A Radical Proposal

Voting can feel antiquated, on just about every level. The Scantron bubbles to fill in, the draconian lines and limited hours, but also the concept itself: Yes or no. Her or him. We know technology can help with the “how” of voting, but what if it could also transform the concept itself?

“The voting system is a straitjacket that throws out information,” wrote authors E. Glen Weyl and Eric A. Posner, an economist and a law professor, respectively, in their book Radical Markets. “A vote can tell you only whether a person prefers one outcome to another, but not how much that person prefers the outcome.” The book, which Princeton University Press published last year, argues that the way democractic societies vote does not reflect the population’s conflicting preferences in the way that, say, markets do.