I found this year's Donation Election to be an intriguing experiment in charitable giving. However, I was disappointed to see funds allocated in a very concentrated way, with most of the funds given to the top few most plausible candidates. I believe a proportional approach would work better.
For those who don't know, proportional representation is a method of voting where the seats in parliament a party gets (which would correspond to the funds a charity gets in the donation election) are delegated proportionally to the number of votes it receives (or in a donation election, the amount of money put in by people who choose this charity as their top choice). Proportional Representation has two big advantages over traditional first-past-the-post and other more concentrated voting systems.
First, it removes all tactical voting. In a first-past-the-post system, votes to third parties are usually wasted as these candidates have little chance of winning the election. This is less of an issue in ranked-choice voting, the system used in this year's donation election, but it is still an issue. For instance, consider an Instant-Runoff-Voting election for 1 candidate (which would correspond to if all donations were given to the candidate with the most votes) with third parties that are polling at the following rates:
- Center-left party (first-place votes): 40%
- center-right party (first-place votes): 25%
- Far-right party (first-place votes): 35%
- Head-to-head polling:
- center-left vs. far-right: 55%-45%
- center-left vs. center-right: 45%-55%
- center-right vs. far-right: 60%-45%
Since the far-right party is likely to lose the head-to-head matchup, far-right voters are incentivized to switch their first-place vote to the center-right party in order to beat the center-left. Strategic voting like this turns out to be a broad weakness of all non-proportional electoral systems. And indeed, in a donation election, we don't want there to be an incentive for people to strategically misstate their choice.
Second, it allows for more expressive representation. In a more concentrated election system, voters are often faced with more of a binary choice: left-wing or right-wing, animal welfare charity or global health charity. This deprives voters of a more expressive vote that better accounts for the minutiae in their views. In a proportional voting system, as long as there is one party that represents a voter's views very well, this is never an issue. The voter can just cast their vote for that one party and not have to make the hard decision where it feels like they are voting for the lesser of two evils. In the case of the Donation Election, as long as there is one charity that each voter thinks is doing great work and can use the extra funding, they need not worry about comparing the viability of different charities which are not their top choice.
I believe this is a broadly-agreeable common-sense change that would be beneficial to implement for next year's donation election.
I wholeheartedly agree, and think we need to look elsewhere to apply this model.
Donor Lotteries unhealthily exhibit winner-take-all dynamics, centralizing rather than distributing power. If this individual makes a bad decision, then the impact of that money evaporates -- it's a very risky proposition.
A more robust solution would be to proportionally distribute the funds to everyone who joins, based on the amount they put in. This would democratize funding ability throughout the EA ecosystem and lead to a much healthier funding ecosystem.