Some time ago I was at a workshop and we did a very interesting test there. The background of it was a Swiss plebiscite of 2013. The Swiss had introduced a minimum wage and people also wished to limit the maximum wage. In polls there was a 2/3 majority for that but the following plebiscite failed nevertheless. Why? Because you could only vote for or against a 1:12 relation of minimum and maximum wage. Some people who voted no wanted it to be lower, some wanted it to be higher or non-existent. So although the majority of the people wanted to have a maximum wage, it didn’t come at all.
In our workshop we did a experiment to vote on exactly this topic but in a different way: Instead of having only one choice for voting, we had a bunch of different possibilities starting from 1:2 over 1:10, 1:100 to no limit at all. You could vote AGAINST(!!!) each of these proposals. Two votes, if you didn’t like the proposal at all, one vote if you were not completely happy with it and zero votes if the proposal was fine for you.
The result was a curve over the different proposals with a minimum at 1:20 meaning that this result had the least resistance in the auditorium. The extremes had no chance to prevail or to unitedly kill the moderate proposals.
And what’s even more surprising: After that test vote we were shown examples from former test votes all over the world and the result was always very similar. Sometimes 1:10 won, sometimes 1:20 but never 1:3 or 1:1000
I was very moved by this experience and I’m convinced that our democratic rules have quite some room to be improved. Im Cardano we have the chance to start right from the beginning and I think that examples like the voting system I described could be a way to go. For sure everything has to be tested carefully before implementing into Cardano but there are much more possibilities to come to sound solutions than we think of usually.
What do you think about that, what are your opinions?