Abstract
For some extraordinary reason, many people in the world place their faith in a voting procedure which is ancient, primitive and, in a word, blunt: majority voting. It is usually divisive, often imprecise and, at worst, a provocation to violence. Accordingly, this chapter looks at voting theory and proves that this binary voting can indeed be hopelessly inaccurate if not, on occasions, plain wrong (while Chaps. 4–6 show that in many instances in practice, it is also at best inappropriate); the text then talks of various forms of multi-option voting; and finally, it describes a preferential points system which can be not only more accurate but actually, in certain circumstances, a very exact measure of the general will.
The truth of an Assembly’s decisions depends as much on the form by which they are reached as on the enlightenment of its members.
Le Marquis de Condorcet, quoted in McLean and Urken ( 1995 : 113)
(Citations from this work are reprinted courtesy of the University of Michigan Press).
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Notes
- 1.
Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.
- 2.
The Scandinavian parliaments use multi-option voting procedures, sometimes; (Sect. 3.3.1).
- 3.
The United Kingdom in the European Union, the European Economic Area , or the World Trade Organisation .
- 4.
For a list of some of those parliamentary votes and referendums which have been won or lost by one vote or by less than one per cent respectively, see Won by One on http://www.deborda.org/won-by-one/
- 5.
In the budget debate of 20.3.2012, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, (Tory), proposed to reduce the previous (Labour) tax band of 50–45%. The vote was on only these two options.
- 6.
One other dictator ‘lost’—Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe in 2000, 45.3–54.7%—but he had taken the precaution of making the vote non-binding.
- 7.
This ‘good’, that or those ‘bad’—from George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
- 8.
In Kirkuk, the vote was duly held on 25.9.2017. It was indeed a source of conflict. On 15th October, Iraqi forces chose to retake the disputed region by force; thankfully, two weeks later, Masoud Barzani , the President of Iraqi Kurdistan, stepped down, and the problem was defused.
- 9.
“All peoples have the right of self-determination . By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development…” Article 1.1. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The un General Assembly, 1996.
- 10.
Hereinafter, this book refers to this beautiful sad country as just Bosnia.
- 11.
UN Resolution 47 of August 1948.
- 12.
As noted, the Condorcet rule is also very good; of the two, this author prefers the Borda rule because, as will be discussed later on, (Sect. 3.3.1), the latter is non-majoritarian.
- 13.
‘Yes’ and ‘no’… and ‘undecided’.
- 14.
At a seminar held in Belfast City Council in 2005, the author tried to persuade the Policy and Resources Committee to suggest the Council could become the first democratically elected local council in the world to use electronic preferential voting. He was unsuccessful. At the time, while some members had their own i-pads and smart phones, there were only two electronic devices in common use in the main debating chamber: the microphone and the light bulb.
- 15.
This is more likely to be true if the parliament concerned is multi-party, i.e., if it has been elected by a system of PR.
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Emerson, P. (2020). Decision-making in Parliaments and Referendums. In: Majority Voting as a Catalyst of Populism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20219-4_1
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