Majority judgment: Why it should be used to rank and elect

Les Grandes Conférences du LIG - The LIG Keynote Speeches
 - 
LIG
Rida LARAKI
Jeudi 04 octobre 2018
"Réalisation technique : Antoine Orlandi | Tous droits réservés"

Abstract:

Every well-known voting system in use today hides important vices that can deny the will of the electorate including majority vote with only two candidates (the domination paradox), approval voting, all methods that ask voters to compare candidates (i.e., rank-order them), and point-summing methods. The underlying reason: the inability of voters to adequately and honestly express their opinions. Majority judgment asks voters to evaluate every candidate in an easily understood common language of ordinal grades such as: Great, Good, Average, Poor, or Terrible. Majorities determine the electorate’s evaluation of each candidate and the ranking between every pair of candidates (necessarily transitive), with the first-placed among them the winner.

Majority judgment is described together with illustrations of its use 
(notably, French and U.S. presidential elections). It was specifically designed to
     • permit voters to express their opinions,
     • be meaningful in the sense of measurement theory,
     • avoid Condorcet’s paradox (guarantee a transitive order-of-finish),
     • avoid Arrow’s paradox (when the order-of-finish of two candidates depends on the presence/absence of other candidates),
     • combat strategic manipulation and encourage the honest expression of opinions.

 

Majority judgment has proven itself in practice. It can and should be used in elections with many voters as well as by juries with few judges (e.g., for figure skaters, gymnasts, wines, films, restaurants, prize 
winners, . . . ).