Storable votes

Imagine a committee, for example the board of a central bank, that every month needs to vote on an up-or-down decision, say changing the interest rate or not.

However, it is clear that the goals of the two systems are similar: by concentrating votes on one candidate or one election, they allow voters to represent the intensity of their preferences.

And by allowing the expression of the intensity of preferences, they increase the representation of minority interests, relative to simple majority rule.

The objective of Storable Voting is to offer a way for voters to represent not only the direction of their preference (Yes/No), but also how relatively intensely they feel about different issues.

Minority representation is achieved while treating all voters identically (all have the same number of bonus votes), and without supermajority requirements or vetoes that hamper decision-making.

An important property of Storable votes is that they function through the private incentives of the voters: there is no external agent who needs to gauge and reward intensity of preferences.

Voters themselves choose how to use the bonus votes and are induced by the mechanism to express the relative intensity of their preferences truthfully.

Rafael Hortala-Vallve introduced a similar concept, which he called "Qualitative Voting",[3] in a paper written later but independently.

As mentioned above: Alessandra Casella, Tom Palfrey, Andrew Gelman, and other co-authors realized several laboratory experiments and one quasi-experiment in the field to test the theoretical predictions of Storable Votes models.

The recurring and surprising result is that while experimental subjects have clear difficulties with the subtle strategic calculations that the theory takes into account, the total payoffs that the experimental subjects take home from the experiments are close to identical to the theoretical predictions.

The laboratory experiments reveal a number of regularities: In a field study, Casella and her co-authors tried to assess the potential effect of introducing Storable Votes in actual elections.

When majority and minority preferences were equally intense, the effect of the bonus vote would have been smaller and more variable, but on balance still positive.