By Dr Peter Emerson, de Borda Institute, author of The Punters’ Guide to Democracy (Springer, Heidelberg).
Democracy is majority rule, they say; and ‘they’ are umpteen politicians, many in the media, lots in academia, and thousands of voters. But democracy is for everybody, not just a majority; and definitely not just the majority … of unionists, Serbs, Jews, Sunni, Russians, Hutu, etc; and also not just the men, the rich, the masses, the capitalists, socialists, or ‘bolsheviks’ (the word means ‘members of the majority’); in summary, not just the ‘winners’. Accordingly, democracy should be based, not on ‘win-or-lose’ decision-making but, as some of ‘them’ also say, “Politics is the art of compromise.”
It is also the alternative to violence. War is always horrible, bloody … and invariably binary. As in the Troubles, so too in the Cold War, as in all wars: “Are you ‘this’ or ‘that’?” “Catholic or Protestant?” “Communist or capitalist?”
Wars end, either in a final battle of defeat and surrender … or in a compromise. But, as we said in ‘Decision-making, the Story so Far,’ (CRC, April 2026), you cannot best identify a consensus in a binary vote.
Nevertheless, politicians persist, democracy is (still) majority rule. Unanimity, of course, is rare in politics; nevertheless, decisions have to be made; lots of topics – like the budget – are complex, and therefore, they add, we need majority voting, with motions subject to amendments, all of which are subject to ‘yes-or-no’ majority votes, and the final decision itself, they continue, is yet another ‘for-or-against’ dichotomy. The fact that there are other, multi-optional voting mechanisms is largely ignored; they stick to the ancient, primitive and divisive majority vote; democracy, they repeat, is majority rule, and that’s that!
It’s everywhere. It’s in democracies, certainly; in theocracies, sometimes; in autocracies, eg, the Bolsheviks’ USSR, when it suits them; and it’s in China (see below). What’s more, many believe in it, and western diplomats proselytise it. One of our biggest mistakes was during ‘the winds of change’ in Africa, the western imposition of majority rule on Rwanda: later, the Interahamwe launched its 1994 genocide with the slogan “Rubanda nyamwimshi,” (‘we are the majority’), a totally unAfrican concept (as we shall note later on).
Another huge, contemporary mistake is threefold: in trying to persuade China to be ‘democratic’, firstly, our politicians forget (or maybe never knew) that China was the first country in the world to use multi-option voting, and that was in 1197, during the Jīn Dynasty (Emerson 2022); secondly, they dismiss the fact that Máo Zédōng was yet another majoritarian, as in his 1957 anti-Rightist campaign; and thirdly, they ignore the dreadful fact that in numerous village tribunals during the so-called Great Leap Forward which followed, majority voting was used as sentences of death! (Emerson, 2020.)
So, if there are other forms of democracy, we should discuss them, and majoritarianism should at least be questioned. Which brings us to the subject of this essay: a free press. And I’m afraid the media hardly even mentions preferential voting in decision-making – in elections, yes, PR-STV and all that; but rarely in decision-making. When did you last hear a journalist talk of either of the two most accurate methodologies, the Condorcet rule and the Modified Borda Count, MBC?
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As a major part of any democracy, a free press can inform, educate, entertain … promote or ignore … scandalise and/or titivate. On the positive side, they can and often do hold those in power to account. But who holds them to account? Needless to say, many journalists, not least those in warzones like Ukraine, Sudan and the Middle East, do fantastic jobs. But may I offer a little personal comment, partly critical, but also, when deserved, complimentary?
My first political act in Belfast was anonymous. Shortly after my arrival here in ’75, a colleague and I hired a caravan, parked ourselves outside the City Hall, and held a 72-hour fast to highlight the plight of the world’s starving poor. A bomb exploded outside a shop in Royal Avenue just opposite, so the press were everywhere. Two of them came over, took a couple of photos, and asked, “What are your names?” “This fast is anonymous,” we replied. “Yes, but we are the press.” “And we remain anonymous.” The fast was not reported.
