The ones winner-takes-all systems are widely criticised for for decades? That your vote is probably always for the bin if you are a Republican in San Francisco or New York or if you are a Democrat in rural Texas?
On the one hand, one might argue that voting power by ADA, by skin in the game is a good thing, that there is no reason why someone with just a couple of ADA should have the same power as someone who has the risk of losing value on millions of ADA, that it would be too easy for malevolent actors to just buy into having voting rights on Cardano with 10 ADA.
On the other hand, yes, if you want to have something in the direction of “one person, one vote”, you need identity. And KYC or digital identities is not even enough. It’s ridiculously easy to create hundreds of digital identities and still possible to KYC lots of accounts. You need to somehow ensure that one person can only activate one voting account, you need uniqueness, you need enough information to rule out multiple registrations per person. And that is a lot of information.
One person, one vote is probably not possible in a decentralised manner at all.
It’ just a constant factor of 1/saturation. It doesn’t matter at all if you say all pools have as many votes as ADA delegated to them (millions each) or if you say they all have delegated ADA divided by saturation (at most one each).
Voters with smaller bags also only get an even more tiny fraction of one vote in your system and are, of course, also affected by the pool they are voting in only getting a fractional vote if it is not saturated, but they at least have hundreds or thousands (just not millions like the whales) of votes in a direct vote by ADA.
Simplified example:
Popular vote by ADA would be: 99 million yes, 97 million no
Yes wins with 50.5 % of the votes.
Now, your “pool electoral college” is used with 5 pools:
Pool 1: 50 million yes, 20 million no, 70 million of 70 million saturation, 1,0 votes yes
Pool 2: 26 million yes, 2 million no, 28 million of 70 million saturation, 0.4 votes yes
Pool 3: 12 million yes, 2 million no, 14 million of 70 million saturation, 0.2 votes yes
Pool 4: 65 million no, 5 million yes, 70 million of 70 million saturation, 1.0 votes no
Pool 5: 8 million no, 6 million yes, 14 million of 70 million saturation, 0.2 votes no
Yes wins with 1.6 against 1.2 (57.1 %) of the votes.
This distribution makes the Yes win much clearer than it really is.
But 63 million of the no in Pool 4 are a whale and that whale is smart. They redistribute their stake so that they have a majority in Pools 2 to 5 (28 million to Pool 2, 14 million to Pool 3, 7 million stay in Pool 4, 14 million to Pool 5).
And that strategy they can even do without knowing or guessing how the other delegators will vote, because they then have 50% themselves in all those pools.
Pool 1: 50 million yes, 20 million no, 70 million of 70 million saturation, 1,0 votes yes
Pool 2: 30 million no (28 from whale), 26 million yes, 56 million of 70 million saturation, 0.8 votes no
Pool 3: 16 million no (14 from whale), 12 million yes, 28 million of 70 million saturation, 0.4 votes no
Pool 4: 9 million no (7 from whale), 5 million yes, 14 million of 70 million saturation, 0.2 votes no
Pool 5: 22 million no (14 from whale), 6 million yes, 28 million of 70 million saturation, 0.4 votes no
Now, no wins with 1.8 against 1.0 (64.3 %) of the votes.
Yep, the pool the whale was originally delegated to went from 1.0 voting weight down to 0.2, but securing (without doubt) the majority in three other pools more than compensated that.
A single whale (with 32.1 % of the total ADA in this toy example) had the possibility to control the voting of 4 of our 5 pools and swing the vote.