By Peter Emerson, Director of the de Borda Institute.

Ireland’s contributions to the development of the world’s democratic structures have not been many… and not always positive.  In 1818, the first dictator to get 100% in a referendum when he became El Supremo is Chile was the Irishman, Bernardo O’Higgins.  Thus he put into second place his French counterpart, for on becoming l’empereur in 1803, Napoléon Bonaparte had won only a paltry 99.7%.

On the more positive side, Ireland has played a leading role in developing the world’s use of citizens’ assemblies, and of particular relevance was a recommendation of the 2016 Citizens’ Assembly “in favour of allowing more than two options on a ballot paper in a constitutional referendum.”  Interestingly enough, however, the vote in favour was binary… which was a bit like ratifying a peace agreement by going outside for a punch-up.  Not only that, they decided that any multi-option ballot should be analysed “by PR-STV” but, of course, you can’t have PR when making a single decision; I presume they meant just STV without PR, otherwise known as the alternative vote AV (or, in North America, as ranked choice voting RCV).

But this blog is about a different Irish contribution.  In 1984, the European Green Parties met in Dover, and a few of us from Ireland were there as well.  I ran a workshop on Northern Ireland and, inter alia, when the debate focussed on multi-option voting, we coined a new word: preferendum.

We used it, a lot.  But there were problems.  Firstly, the word is not in every dictionary; but it sounds like ‘referendum’, so most people think they know that it’s a multi-option referendum.  Correct.  But there are several ways of analysing a multi-option vote – plurality voting and two-round voting are both basically single-preference systems; approval voting and range voting are non-preferential; while the preferential methodologies include AV as well as the Borda and Condorcet rules.

We therefore started to call our methodology the Borda preferendum, so to distinguish it from any of the other types.  But there’s another problem: Jean-Charles de Borda’s voting procedure is not exactly the same as that which today is called the Borda Count BC.  He suggested that, in any vote on n options, where the voter casts m preferences, points shall be awarded to (1^st, 2^nd … last) preferences cast, according to the rule

(m, m-1 … 1).

But some of his contemporaries in l’Académie des Sciences changed this to

(n, n-1 … 1).

or

(n-1, n-2 … 0).

If every voter has submitted a full ballot, the social choice and social ranking of any m- or n-rule analysis will remain the same.  If, however, some voters have submitted only a partial ballot, the difference between the m- and n-rule outcomes can be huge.  In brief, the m rule gives a voter’s (x)^th preference 1 point more than her (x+1)^th preference, regardless of whether or not she has cast that  (x+1)^th preference.  The n rules, in contrast, give he who casts only one preference an (n-1) advantage over all the other options.  So on really contentious topics, the BC may not be much better, if at all, than a plurality vote.  The m rule, however, is unbiased.  The n-rules promote division, whereas the m-rule can be the very catalyst of consensus; and the m-rule, Jean-Charles’ original proposal, is today known as the Modified Borda Count MBC, a magnificent Irish contribution to the world’s politics.

And – my word! – the good news is that my word le préférendum is now part of the political lexicon in France.  It was in Le Point as well as Le Monde and Le Figaro. 

Now it might be that President Macron is clutching at straws; certainly his spokesperson Olivier Véran doesn’t understand this voting procedure: “It is a concept that would allow us to test several subjects at the same time during the same vote,” he said in Le Monde, but that’s nonsense.  Nevertheless this could be the start of something which was not on our horizon in Dover, all those years ago: progress to a non-binary polity, and the obsolescence from the political lexicon of words like ‘majority’, ‘minority’ and ‘veto’.