In ’78, I organised the Friends of the Earth’s ‘cycle-in’ – and dozens of cyclists met at the City Hall to then, with a penny-farthing, a couple of blind cyclists riding pillion on tandems, and one Chinese tri-shaw, pedal round the city. It was a sunny, lovely, fun day. We went past the UDA’s HQ on the Newtownards Road and Sinn Féin’s on the Falls – oh all very cross-community – and The Belfast Telegraph said we blocked the traffic. But we were the traffic!
Now in all elections, the conduct of the media is governed by the Fair Representation Act: basically, this says that coverage of each party should be in relation to its popularity. (In contrast, the electoral laws in some other countries assume there are no favourites.) So how do our media measure popularity, when the election hasn’t yet happened? Ha! the ‘news’ recalls ‘the past’ of the previous election. Catch 22. So a new party might well get minimal coverage. In 1981, we used our first name, “Ecology” rather than “Green Party,” and introducing me with the words, “To be fair,” a BBC NI reporter asked me to explain this concept in just 30 seconds! (Needless to say, on the hustings, I was asked but only once, “Are you a Protestant ecologist or a Catholic ecologist?”) Looking back, it could be said, when the Greens and the Women’s Coalition were starting, in ’81 and ’96 respectively, the media were more sympathetic to the latter.
I was also involved with CND, campaigning against the other binary conflict of those days, the Cold War. And our non-violent civil disobedience was based on humour if possible, and/or self-sacrifice. We had established a Greenham Common style peace-camp at RAF Bishopscourt near Downpatrick, and having told the RUC what (but not when) we were going to do, we broke in. Our relationship with the police, however, was much warmer here than in England. (It even got to the stage, just before Christmas, when the Downpatrick Chief of Police came by with a bottle o’ bush: “I think you’re absolutely right, but please don’t tell the press.” Today, 40 years on, it’s OK now.)
We also broke into what the NIO had said was just a store but which we suspected was a nuclear bunker, the window-less block in Eden Park; and we were right. The Irish News coverage of our photos of its ops room was extensive, but no-one commented on the replacement lock which we left, just in case we had caused any damage, nor on the fact that, having passed the photos to the press, we stayed on site to report ourselves to the police. After all, a crime had been committed. We confessed. But we were never charged. Yes, The Irish News gave us front-page news; in contrast, BBC NI said we were unavailable … which was nonsense.
Now everyone remembers, in ’85, just after the Anglo-Irish Agreement, Ian Paisley at the City Hall shouting, “Ulster says ‘NO’!” One week later, (as mentioned in my Community Relations Council piece here), six of us stood there in silence with the slogan, “We have got to say ‘yes’ to something.” Ah, BBC NI came to do a TV piece, jolly good: from a distance down Royal Avenue, they showed all half-dozen of us, but then – jolly bad – zoomed in on only two words, “say yes.” Which was not what we were saying! Living as I do on the Ballysillan Road, I was actually rather worried that this binary analysis would put me in some danger, (but the only local reaction was from some of the neighbours’ kids: “Saw you on telly.”)
