one of the most effective for reducing the voting time required. Voters also only need to allocate a single point and don’t need to indicate the intensity of their preferences using multiple points. **Very low game theory risks (Score - 5)** Bad actors would not get any added benefit from diluted voting power as this would not be possible if every voter was using their full voting power when they allocate their available points. The amount of voting power they allocate would also always be a constant regardless of whether they allocate to one or many proposals as each point would either represent their full voting power or a proportional amount of their voting power. Even if a voter didn’t use all of their voting power they would have used the maximum they could have used on the proposals they did approve. **Total score = 16 / 20** # Available positions multiple points per decision Available positions using multiple points based points allocation approach
**Overview** The number of positions that can be filled multiplied by a number of points, such as 10 or 100, will determine the amount of points each voter receives to allocate. This allocation approach gives voters a larger amount of expressiveness to decide how they want to allocate their points. In many funding decisions a rough estimation of the available positions would be required as each proposal could request a different amount of funding. In these situations the total budget could be divided by the average requested budget to get an estimation of the available positions. **High accuracy & expressiveness (Score - 4)** Having multiple points per available position can be effective for enabling voters to express the intensity of their preferences. Having a limited number of points based on the number of available positions could also potentially help with increasing accuracy of the decision outcome. If voters dilute their points across too many proposals this could reduce the accuracy of the decision as voters are not being forced to select and consolidate their points across the most important proposals. Multiple points per proposal would give voters much more flexibility in how they allocate their points across many proposals. **Moderate voting complexity (Score - 3)** The complexity would be slightly higher than a single point allocation approach for available positions as now the voters need to be concerned about the intensity of the preference they are expressing when allocating their points to each proposal. A benefit of this approach is that voters would receive the same voting experience in each decision. **Low voting time required (Score - 4)** The voting time would be slightly more than the single points approach for available positions as voters would need to spend more time thinking about how they want to allocate a larger number of points across the same proposals. More time and thought could likely be needed to decide how they want to allocate their points. **Moderate game theory risks (Score - 3)** This approach is using a fixed maximum allocation approach which means that the consolidation of voting power across a number of proposals would not give bad actors an increased influence if voters are also allocating the maximum points on their preferred proposals. Bad actors could benefit from voting behaviour where voters dilute their voting power by allocating their points across more proposals than there are fillable positions. Not allocating points up to the maximum limit would mean increasing the effectiveness of bad actors consolidating their voting power on their own proposals to better influence the decision outcome. **Total score = 14 / 20** # Multiple points per decision Multiple points per decision based points allocation approach
**Overview** Everyone is given the same number of points to allocate. The points allocation is a single fixed number. It is not based on any information about the voter, their voting power or any other part of the decision. Some example points allocations could be 10 points, 100 points or 500 points. **High accuracy & expressiveness (Score - 4)** A multiple points per decision approach would mean that each voter gets the same number of points to allocate in every decision. A large number of points could be effective at giving voters a highly expressive way to allocate their voting power across a wide range of proposals. The main problem with this approach is that the number of fillable positions can change in each decision. For decisions that have a large number of fillable positions the number of points that a voter receives to allocate might not be sufficient to enable voters to express their preferences. **Moderate voting complexity (Score - 3)** The voting process would be the same for every decision which helps to reduce the complexity for voters and make it easier to learn and use this approach repeatedly. The main complexity with this approach is the number of proposals submitted could change drastically between decisions. In these situations it might be more challenging to allocate the same number of points across a changing amount of proposals each time. **Moderate voting time required (Score - 3)** Voters would become familiar with the number of points to allocate, however for each decision they would need to compare the proposals to make a decision on how to allocate a single set of points between them. They would need to consider how many proposals they are going to approve and how they intend to split the points between the proposals they are going to approve. **Moderate game theory risks (Score - 3)** Bad actors could benefit