If Northern Ireland is ever to have a power-sharing arrangements which functions successfully, considertion should be given to a form of multi-option preference voting, instead of thinking that EVERY political question is a dichotomy! Accordingly, we recently sent the following letter to the press.
Dear Editor, Current proposals for decision-making in the seven super councils (envisaged by the Review of Public Administration) talk of 75% weighted majority voting. A disadvantage of such a system is that, in effect, any group of 25% or more can exercise a veto. And as was said some years ago, a veto is like a pistol in a Chekhov play: if it is on the mantelpiece in Act I, someone will use it in Act II.
Another more fundamental disadvantage of the weighted majority vote also applies to the consociational mechanism of the Belfast Agreement. Both of these methodologies are dichotomous: they both reduce every discussion to a majority vote or to a series of majority votes. So everything is either “option (or amendment) A, for or against?” or “option A versus option B”. In other words, the question is always a closed one.
In conflict resolution work, in contrast, professional mediators rely on open questions. If a similar approach were adopted in our political institutions so that contentious decisions were subject to a multi-option vote, then, by asking the councillors to express their preferences on a range of options, it would be possible to identify that option which was the most widely acceptable, i.e., the option which got the highest average preference.
In both weighted majority voting and consociational voting, there may be winners who win everything, and losers who get nothing. Consensus voting, in contrast, is inclusive, and because the outcome is an average, (and an average, by definition, involves everybody), it means that (almost) everyone wins something but that no-one wins everything. Furthermore, by establishing a minimum average preference rating, councillors may know, without any resort to ‘designations’, that the winning option has sufficient cross-community support.
Yours