As a natural follow-on to that vigil, I helped to run that ‘nobody-votes-no’ experiment in consensus politics that I described last time. The press were there, lots of them; but they weren’t really interested in our voting procedures – most of them just wanted to talk to Sinn Féin. With advice from an academic in UCD, I later learnt that this ‘no-no’ voting procedure is actually the Modified Borda Count MBC, invented in 1770. A second voting methodology, the matrix vote, is an NI invention, designed for use when a large group of people – eg, an Assembly – wants to elect a team – as in a power-sharing executive. Two other academics, both from Queen’s, helped enormously to promote this tool of power-sharing. Basically, the ballot paper is a page: on the x-axis, every MLA may choose, in order of preference, those whom they want to be on the executive, and on the y-axis, in which portfolio. Like PR-STV, it suggests a party of about 30% in the Assembly should aim for about 30% of the Executive, and limit its number of nominees accordingly; at the same time, as with an MBC, it encourages every MLA to cast a full ballot. In effect, it prompts our MLAs to cross the gender gap, the party divide, and even the sectarian chasm. Ha! perfect for power-sharing, one would have thought. Despite further demos of this matrix vote both here in Belfast and Dublin, not to mention Vienna and Munich, it has yet to be mentioned by most of the current generation of our academia or anyone in the NI media except in one article in Fortnight (No 430 – but its author was biased – me!). And the good news is that a Dutch lecturer recently suggested their parliament in The Hague should use a matrix vote to form its post-election government. So maybe, if and when it’s adopted somewhere else…
But I’m getting ahead of myself. For our fourth People’s Convention in 1991, Michael D was our keynote speaker. Yugoslavia was falling apart, and Bosnia, it seemed, would be next; so I invited a guest from Sarajevo, Petar Radji-Histić. The small uprising in Slovenia and the much larger, horrible war in Croatia, had both started with binary referendums. So we tried to say, please, no binary referendums in Bosnia, not least because their 1991 election had shown Bosnia split into three – Moslem:Orthodox:Catholic 40:30:20 – so there was no majority anyway! We spoke in vain.
Maybe the press just did not understand. Maybe too, nor did Brussels. It insisted on a referendum; sure enough, 40 + 20 voted ‘yes’ while the 30, just like the SDLP in our 1973 NI border poll, abstained. That vote started the war. One year later, there was another war, as the 40 fought the 20. Accordingly, I met with the BBC NI Controller and asked, “Why not do a programme on consensus decision-making?” “Ah, we need a hook; if there’s a story to hang it on, then we might.”
So I went to the Balkans. Serbo-Croat (as the language used to be called) is similar to Russian, so I brushed up my linguistics; The Irish News gave me accreditation; Petar helped me get a UN press card; and I managed to cycle across Bosnia, twice, in winter and in war, firstly from Zagreb via Banja Luka to Belgrade, and then back again, via Sarajevo and Mostar to Split. I went in order to say, on my return to Belfast, that majoritarianism doesn’t work well there either. A hook – indeed, a harpoon – for a story and a discussion on consensus voting? But no, apparently not; BBC NI was just not interested. The Irish News took a couple of articles; The Newsletter asked me, how d’you spell Sarajevo? But BBC NI did nothing.
Why so? No reason was given. But I think it was because they thought (a) correctly, that I would be standing in what were soon to be declared, the forthcoming elections; and (b) that any coverage for the Green Party, even before the election campaign had officially started, would be (totally within their rules but) unfair on the ‘poor little DUP’ – oh dear – more ‘Fair Representation’.
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As noted above, our binary mindset was problematic, not only in this little corner of the planet. Our dilemma – “Are you Catholic or Protestant?” – had its parallels in the Balkans and the Cold War – “Serb or Croat?” “Communist or capitalist?” – not to mention in Rwanda and throughout the Middle East – “Hutu or Tutsi?” “Arab or Jew?” “Sunni or Shi’a?” and so on. So back in ’83, I’d started to learn Russian; five years later, I got a job translating in Moscow.
Now in those days of Mikhail Gorbachev and perestroika, many Russian journalists knew the USSR had been one ghastly experiment, run with a state-controlled medium, a newspaper called Pravda, (the truth, правда); but secondly, that now they were open to new ideas. So, with my co-author, Irena Bazileva, we published articles on consensus in Moscow News and Russia’s leading literary journal, Novy Mir, (Новый Мир), where we appeared alongside Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. Though I say it myself, this was an amazing achievement. The Irish Times, however, based in Moscow, was not interested. Majoritarianism, it seems, was not and is not to be questioned, and that is a second that!
To say (as I do) that majority voting is ancient, adversarial and often inaccurate is to criticise, not only the current basis of democracy – majority rule – but also the world of business, where so much depends on majority shareholdings and so on. So I’m ruffling a few fiscal feathers as well as the political plumage; but let’s be honest, something is definitely wrong if, as is the case, so much power is given to so few individuals – Trump in politics, Musk in business – as if they represented millions; of dollars, maybe; but of people, no.
