VoteLab: A Modular and Adaptive Experimentation Platform for Online Collective Decision Making

TL;DR

VoteLab tackles the need for systematic, large-scale testing of diverse voting methods in digital democracy contexts by providing an open-source, modular, and adaptive platform with smartphone UX. It enables visual campaign design, tag-based audience targeting, and rich meta-data collection, demonstrated through a preregistered $n=120$ participant COVID-19 study using four voting methods ($mv$, $cav$, $sv$, $mbc$) across four questions. The main contributions are a modular architecture, a Web dashboard plus Android app, a reproducible software artifact, and thorough documentation, all enabling rigorous experimentation of complex collective decision-making scenarios. The work lays groundwork for broader applications such as participatory budgeting and Smart City pilots, with future directions including iOS/browser voting, more aggregation methods, and secure incentive mechanisms.

Abstract

Digital democracy and new forms for direct digital participation in policy making gain unprecedented momentum. This is particularly the case for preferential voting methods and decision-support systems designed to promote fairer, more inclusive and legitimate collective decision-making processes in citizens assemblies, participatory budgeting and elections. However, a systematic human experimentation with different voting methods is cumbersome and costly. This paper introduces VoteLab, an open-source and thoroughly-documented platform for modular and adaptive design of voting experiments. It supports to visually and interactively build reusable campaigns with a choice of different voting methods, while voters can easily respond to subscribed voting questions on a smartphone. A proof-of-concept with four voting methods and questions on COVID-19 in an online lab experiment have been used to study the consistency of voting outcomes. It demonstrates the capability of VoteLab to support rigorous experimentation of complex voting scenarios.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: (A) VoteLab architecture. (B) VoteLab life cycle. (C) Consistency of voting outcomes.
• Figure 2: VoteLab user interface: (a) Voting management dashboard. (b) and (c) show two example polls answered by the app user via two different voting methods: combined approval and score voting.