from voting behaviour where voters dilute their voting power by allocating their points across more proposals than there are fillable positions. This behaviour can help to increase the intensity of the bad actors' voting power on influencing the decision outcome as they could benefit from using all of their full voting power on their own proposals. **Total score = 13 / 20** # Multiple points per proposal Multiple points per proposal based points allocation approach
**Overview** Everyone is given the same number of points to allocate to each proposal. The points allocation is a single fixed number. It is not based on the information about the voter, their voting power or any other part of the proposals or decision. Example points allocations could be 5 points, 10 points or 100 points. **High accuracy & expressiveness (Score - 4)** Having multiple points means voters will be able to express the intensity of their preferences. All voters will also get the same experience. The lower the number the less the expressiveness but the lower the complexity. The main concern with this approach is that it could reduce accuracy outcomes as the voter is not required to compare proposals to decide how they want to allocate their points. They could allocate the full amount of points on each and every proposal. This is good for expressiveness but could come at the cost of reducing accuracy in selecting the most promising proposals. **Low voting complexity (Score - 4)** The voting process would be the same for every decision and for every vote meaning this approach is easy to learn and use repeatedly. Having larger numbers would slightly increase the complexity of allocating the points however not by a large amount. **Low voting time required (Score - 4)** Voters would become familiar with the number of points they can allocate so this would help with reducing the time it takes for voters to participate in each decision. **Moderate game theory risks (Score - 3)** Bad actors could benefit from voting behaviour where voters dilute their voting power by only using some of their allocated points on a proposal rather than their full voting power. This behaviour could help to increase the voting power of bad actors as they can benefit from always using their full voting power on any of their proposals. **Total score = 15 / 20** # Single point per proposal Single point per proposal based points allocation approach
**Overview** Everyone is given a single point they can allocate per proposal. This will often represent their entire voting power that they can use on any proposal decision. **Low accuracy & expressiveness (Score - 2)** Voters would be able to vote on any of the proposals that they prefer and allocate a point towards them. This gives the voter some expressiveness to indicate which proposals they prefer but does not enable them to express the intensity of their preferences. The other concern with this approach is around the accuracy of the outcome as it doesn’t force the voter to select the most important proposals. Instead voters could simply decide to approve every proposal that they want to. **Very low voting complexity (Score - 5)** The voting process would be the same for every single decision which makes the voting process simple. Only having one point to allocate means the voting process remains simple. Every voter would get the same experience within a given decision and with any future decisions. **Very low voting time required (Score - 5)** There is only one point to allocate and voters would become familiar with the approach. This approach would keep the time required to participate to a minimum. **Very low game theory risks (Score - 5)** Bad actors would not get any benefit from diluted voting power as every voter would apply the full voting power on each proposal they approve. Certain voting behaviour would not give these bad actors more influence over others beyond the influence of their own voting power. **Total score = 17 / 20** # Applying the score voting examples to these approaches Applying the score voting approaches to the example score voting systems Four different parts of score voting have been compared with the different approaches that existed for that part. These comparisons focused on: * Points allocation approaches * Maximum proposal allocation approaches - These maximum proposal allocation approaches are only relevant to the points per decision points allocation approaches. * Voting option approaches * Victory condition approaches These different approaches for score voting can be mixed and matched to create the different [example score voting approaches](/approaches/voting-approaches/score-voting) that were listed in the voting approaches analysis. The score voting approach examples adopt the following approaches:
NamePoints allocation approachMaximum proposal allocation approachVoting option approachVictory condition approachNotes
Approval VotingSingle point per proposalNo maximum allocationApproval option onlyTotal score
Disapproval VotingSingle point per proposalNo maximum allocationDisapproval option onlyTotal score
Balanced Approval VotingSingle point per proposalNot applicableApproval & disapproval optionsTotal scoreApproval scores minus disapproval scores generates the total score
Score VotingMultiple points per proposalNot applicableApproval option onlyTotal score
Majority JudgementMultiple points per proposalNo maximum allocationApproval option onlyMedian scoreExample voting options of Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor, Very Poor would be a 5 point system that names each option on the voting interface.
