You can do something similar with voting "credits" instead of cash, everyone gets 100 and they can use them to vote on the things they want

I've done this to help elicit requirements from stakeholders and it works really well

This is really interesting. I do fear it'll cause exhaustion techniques.

This may not happen in isolated experiments, but if you build a political system on that concept, let it run for decades, in a world where a political decision can shift tens of billions of dollars (e.g. a fiscal change for banks, an environmental law for the dairy industry, etc), you'll see the system get gamed.

e.g. say I propose 100 bs bills to repeal gay marriage and abortion rights. I expect to lose, but opponents expend all their credits. Then I propose a law banning muslims and mexicans and put all my credits behind it. The end result is they get to keep what they had, status quo, and I get to pass something ridiculous.

Of course it works both ways, but my point is that you're creating a system where volume of bills is a strategy. And strategic, efficient use of credits, starts to matter. Such that I may choose NOT to vote for something I care about, because that credit has a premium on an even more important bill I fear might be proposed, which I absolutely have to put my weight behind. And an incentive not to vote doesn't sound like a system we should work towards.

At the end of the day, making something scarce like you propose does two things; 1) it makes things more efficient and meaningful, you don't play around with scarce things. That's great. But 2) It puts a cap on it, it's limited in amount, and in the context of exercising your vote, voicing your opinion, that's probably not something we should cap for people.

We already have this with financing campaigns (credits being money, which is both scarce and to some extent capped for campaign contributions), but I don't think it's ultimately (although super interesting) the right thing to do for the actual act of voting.

Definitely interesting.

The particular strategy that you propose for gaming the system assumes that voting events are scattered throughout a term (I assume there is some period or term after which everyone's 100 votes are replenished?) rather than all being on the same day. If this is the case then another problem is the privacy issue that arises when the state has to track how many votes each citizen has left.

Both problems are solved if there is a single event each term, where you get a single ballot containing all the questions for that term and get to fill in at most N bubbles on the ballot, with zero or more for each question.

Such a system probably still has undesirable properties, though I'm struggling to contrive a good example of one at the moment.

Or 50 bills to repeal health care regulations.

I think the idea that you should be able to vote on an issue according to how much you care about it tries to fend off one problem (uninformed people vote carelessly) but creates many more. For example: How should I know in advance how important an issue will be to me in comparison to votes that nobody even thinks about right now? And is somebody who is really angry about immigration into their country really going to investigate the problem thoroughly (because they "care so much") or simply voting based on their gut?

From my perspective there are so many problems with referendums that it might not be possible to find a solution at all. They have become a way to destabilize the current government although those are the elected officials. And still, in a general election there would probably be a support for the established parties in Britain. This shows to me an unsolvable discrepancy between referendums and elections.

"You could also make the counterargument that older voters are wiser and have more experience and can make more sound decisions about the future of their country and should therefore have a heavier influence."

Proven to be false with the result of this vote.

> I personally think you should be able to vote on an issue in proportion to how much you care about it

You already are. Care enough and you can join grass roots movements who are trying to influence the population to vote a certain way. Afaik, the Brexiters were a grass root campaign and they managed to multiply their votes by convincing the public to vote to leave.

That would just give more influence to people with more money. We have enough of that as it is and I don't think it's a good thing.

And as a counterargument to older people being wiser older people tend to get very nostalgic about the old day and selectively remembering only the good things so I wouldn't trust the judgement of a random older person more.

> You could also make the counterargument that older voters are wiser and have more experience and can make more sound decisions about the future of their country and should therefore have a heavier influence.

Yes, but it's a different argument for a different system or principle.

i.e., the democratic principle is that one can influence the governance of oneself, whether directly or indirectly, you vote on the governance of the society you live in. Rule of the people.

In line with that principle is his suggestion to weight vote by age. i.e., as a proxy for the duration or degree to which you'll live in said society under any given proposed policy, is heavier for young people than old people, simply because young people live longer in these societies under these policies, on average. Such that these people who live 'more' under this policy, could be argued to deserve a bigger influence. In the same way that I as a European can't and shouldn't be able to vote on US domestic policy because I don't live there, and in the same way there've been (pipedream) ideas for the world to receive a minor vote in US (foreign) policy, because they're subjected to it so much. It's all in line with democratic principles.

Your argument is a valid one, too, but it's linked on another principle, a more technocratic one i.e. those who are educated ought to govern. That's not a very democratic principle (although I'm not ruling it out on that basis, democracy is imo the least worst system, not a system to be blindly put on a permanent pedestal).

By and large I think people tend to favour the former (democratic) over the latter (technocratic) principle. And within that context, a minor degree of age-weighing makes some sense, on paper.

In practice it's hard to execute, easy to abuse, and merely captures a democratic proxy. i.e. you don't get to weigh in young people who die early, who migrate, and if you do weigh things, how much would young people get a bonus for, 5%? 10%? It becomes an impossible political game that I don't think makes sense in the real world, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Paying for votes I think is a terrible idea by the way. About making the proportion of caring matter, I think you may realise there's already something basic like that, which is deciding whether to vote or not in the first place. We've seen time and time again, votes going differently from the polls, because people who got approached on the phone had an opinion but couldn't care enough to exercise it with effort by voting.