2025-31 Letter from Ukraine: another binary!
Friday, November 21, 2025 CRC to pubish: Letter from Ukraine.
Majority rule - one lot wins everything, while the other lot loses everything - came to dominate politics, long after the Greeks devised majority voting, some 2,500 years ago. There were no political parties in those old days, so anyone - (men only, I’m afraid) - could vote with a neighbour today, and against him tomorrow, without the two of them falling into antagonistic groups (or political parties) in permanent opposition to each other.
Parties came later: whoever designed the House of Commons ignored the example of King Arthur's round table and built a two-sided debating chamber. So they started to abuse each other: “You tories!” (‘Papist bandits’) shouted one side; “Oh you whigs,” ('Presbyterian bigots') replied the others. Hence, the two-party system. It’s “a frightful despotism,” said George Washington; but party politics and majority rule became well established: government versus opposition.
And adversarial binary politics has survived. In 105, Pliny the Younger realised that, when there are three or more options on the table, majority voting has serious limitations: he proposed plurality voting. The debate resumed after the Dark Ages, with approval voting in Venice in 1268; Ramón Llull suggested preferential voting in 1299, and Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa proposed a points system in 1433; in 1770, this became the Borda count BC, after Jean-Charles de Borda. The two-round system came in 1775; the Condorcet rule dates from 1785; and finally (for this short summary), the alternative or single transferable vote AV or STV - the Americans call it ranked choice voting RCV - the invention of Thomas Hill in 1821.
1 Majority voting is either a singleton - “Option X, yes or no?” - or a pairing - “Option X or option Y?” With singletons, there might be a majority against everything, as in Brexit; with a pairing, there will always be a definite outcome, but whether this is the most popular remains unproven.
2 In plurality voting, the punter or representative chooses just one of three or more options; the winner may have a majority, or maybe just the largest minority.
3 Approval voting is non-preferential; the punter may ‘approve’ of an option if she thinks it is brilliant, good, or just ok. The option with the most ‘approvals’ is the winner.
The next three are all preferential.
4 In a BC on n options, a 1st preference gets n points, a 2nd gets (n-1) points, and so on; the option with the most points wins.
5 In a Modified MBC, if the punter casts m preferences, her 1st preference gets m points. So she who casts only one preference gets her favourite just 1 point; and those who cast all n preferences get their favourite n points, {their 2nd choice (n-1) points, etc.}.
6 Like a sports league, comparing options (or teams) two at a time, the Condorcet rule identifies the option which wins the most pairings (or matches).
Most of these methodologies are ‘win-or-lose’. The MBC, however, is win-win; it's the only methodology which is always egalitarian, people vote ‘yes’ to their favourite, or ‘yes’ in their order of preference to two or more options… but no-one votes ’no’.
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While electoral systems vary enormously, from binary voting in North Korea to (the British invention of) PR-STV in Ireland, decision-making varies hardly at all: nearly every country uses majority voting! Furthermore, the GFA states that we the voters should have preferential voting when electing our Assembly, but that we should not have preferential voting in any future referendum. Decision-making in the Assembly, albeit consociational, should also be binary.
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Politics is adversarial, mainly because it is based on the old Greek binary vote. It could be more consensual. In every debate in, say, a five-party assembly, every party could submit an option; each would be debated in turn and amended, only if the proposing party agreed to that change; then, when all was said but not yet done, the Speaker would call for a vote on, let’s say, a five-option ballot:
+ he who casts one preference gets his favourite only 1 point;
+ she who casts two preferences gets her favourite 2 points, (and her 2nd choice 1 point);
and so on; accordingly:
+ those who cast all five preferences get their favourite 5 points, (their 2nd choice 4, etc.).
In effect, this MBC encourages every voter to submit a full ballot; to recognise the validity of the other options; to cross the gender gap, the party divide, and even the sectarian chasm; to state their compromise option(s)... and if everybody does state their compromise option, the collective compromise is the option with the most points, with the highest average preference. And an average, of course, includes every voter, not just a majority of them. Democracy is for everybody, not just the winners. By definition, a democratic decision-making procedure should be egalitarian… like the MBC.
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“Ulster says ‘no’!” shouted thousands in 1985. One week later, six of us held a banner: “We have got to say ‘yes’ to something.” And six months later we held the New Ireland Group’s Peoples’ Convention, under the late Dr John Robb: an open, public meeting, with some 200 participants, from Sinn Féin to the UPRG, all except the DUP.
Participants sat in a tiered, concentric circle. They paused, initially, for silence. Next, they listened to the late John Hewitt reading his Anglo-Irish Accord. And then the debate: everything was ‘on the table’ if it complied with the UN Charter on Human Rights; and finally, on ten options, they voted, ‘yes’ to a favourite, or ‘yes’ in their order of preference to a number of options... but no-one voted ’no’! Sure enough, a compromise was found: “NI to have devolution and power-sharing, within a tripartite Belfast-Dublin-London agreement.” A mini-GFA, just 12 years ahead of its time.
But this procedure of voting had already been invented, in 1770, by yes, M de Borda, in France. It was adopted by l’Académie des Sciences, though then rejected by the latter's new boss. He wanted to control things, so he brought back majority voting; he chose the one and only option - himself; and in a binary referendum in 1803, he became l’empereur, Napoléon. A ‘democratic dictator’ he might have said.
He was followed by Mussolini and Hitler et al, all using binary voting… but the first one to ’dictate properly' and get 100% was an Irishman, Bernardo O’Higgins, in 1818, in Chile.
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Given that majority voting is so manipulable, while the MBC is so robust and accurate, we suggest that everyone involved in collective decision-making - in community groups, trades unions, political parties or whatever - adopts the MBC. If only for the sake of Ukraine. It could even help COP 30 reach consensus decisions, and thus ensure the human race actually survives.