Spend VotingMultiple points per decisionNot applicableApproval option onlyTotal score
Average VotingMultiple points per proposalNot applicableApproval option onlyAverage score
Median VotingMultiple points per proposalNot applicableApproval option onlyMedian score
Cumulative VotingAvailable positions single points per decisionNo maximum allocationApproval option onlyTotal score
Quadratic VotingMultiple points per decisionQuadratic allocationApproval option onlyTotal scoreThe cost of each additional vote for a proposal increases quadratically. This makes it less effective to consolidate points in one proposal.
Conviction VotingMultiple points per decisionNo maximum allocationApproval option onlyTotal scoreThe duration of time that points have been allocated to a proposal will influence the final score they receive.
Weighted VotingMultiple points per decisionNo maximum allocationApproval option onlyTotal scoreVoting power is influenced by things like share options which gives larger shareholders more voting power in a decision.
STAR VotingMultiple points per proposalNot applicableApproval option onlyTotal scoreThis approach also adds an automatic runoff process as well.
# Voting approach improvement ideas Exploring how the suggested score voting approach could be improved The suggested approaches that emerged from the score voting approaches comparisons could be improved by adding in a way for voters to indicate a dissenting opinion and also to improve the expressiveness of approval voting. ## **Decision disapproval voting option** Enabling voters to disapprove each proposal with voting power is problematic for per proposal scoring approaches as bad actors would simply disapprove all competing proposals. This can give bad actors an edge over normal voting behaviour. Due to this it makes sense to not attach disapproval voting power to each proposal due to these game theory risks. An alternative way that voting power could be attached to a dissenting vote is by using a decision disapproval option. If a voter disapproves of the decision or most or all of the proposals they could decide to disapprove the entire decision instead of approving any of them. This could be useful in situations where the voter disagrees with the relevance or importance of the decision in the first place or when they believe the quality of proposals submitted is not high enough. These are both valid reasons why voters might prefer that a decision is abandoned entirely. An ecosystem could then choose to either abandon the decision if it gets disapproved or they could decide to carry out another vote again in the future once the submitted proposal quality has improved. The threshold for a decision disapproval option to succeed could be that the largest amount of voting power needs to agree with the disapproval when compared to the voting power applied to other proposals. Alternatively the threshold could also be higher by requiring it to reach an over 50% majority or another percentage value. **Minimal game theory risks** The main advantage of this suggested decision disapproval option is that bad actors would have to disapprove their own proposals if they wanted to vote with a dissenting opinion. The disapproval of all proposals would only succeed if a certain threshold of voting power has agreed with this outcome. Bad actors could try to dissent all decisions to just be malicious however they could also do this type of behaviour by voting on poor proposals to be malicious. The benefit of adding a decision disapproval option is it shouldn’t directly give bad actors any more wealth or influence over the network in these decisions that do get disapproved. ## **Expressive voting** **Adding a disapproval option** The main problem with adding a disapproval option with a per proposal points allocation approach is that bad actors can disapprove every proposal that isn’t their own. This gives them a voting power edge as they get to use it both positively for their own proposals and negatively towards everyone else. The disapproval voting option could be added as a voting option however the disapprove option could have no impact on the final decision outcome. This turns the disapprove option into an informational tool for voters to express their disapproval of a proposal. This would make the voting process more expressive for voters as now they can share their dissenting views on a proposal that other voters can take into account in future decisions when the decision results are released.
**Approval & disapproval confidence variants** Another problem with the initially suggested 1 point per proposal approach is it lacks expressiveness for voters to share the intensity of their preferences. One way this could be resolved is by giving voters some more confidence variants that they can choose from. These alternative options would generate the same outcome in terms of the amount of voting power that someone is applying to a proposal. The key difference is that the voter can express the level of confidence they have in their decision. For example an approval option could be split into three options such as “Strongly Approve”, “Approve” and “Somewhat Approve”. Selecting any of these options would mean a voter is applying their full voting power to approve that proposal. This could also be applied to the disapproval option mentioned above and result in “Somewhat Disapproval”, “Disapprove” and “Strongly Disapprove” options. Alternatively you could also just have a two variant option such as “Approve” and “Strongly Approve”.
