Suppose a group must choose among several improvements. Everyone cares about each proposal differently: a person might mildly prefer a new logo but urgently need a quieter meeting space. Simple majority voting gives them one equal-strength answer on each question. Quadratic voting lets them concentrate voting credits on the questions they care about most.
Under the basic rule, one vote costs one credit, two votes cost four, and three cost nine. The quadratic cost makes extra influence increasingly expensive. A participant who spends heavily on one proposal has fewer credits available elsewhere.
The voting budget becomes part of the politics
A grant group could experiment with equal credit budgets distributed across a portfolio of proposals. Participants would face a concrete trade: support several acceptable projects or push hard for a particular priority. That illustrates preference intensity without requiring real money.
But credit allocation, verified identities, and coordination among voters are central to the result. If people can cheaply create extra identities or trade favors as a bloc, the intended constraints change. Using money rather than equal credits raises a different question about wealth and influence. The cost rule limits how cheaply an individual can accumulate votes; it does not decide who receives credits or prevent people from coordinating to evade its constraints. Those surrounding rules determine whose intensity can actually be expressed.