Quadratic Voting and the BOSCore Borda Count method

System analyst John C has some knowledge of blockchain voting methods, he recently presented the BOS Borda Count Voting Mechanism for DACathon 2020 highlighting how the design presents possible solutions to blockchain voting and why system integrators might want to include BOSCore Borda Count Method in their projects.

Approval voting is a single-winner electoral system, each voter may approve a number of candidates and the winner is the most approved. Block One, decided upon “Approval Voting” as the default for EOSIO in part due to its simplicity, and to date, there is no configurable change to the default.

When you have a multiple winner election and those winners are ranked for example DPoS 1st — 21st and apply a single-winner election rule (approval voting) then there is a lot of lost information. Information that says what the voters really want. Like plurality voting, approval voting can fail to reflect the outcome of what voters really want, due to lost information.

EOSIO’s default voting mechanism can lead to concentrated voting in the hands of a few people. The one-vote multi-selection approval mechanism allows token holders to trade votes, which can ultimately lead to the Block Producer rankings being controlled, thereby causing an imbalance in the decentralization of the system, and further leading to an increased gap between the ranks.

Problems associated with concentrated voting:

• Lost Information on what voters really want.
• Imbalance in the decentralization of the system.
• A decrease in the morale value of network operators can even become negative.
• Impacting security and adversely effecting community participation.

Quadratic Voting

In a web snippet on Quadratic Voting (QV) the following background information can be found that dates the system to around 43 years.

A mechanism closely resembling quadratic voting was first published in 1977 by Groves and Ledyard, with a similar mechanism being proposed by Hylland and Zeckhauser in 1980. More recently, the mechanism of quadratic voting is said to have been re-discovered and refined into its present form in papers originating in 2012 by E. Glen Weyl.

Quadratic voting in its base form is a method of vote-buying, using the square value of the number of votes as an incremental cost to casting vote preference. In relation to blockchain, this can be adapted to relative stake weighted voting and used with Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchains.

There is a comparative analysis of Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) ranking of EOS block producers based on “the vote weight in the square root of the total staked amount, see image.

From the results we can see that applying quadratic voting changes the rank order results of the 21 highest voted block producers and brings the 22nd EOS block producer in to the ranking to replace the 8th EOS Block Producer. The current voting method for EOS Block Producers is approval voting where up to 30 votes can be cast with an equal stake weight.

Criticisms of quadratic voting are similar to the criticisms of the EOS Block Producer voting method revolving around the wealthy or in the case of EOS those with custody of EOS having a greater influence on the voting process. Concerns about the application of quadratic voting as a voting method appear to be valid and are leading to further research in the are of adapting the method for blockchain voting scenarios.

Vitalik Buterin has posted several articles exploring the application of quadratic voting as a voting mechanism for blockchain technologies. In general, the discussion on voting systems and their application in blockchain systems is not limited to a single voting mechanism, and rightly so as modified forms of the various mechanism arise through adaptive use for specific use cases, reinventing voting systems can lead to greater innovation in the field.

Paying attention to quadratic voting, in an article titled “Liberation Through Radical Decentralization” and written in collaboration with Glen Weyl who is credited with re-discovering quadratic voting. Vitalik discusses opportunities to collaborate through actively working to foster connections between our respective communities.

We thus see many opportunities to collaborate and are actively working to foster connections between our respective communities. Even if neither community achieves its sweeping social ambitions, there are a wide range of narrower contexts where collaborations seem capable of making important social impacts, including using blockchains to improve the security of data markets and QV for aggregation of opinions in blockchain-based social networks.

In the context, Vitalik appears to be referring to collaborations with Several organizations and communities that have formed in support of quadratic voting, for example, RadicalxChange which describe themselves on Twitter as a community of activists, artists, entrepreneurs, and scholars committed to using mechanism design to inspire radical social change.

Vitalik sees potential in collaborations to solve challenges that address governance problems blockchain-based communities face and more recently became involved with Quadratic Finance/Funding in a project which has drawn criticism for Block One CEO Brendan Blumer on twitter.

Challenges to the blockchain industry.

In 2016 the ethereum community was faced with challenges caused through a breach to the ethereum DAO contracts in that instance the ethereum foundation turned to a voting system using one vote per ETH to gauge community sentiment.

There have been many attempts to use votes to gauge community sentiment when deciding on potentially controversial protocol changes, but so far they have been criticized either for being too vulnerable to manipulation by sockpuppets (fake accounts) and malicious voting by non-community-members or for being too skewed toward reflecting the views of a small group of wealthy coin holders.

Vitalik writes that he considers some form quadratic voting could present a moderate alternative to systems leaning toward reflecting the views of a small group of wealthy coin holders.

Some form of QV could present a moderate alternative, as participants’ differing strength of views and stake in the community are taken account, but because the cost of buying many votes quickly becomes prohibitive (1000 votes would cost 1,000,000 credits) the ability for a small elite to disproportionately affect outcomes is limited.

In a more recent article Vitalik concludes that quadratic voting can be extended in many ways and continues to be optimal in contexts with more than two choices, quoting Arrow’s theorem and Duvergers law as reasons “traditional voting schemes” fall prey to various kinds of “strategic voting”

BOS Borda Count Voting mechanism learns from the work of Don Saari and his interpretations of the Arrow’s impossibility theorem in that reductionist approaches to complex problems can fail due to loss of information, quadratic voting is no exception here.

Through a review of the various articles, scholarly documents and live comparative analysis of quadratic voting on the EOS block producers it seems likely that criticisms of the system favoring collective decision making involving elite groups can be somewhat justified and as Vitalik identifies, quadratic voting in some form could present an alternative.

In theory, it would also be possible to improve quadratic voting by merging the method with the BOS Borda Count Voting method.

BOSCore Borda Count Method

BOS Borda Count can be used in many blockchain-based voting scenarios where there are multiple winners. BOSCore first introduced this improved Borda voting mechanism for the election of BET (BOS Executive Team). In order to find a more reasonable means to make a corresponding contribution in ensuring system security and widespread distribution; which ultimately leads to a better and more inclusive distribution of WPS funds.

Solution. Relatively concentrated voting:

• More information on what the voter really want
• Balance in the decentralization of the system.
• Encourage operators, stabilize backbone teams, generate checks and balances.
• Increase Security, and is beneficial to community participation.

With BOS Borda Count Voters rank candidates from 1st, 2nd, 3rd and so on.

The voting mechanism weighs each vote choice with an automated descending relative weight (contribution value) that is derived from a formula of (n+1-i)/n*stake used as an F function

n = number of candidates
i = unique ranking ordinal number between 1st and 25th

Search the internet for “BOS DPoS Borda Count” and you’ll find articles published in 2019 for the further exploration of the existing EOS voting system and development of a “Fair” voting system based on the Borda count consensus voting method.

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References and further reading.

BOS Borda Count Referendum and WPS Proposal
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V96w3L5BGPtrvLpoUYsJUUNsC6yH0RFB7LSByghYx50/edit