**Optional feedback options** Another way that the voting process could become even more expressive beyond adding approval and disapproval voting options and confidence variants is to capture more feedback from the voters. This feedback would be entirely optional. After a voter has approved or disapproved a proposal they could also optionally express some rationale as to why they made that decision. Not every voter will be interested in giving this feedback however for the ones that are interested in doing so this could generate highly insightful information. Some common approval based feedback examples could include: * High Impact Potential * Good Value For Money * Strong Supporting Evidence * Strong Expertise * Detailed Information Some disapproval options that a voter could select include: * Limited Impact Potential * Too Expensive * Weak Supporting Evidence * Lack Of Expertise * Limited information * Overly complex * Infeasible * High Risk Each decision should consider what its own set of common reasons should be that might be relevant for why a voter decides to vote one way or the other. Listing these out can make it quick and easy for voters to express their opinions when casting their vote. This type of information could be highly valuable to proposers as they could then more easily identify areas for improvement and reasons why other proposals might have been more successful. Another additional feature which could be useful is if voters could share their own specific feedback in a text box by using another option such as “Other”.
**Reducing negative information game theory risks** Adding a disapproval option that doesn’t impact the decision outcome can be an effective way to prevent the negative influence of bad actors always disapproving the competing proposals. Even with the voting power removed, bad actors might still decide to use the disapproval option to try and make proposals look bad in the results. They might do this to try and reduce the chance that similar proposals get selected in future decisions. One way this problem could be reduced is by making voting behaviours public without revealing the voting power or wallet addresses that made those votes. If an ecosystem is able to see that a voter has approved one proposal and disapproved all the other proposals there would be an immediate reason to be suspicious of this voter. These voting behaviours are more clearly trying to make other proposals look bad in the decision outcome data. Making this data public would make it much easier to identify trends in how people are using the disapproval voting option and which voters might be being more malicious rather than constructive. This could help with making it more difficult for bad actors to disapprove many proposals in a single decision without revealing that their anonymous voting behaviour was not done in a supportive and constructive manner. One main concern with this suggestion is thinking about how many voters might be needed to ensure that the privacy of voters is respected. People might be able to apply logical deduction to try and work out who is voting in a certain way if there weren't enough other voters. The larger the number of voters the less this factor should be an issue due to the larger number and variations of voting behaviour that should emerge from the decision data. # Expressive approval voting with decision disapprovals Outlining some suggested voting approaches that could be effective for Web3 ecosystems
**Expressive approval voting with decision disapprovals** Approval voting can be used for single selection decisions where one proposal can be approved and for multiple selection decisions where multiple proposals can be approved in a single decision. Approval voting can be extended to become expressive by introducing the disapproval option that is only informational and would not impact the decision outcome. Confidence variants can also be added to both approval and disapproval options so voters can indicate how confident they are with their decisions. A decision disapproval voting option could also be added for situations where voters disagree with some or all of the proposals in a decision and would prefer that the decision is abandoned or revisited in the future. **Advantages of these voting approach suggestions** * **Simple and quick for voters** - Binary voting and approval voting are very simple and quick for voters. This makes these approaches very suitable for large scale voting systems that want to handle a large number of voters. * **High voter expressiveness** - Improving upon binary voting and approval voting by making them more expressive helps to make the decision process more informative and insightful. Voter preferences and opinions can be captured more effectively and quickly with this suggested approach and the data can help with improving the proposal quality and the ecosystems decision making ability over the long term. * **Robust at scale** - Different voting behaviours would not give bad actors an added advantage with these suggested voting approaches. These suggested approaches would be robust and resilient at scale and could handle a large population of voters. * **Universal voting solution** - The same voting option structure that has both approval and disapproval options with confidence variants can be used for nearly every decision that is made in a Web3 ecosystem. These suggested voting options work for binary decisions, single selection decisions and multiple selection decisions. A simple and universal solution can help with making it easier and quicker for voters to learn and participate in any voting decision being made across an ecosystem. * **Custom voting experience** - The suggestion for making binary voting and