Furthermore, in his farewell address of 1796, George Washington described the two-party system (which, of course, is based on majority voting) as a “frightful despotism.” And he was right: like night follows day, the USA is now ruled by Trump, a frightful despot. What’s more, as in the Soviet Union, his medium, Truth Social, also pretends to be right.
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But first, back to NI basics, and two years after our 1991 People’s Convention, we had a conference on power-sharing, with senior figures from Sinn Féin and the DUP, as well as the usual others: Alliance, DL, Greens and SDLP. But thinking that NI events are often too Belfast-o-centric, we held our conference in Dungannon … the only medium to cover such a distant out-post was The Newsletter.
Next came 1998, the Belfast Agreement in which everything was going to be reduced to a binary referendum. Many colleagues were surprised that I should vote ‘yes’ and even campaign for such a positive outcome. Sure, I didn’t like some of the details – the designations, the binary nature of decision-making proposed both for the Assembly and any future referendum – so I wrote a critique for Fortnight (No. 371). According to one senior local journalist, however, his professional colleagues in all media had come to an unwritten agreement that there were to be no criticisms of the Good Friday Agreement prior to the referendum. So the editor insisted my article should be published under a pseudonym: he chose Waldo Ralph, (not exactly the most discreet disguise).
But now, a good news story: the February 2016 Irish general election had produced a hung Dáil, so The Irish Times combined with the de Borda Institute to host a joint open public debate in Ballymun on the matrix vote. As folks arrived, each was given a ‘pretend-TD’ identity so that the role-play reflected the balance of party strengths in the newly elected Dáil; next, each ‘party’ decided which candidates to nominate for which ministerial posts; and then the fun started: various ‘parties’ formed pacts to try and out-do the others; and finally, an electronic vote facilitated the ‘election’ of a ‘government of national unity’; it worked, with lots of coverage … but only in that one medium.
Then came the bad news: Brexit! The debate was obviously multi-optional, so in February of that same year, four months before the referendum, I issued a press release to suggest the ballot should also be multi-optional. It was ignored, almost totally; BBC Radio 4 did interviews on the Today and PM programmes; but it wasn’t good enough for BBC NI or any other NI, Irish or British medium. Even retrospectively, after (the war in Bosnia, the genocide in Rwanda and) Brexit, one might have thought a medium and/or an academic might reflect on what could have been done differently, namely, on how a multi-option ballot might have reduced tensions in the campaign, and produced a more accurate assessment of society’s collective will … but no. Indeed, the opposite was the case: in celebrating the 25th anniversary of the GFA, Queen’s University ignored the People’s Convention I mentioned: it had become a non-event.
Being ignored by many in the media and now too academia, I was not producing positive results. So I started to learn Chinese. Umm, not bad for someone in their sixties. From 2013, I spoke (mainly in English) in several Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese universities, critiquing binary ballots and demonstrating, in their stead, multi-option voting. Umm, not bad for someone in their seventies. Then, in 2021, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences invited me to its inaugural (online because of Covid) International Forum on Democracy in Beijing; so I submitted a 10-minute power-point video. The next two Forums were hybrid. But with an all-expenses invitation to attend the ’25 event, I aimed to participate in the 4th Forum in Beijing, in person.
Accordingly, in November ’24 and mainly overland, I travelled via Strasbourg for the Council of Europe’s 14th World Forum on Democracy; next, to Baku for COP29; then, to Tbilisi to get an honorary degree; and finally, to India, to visit Dharamshala with its Tibetan refugees, followed by two university talks in Delhi on multi-option decision-making. I arrived in China in January ’25 and then, initially near Shangri-La at over 3,500 metres above sea level, I cycled from village to village to look at rural governance, before taking a train and resuming this rural research on my bike in the next province. Umm, not bad for someone in their eighties. But not good enough for NI’s media, I’m afraid; none of them! During the course of eight months, I visited ten provinces, not least Inner Mongolia, Xīnjiāng and Tibet. It was all well covered by The Irish Times, Meet the 82-year-old Belfast man cycling across China to understand how villages vote, but here in NI, there was and there still is nothing; the press has used its freedom to ignore.
