Equal Shares Voting Receipts
A public voting-receipt interface for Kultur Komitee Winterthur 2026, showing how Equal Shares turns votes, costs, and equal budgets into explainable project funding.
For Kultur Komitee Winterthur 2026, I built a public voting-receipt interface that makes the Method of Equal Shares easier to inspect, explain, and discuss. Instead of only publishing a final ranked list, the interface shows how individual votes, project costs, and remaining participant budgets translate into funded projects.
The core idea is democratic legibility. Equal Shares can produce fairer budget outcomes than a simple “most votes wins” process, but the result needs to be understandable to the people in the room. The receipts show which funded projects each participant helped pay for, how much of their equal budget was used, which supported projects were not funded, and where the collective budget ran out.
In March 2026, 23 participants in three groups used the system to allocate CHF 161,000 to cultural projects in Winterthur. The receipts did not replace discussion. They gave the group a shared object to reason with: simple cases became easier to understand, while close or contested cases could become the focus of deliberation.
The feedback is promising. Compared with 2025, more participants in 2026 saw individual voting and group discussion as equally influential, rising from 34.4% to 62.5%. At the same time, participants also reported wanting group discussion to carry more weight. That combination is exactly what the interface is meant to support: clearer individual agency without flattening the value of collective judgment.