Letter: More inclusive, multi-option alternatives to binary voting are available
A letter from Peter Emerson:
When I asked the local council member about decision-making in the little village of Fēng Lì - it’s in China’s Guǎngxī Province - his answer was as simple as would have been our rule on Brexit: (I quote the words he used on his mobile), “the minority [must] obey the majority”. And China has over 50 minorities.
Furthermore, while we westerners preach democracy and all that, we sometimes forget that China was using binary voting over 2,000 years ago.
Secondly, a Chinese government was the world’s first to use multi-option voting, and that was in 1197, albeit just once; the UK followed, again just the once, in 1948; and Ireland has yet to even try.
Sadly, however, and with horrific consequences, Máo Zédõng reverted to majority thinking in the anti-rightist campaign of 1958, and to majority voting in the 'Great Leap Forward' (sic) which followed.
Suffice to say, majoritarianism was (perhaps not THE but definitely) a cause of:
l The Troubles;
l bolshevism - indeed, the word ‘bolshevik’ means 'member of the majority’ (and when it was first used, in 1903, there were just 19 of them;
l the referendums which started “all the wars in the former Yugoslavia,” (Oslobodjenje, Sarajevo’s newspaper, February 7, 1999) and now the war in Ukraine;
l the right-wing coalition in Israel; apparently, Netanyahu can go to bed with the devil, as long as his government is at least 50% + 1, he (and others) will regard it as democratic;
l the 1989 killings in Tiān’ānmén Square, for the decision to send in the tanks, it is said, was the result of a majority vote of the Communist Party’s Standing Committee… as if (as in Brexit) there was only one option - tanks, (remain), ‘yes’ or ’no’? and
l article 97 of the constitution of North Korea, which stipulates both simple and weighted majority voting (not that either are used very often… if at all).
So why do we continue to use binary voting when we know many supposed ‘opposites’ - e.g., Catholic or Protestant? Sunni or Shi’a? Republican or Democrat? etc. - are examples of non-duality; and when we know other, more inclusive, multi-option procedures are available (and have been, in some instances, since the year 1770)?
Peter Emerson, director, the de Borda Institute, Belfast