Storable Votes are a simple voting scheme that allows the minority to win occasionally, while treating every voter equally. Because the minority wins when it cares strongly about a decision while the majority does not, minority victories occur with little cost, in fact typically with gains, for the community as a whole. The idea is simple: Consider a group of voters faced with a series of proposals, each of which can either pass or fail. Decisions are taken according to the majority of votes cast, but each voter is endowed with a budget of votes to distribute freely ove ... More

Storable Votes are a simple voting scheme that allows the minority to win occasionally, while treating every voter equally. Because the minority wins when it cares strongly about a decision while the majority does not, minority victories occur with little cost, in fact typically with gains, for the community as a whole. The idea is simple: Consider a group of voters faced with a series of proposals, each of which can either pass or fail. Decisions are taken according to the majority of votes cast, but each voter is endowed with a budget of votes to distribute freely over the multiple decisions. Because voters cast more votes on decisions that matter to them more, they reveal the intensity of their preferences and increase their probability of winning exactly when it matters to them most. Thus Storable Votes elicit and reward voters’ intensity of preferences without the need for any external knowledge of voters’ preferences. By treating everyone equally and ruling out interpersonal vote trades, they are in line with common ethical priors and are robust to criticisms, both normative and positive, that affect vote markets. The book complements the theoretical discussion with several experiments, showing that the idea is supported by the data: experimental outcomes match the predictions of the theory. Because the intuition behind Storable Votes is so simple—“vote more when you care more”—the results are robust across different scenarios, even when subtle strategic effects are not identified by the subjects, suggesting real potential for practical applications.