In 2002, Westminster tried to reform the House of Lords. There were five options; they took five majority votes and lost the lot. In other words, for the given voters’ profile, they used a decision-making procedure by which a decision could not be made. Robin Cook MP then tried to introduce preference voting but in vain, because “that would have involved the technological development of a pencil and a piece of paper… too [much] for our parliament and its medieval procedures.” So, is there a chance for electronic voting in the Parliament of the UK?

Majority voting in parliaments

The term electronic voting usually refers to the electorate, rarely if ever to parliaments. And as shown in the book Defining Democracy (Springer, 2011), politicians like majority voting. It allows them to control almost the entire ‘democratic’ process: they write the question, and the question is (usually) the answer. In any plural democracy, however, there should invariably be more than two possible solutions to any controversy. A better solution would be debating all options by MPs and then vote electronically and in secret.

According to the author, Majority voting is inaccurate and highly adversarial. A more inclusive and democratic methodology is the Modified Borda Count (MBC), as demonstrated in an electronic vote in Belfast in 1991, three years before the IRA cease-fire, and many times since.



Guest Article by Peter Emerson
The de Borda Institute
www.deborda.org