approval voting more expressive is not one that needs to be forced upon the voters. The voter could be given either a simple voting experience or an expressive voting experience depending on their own preferences. A simple version could have an approval and disapproval option on every proposal and for every decision type. The more expressive version would enable voters to indicate the level of confidence they have in their approval and disapproval decisions and also enable them to provide more general feedback. Using a simple toggle setting could enable voters to decide themselves which voting experience they want to have. Some voters might prefer to vote as quickly and efficiently as possible with a simple voting setup. Other voters might prefer to express confidence in their decisions and provide more feedback. **Expressive binary voting** The suggested score voting approach is to allocate 1 point per proposal that voters can then use when approving a proposal. If the decision was a binary decision that had a single proposal with a yes or no outcome a single point allocation approach would simply mean that it is actually a binary voting system and not a score voting one. Expressive binary voting could be used alongside expressive approval voting to cover any binary voting decisions. Expressive approval voting helps to cover both single and multiple option selection decisions. The main difference between expressive binary voting and expressive approval voting is that the disapproval voting options would be counted towards the final decision with binary voting. Voting power is always applied to both approval and disapproval options with binary voting. Expressive approval voting would only apply the approval voting power to determine a final outcome. # Voting delegation Overview covering why governance systems need to implement functionality for voter delegation and some approaches that are worth considering Voting delegation will be an important part of making a good voting system that can cater to the needs and preferences of every voter. ## **Why voting delegation is inevitable** In an ideal world everyone would be willing to participate in every governance decision that impacts their daily lives. In practice, we rarely see this when you look at voter participation statistics. Many people don’t even participate in politician selection decisions that happen every few years. Some people might rather spend their time elsewhere, some might not agree with the voting system itself and others might prefer to let someone else handle this responsibility. You cannot force a large population of people to all participate and make their own decision. A voter is always able to copy a voting decision from another person. Even if the person was monitored to check they voted themselves this does not mean they are not copying the decision that someone else has made. You cannot prevent people from interacting with other people prior to a governance decision, which also means you can’t prevent them from copying other people's decision choices. A Web3 ecosystem should implement voting functionality that allows anyone to delegate their voting power to other people. By doing this on the network itself there is a huge opportunity to properly understand the voting behaviours of the users in that ecosystem. If this functionality was not built on-chain it would be more difficult to know whether people are voting with their own opinion or if they are adopting another person's choices. Data about voting delegation could be highly insightful for understanding the governance process. For instance, delegation data would help with understanding what percentage of voting power is being delegated across each type of decision. ## Why flexible delegation implementations are inevitable A Web3 network cannot easily prevent people from building systems on top of the network that enable voting behaviour that was not originally intended. As an example, if a Web3 network does not implement weighted voting delegation a wallet solution could be created that splits up someone’s assets across multiple wallets so they can allocate the exact amount of voting power they want to a given voting option. This also extends to the number of people that they delegate to. If someone wanted to delegate to three people but the network only allowed them to delegate to one person the solution would be to manage multiple wallets that each have the amount of weighting that the person wants to delegate to each person. Wrapped wallet solutions could make it effortless to manage multiple network wallets in a single abstracted wallet experience. Web3 ecosystems benefit from just making it easier for people to delegate their voting power exactly how they want to, whether that’s to one person, an organisation or to multiple people. Flexible implementations for voter delegation should mean that valuable data sources are created for understanding the governance system and how it is being used. On-chain data can help with showing exactly how people are actually participating in governance decisions. It might be the case that people like to split their voting power across multiple people for the same decision. Alternatively, it could be popular to delegate voting power to one person or a group for each decision instead. In any scenario, the easier it is to see how people are actually voting the easier it becomes to understand overall voter participation and usage patterns. ## Multiple voter delegation approaches The simplest approach to implement voter delegation is to let someone delegate their entire voting power to someone else. The problem with this approach is it doesn’t give the voter much control over how they can participate and also delegate their