In October ’25 I started for home, still overland, getting the Trans-Siberian from Beijing via Mongolia to Russia and Ukraine where, following yet more university presentations in Tiānjīn, Táipěi (and Ulaanbaatar), with lots of support from foreign academics, I gave further lectures in Moscow and Kiev, concluding in the former with the words, не убивай, (nye ubivai), thou shalt not kill. Kiev was cold; it was war. But the NI media were still just not interested. And that was yet another that.
Why? I don’t know. Why campaigning for peace should be ignored, especially when war is one of the greatest threats to the survival of our species, I have no idea. Suffice to say, I don’t just criticise, I also advocate an alternative: Jean-Charles de Borda’s MBC of 1770 for decision-making; for elections, the 1984 brainchild of the late Professor Sir Michael Dummett, the Quota Borda System QBS which was first tested here in NI; and a third Borda methodology, the matrix vote for governance. Three voting procedures, all used and shown to be robust … yet the first is largely, while the latter two are completely, ignored.
Why? As I say, I just don’t know. After all, these three voting systems could be the basis of a ‘win-win’ democratic polity; it could act as a catalyst for a polity of compassion, one which always aimed to identify the best possible compromise and render political violence unnecessary if not indeed obsolescent.
Maybe, like so many, the NI media believe that mantra, ‘democracy is majority rule’ and think that any criticism is anti-democratic. Maybe. Maybe they think our desperately imperfect democracy has already evolved to its apogee. Oh heaven forbid!
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The problem, I should add, is not just here in Belfast, or just here in these islands. As I mentioned, majority voting is ubiquitous … and often iniquitous, and not only in conflict zones. In continental Europe, where PR elections often lead to multi-party parliaments, the latter then divide into two, with a multi-party coalition taking over the government, confronted by another even smaller (in terms of number of parliamentarians) but with a larger (number of parties), multi-party opposition. From pluralism to dualism (or duelism). Forming a government can sometimes take days, weeks, months … and in Belgium, in 2010 – or was it 2011? – they argued for over a year, 541 days! With a matrix vote, the whole process could have been done in about a week!
Elsewhere in Europe, the situation is even more serious, for the extreme right is on the rise. Everyone knows that Hitler created his one-party state with a weighted majority vote, the 1933 Enabling Act. Today, throughout Germany, people are very aware of the policies of the Alternative für Deutschland, AfD … yet few if any are willing to question the ‘principle’ of majority rule. Why not? Again, I don’t know. But if AfD does get 50% + 1, it will then be too late….
It’s roughly the same with the PVV in The Netherlands, Reform in Britain and Sinn Féin in Ireland. Few parties are willing to coalesce with these extremists, but few if any are questioning the current German/Dutch/British/Irish political structures of majority rule: the electoral systems vary, but their decision-making is invariably binary. Only in other cultures do some question our collective addiction to the practice of ‘resolving’ a multi-option problem (like Brexit) with a binary vote on only one option, (a form of AI, artificial incompetence).
In the sub-Sahara, for example, “asking ‘yes-or-no’ questions is very unAfrican,” to quote a Rwandan Senator I met in 2003. Asia, too, is different, and while Christianity has had a huge influence on us Europeans, Hinduism and Buddhism tend to be less binary, and maybe a more compassionate, non-binary polity will emerge abroad. Oh if only the original architects of the House of Commons had not built an adversarial, one side versus the other, debating chamber; if only they had followed the good example of King Arthur and his round table…
Further info
Dr. Peter Emerson is the author of The Punters’ Guide to Democracy (2022) and Majority Voting as a Catalyst of Populism (2020), (Springer, Heidelberg). He is the director of the de Borda Institute.