The Democratic caucus of the Colorado State House of Representatives had a problem—but it was the good kind. The 2018 1 election put Democrats in charge of the House, the State Senate, and the governorship. Now it was time to decide, out of somewhere between 60 and 100 appropriations bills, which policies to fund first. But … well, you know how Democrats are, right? The only thing they really agree on is that the most efficient shape for a firing squad is a circle.

The state reps could have just voted, of course, but each of those 41 Democrats in the House was probably the sponsor of at least one of those bills. So they’d vote out of self-interest. No help there. What the Dems needed was a way to capture desire, to know which bills were everyone’s priority. “We have a limited pot of money to spend on new legislation every year,” says Chris Hansen, a state representative from Denver and chair of the House Appropriations Committee. “So we needed to devise a method for accurately capturing the preference of those caucus members.” Hansen isn’t just a pol. He’s a PhD energy economist with an interest in game theory. He’s open to weird science, is the point. So a pal of his, hearing about his plight, told him about a new idea: quadratic voting.

The result of some concept work by a Microsoft Research economist named Glen Weyl, quadratic voting is designed to force people to express their honest opinions about their choices by attaching a cost. One vote costs one unit of value—in its purest form, you would literally buy that vote with your own hard-earned American dollars. But not so fast, because the cost of a vote increases—by the number of votes times itself, to be precise. (That's the "quadratic" part.)2 So two votes cost four dollars; three votes cost nine. Ten votes? One hundred dollars. The point is, you can yell as loudly as you want, but louder yelling costs more—so you have to be really incentivized to do it.

“Fundamentally, quadratic voting addresses the problem of the tyranny of the majority, a standard criticism of democracy,” Weyl says. “Standard rules are based on the notion that everybody is exactly the same and cares the same amount. If you doubt that’s a problem, think about the plight of African Americans in the United States, or the drug war, which dramatically affects certain groups of people.” But with quadratic voting, you can vote harder on what’s closer to home. And when the vote is over, all the money in the pot gets distributed to each voter equally, which is supposed to sort of re-grade the playing field for next time.

Like a lot of other similarly intricate ideas, quadratic voting sets out to solve a fundamental problem in the field of “social choice,” which is to say, how groups of people choose what they want. It may seem like the purest solution is one-person-one-vote, sometimes delightfully abbreviated as “1p1v.” But it doesn’t work as well as it should. Like, a “plurality election” is where the candidate with the most votes wins, but when you have multiple candidates, it’s possible for someone to get a small number of votes but still win if his or her total was higher than the next candidate down. (That happens in a crowded presidential primary.) The American Electoral College system allocates points on a state-by-state, winner take all basis, which means someone can lose the 1p1v “popular” vote by quite a lot and still win. (Hello, Mr. President.) And in the US, slightly more than half of voters, or half of congress, can enforce their will over the other less-than-half—even if the numbers are really close or the will is really disproportionate.