"International organizations, from the European Union to the Security Council of the United Nations, are discussing the reform of their voting systems. The difficulty is combining transparency, rapid decision-making, and the right of member countries to reject proposals they consider unacceptable, even when they find themselves in the minority. The traditional answer has been a system of vetoes, but vetoes are cumbersome, inefficient, and controversial."

So states Professor Alessandra Casella, who proposes a solution in the form of a voting mechanism termed "Storable Votes" designed to empower the minority in any committee while preserving a sense of fairness to the whole. The mechanism can be used when a committee has a series of proposals it has to vote upon over time. Instead of each member having one vote for each proposal, each member "is allotted a stock of votes, to be spent as desired over the multiple decisions." While a proposal is passed only when it gets a majority of votes, each voter can cast more than one vote for it, or decline to vote entirely, as long as they are operating within the "budget" they have available for the whole series of proposals they are to vote on. Thus "voters express the intensity of their preferences by choosing which 'price' (in votes) they are willing to pay to gain influence over a specific decision." In this way, they can "spend" more on the proposals that matter to them than others. While voters are treated equally under the storable vote mechanism while allowing the minority to win by using accumulated votes, the minority can only win when it cares strongly about a proposal and the majority doesn't. Professor Casella has explored the intricacies of such a system over the course of many papers directed at improving the fairness and efficiency of referenda in this way.

Alessandra Casella, Robert Palfrey, and Raymond Riezman, "Minorities and Storable Votes". September 2005.