voting power. They might want to vote on a few decisions themselves and then enable another person to vote on a handful of other decisions. They also might want to leave the rest of the decisions to another friend they trust. Voters benefit from having the flexibility to delegate their voting power exactly as they want to. **Priority ranked delegation** A voter may want to delegate their voting power based on a priority ranked order. For instance, they could delegate their voting power to two different people but they might prefer the opinions of one person over the other. Priority ordered delegation could mean that the voting choice from the top priority person would be used. If the top priority person didn’t vote it would then go to the next person down the priority list and so on. Someone's own votes would likely be priority ranked by default. Imagine a situation where someone delegates their voting power to another person. For the most part they might agree with the decisions that this other person is making - and this is why they delegated to them. However in certain situations they might have their own opinion which differs from the person they delegated to. In this situation it is beneficial for the voter to be able to cast their own vote and for that vote to take priority over the other persons vote that they delegated to. This is useful as it means the voter only needs to intervene and participate in the governance process when their own opinion differs from the person they have delegated to. **Percentage weighted delegation** Voting power could be split and delegated across multiple people. For example, someone may want to delegate a large percentage to one person and a small percentage to multiple other people. Or it might be any other combination of weightings they prefer. Percentage weighted delegation is one approach that could help with preventing people from receiving too much voting power as now people can easily distribute their voting power across a wide range of people that they trust and agree with. If someone doesn’t vote on a decision the voting power they would have received could be split across the others that did based on the proportional amount of voting power they received from the voter. This could be an effective solution for ensuring that someone's voting power is always fully utilised. **Averaged outcome delegation** Voting power could be applied based on the averaged outcome from the people that someone has delegated to. If someone delegated to three different people the outcome from the delegation could be an average of the voting options that were selected. So if two people voted on option A and one person voted on option B the outcome would be that the entire voting power would be applied to option A - this would represent the averaged outcome from the people they delegated to. The problems with an averaged outcome delegation approach is it requires the voter to delegate to an odd number of people. It also can be problematic for multiple voting option decisions as even with an odd number of voters the outcome might not result in a majority consensus. Percentage weight delegation is preferable for many scenarios as it doesn’t have this problem. ## Decision categorisation approaches An important part of making a good voting delegation system is to ensure that people can delegate their voting power exactly as they want to. So a voting system will benefit from ensuring that people's ability to delegate to other people is as precise and granular as possible. **Defined decision types** One of the main responsibilities for the network in regards to voter delegation is to ensure that decisions are well defined. A common way this is done in programming is with the use of an enum which means a constant value is assigned to the same types of decision. If each governance decision has a defined type it should then be possible to give voters full control of delegating their voting power based on each of these decision types. Decision types should help to maximise the control and flexibility that voters have when delegating their voting power. **Single tier decision groupings** If each decision has a defined decision type it then becomes easier for those decision types to then be grouped together under different headings. For instance there might be a number of decisions that are related to monetary policy. Someone could then make a list of these decision types under that heading and people could use that grouping when delegating their voting power to someone. The functionality for creating and managing these groupings doesn’t need to be handled by the network itself. Instead wallets could let people make their own groupings or let them use other peoples groupings when delegating their voting power. This approach gives the community full control in how they delegate their voting power in a way that is quick and efficient for each person based on their own preferences on how to group the governance decisions together. As long as decision types are well defined a large number of different possible groupings could then be defined. These groupings should help people with delegating their voting power more quickly rather than needing to select which decisions to delegate to each person manually. **Multiple tier decision groupings** Multiple tier decision groupings would be an extension of single tier groupings. For example, there might be a larger tier grouping of funding process decisions and then a smaller tier grouping for contributor selection decisions. Some groupings could represent a subset of a larger decision grouping. Using multiple tier groupings can help to further increase the speed in which people can delegate their voting power in the exact way they prefer.