“Yin and Yang, a cosmic duality of opposing but complimentary…forces…lie at the centre of Chinese mystical thought.” Linda Jaivin, The Shortest History of China, 2023.
The world is very binary. Humans and lots of other creatures have two eyes and ears; many have two arms and legs; and on umpteen occasions, one is taken to be the opposite of the other.
Sometimes too our language is very binary… is it not? n’est-ce pas?duì bù duì? – to take English, French and Chinese examples. But some ‘opposites’ are in fact complimentary, like male and female; indeed, these two cannot be (pro)creative unless they cooperate.
Similarities
In the same way, democracy is for everybody, not just a majority. Furthermore, in a modern, pluralist society, every controversy - on new infrastructure, the economy, the constitution and so on - is almost bound to involve more than two possible outcomes.
So binary voting will inevitably be inadequate. James Hilton writes in Lost Horizon that some “people would be quite shocked by having to declare that one policy was completely right and another completely wrong".
There are two types of majority vote, the singleton – “Option X, yes or no?” – and a pairing – “Option X or Option Y?” Either way, to take a binary vote on a contentious topic is illogical. In debate, complex issues almost certainly involve several possible multi-optional solutions. There might, after all, be a majority against everything - as was the case in Brexit.
Secondly, to think that the Northern Ireland pairing – “Are you Protestant or Catholic?” – consists of two mutually exclusive opposites was obviously a mistake, for both are Christian.
In like manner, the dichotomy – “Are you Russian or Ukrainian?” – contains a legion of ethnic, linguistic and religious similarities; the question nevertheless turned a nuance into a nuisance, and now today’s totally non-sensical war.
Advocates
This binary approach to decision-making, however, is both ubiquitous and iniquitous. The queries – “Are you Serb or Croat?” “Arab or Jew?” “Sunni or Shi’a?” “Hutu or Tutsi?” all ignore the commonalities and focus on the differences.
Or consider the non-duality of the two Cold War ‘opposites’ – “Are you communist or capitalist?” Looking at 'communism' as practiced in Russia and China, the two ‘idealogies’ were both creeds based on greed. Both sought to exploit nature for the short-term gratification of current generations. And both were European in origin, with NATO confronting its eastern counterparts in Russia, and very nearly destroying us all!
So maybe we all got it wrong. Maybe, if we had followed our religious instincts more closely, we would have devised a better form of decision-making: not a procedure by which one faction then dominates another, either by arms armed – militarism – or arms raised – majoritarianism; rather, a methodology which encourages all concerned to come to a compromise.
Napoléon and countless other politicians wanted to use a system which they could control - the majority vote.
“Love thy neighbour,” demands the Christian, who then advocates democracy and, in contradictory and hypocritical mode, votes (‘for’ or) 'against’ the neighbour. In contrast, Hindus and Buddhists and even some Chinese atheists, often take a different view.
Dominance
- …those who are “free from pairs of opposites [are] easily liberated from bondage.” (Śrīmad Bhagavadgītā. 2024, Gita Press, India, Chap 5 [3], p 78);
- “…the nonduality of right and wrong [is] the state of a buddha.” Longchenpa, a Buddhist monk of the Nyingma tradition. (P. Christiaan Klieger. Tibet – A History Between Dream and Nation State.)
- “Western civilisation is built on a philosophical-theological tradition of binary antagonisms,” (Jiang Shigong, quoted by Peter Frankopan, The New Silk Roads, Bloomsbury, 2019, p 153).
Given, however, the international dominance of western ways, and the fact that many Asian countries now use majority voting, maybe they have got it wrong too.
Divisive
China started to use majority voting, albeit only in the Imperial court, about 400 years after it was first deployed by the Greeks. Michael Wood argues in The Story of China that ancient Greece almost certainly had had “contact across Central Asia with China in the late fourth century BCE.” Whether these contacts involved discussions on the use of voting is unknown.
Nevertheless, starting with Pliny the Younger in Rome in the year 105, many realised that binary voting on non-binary problems was unwise - if not indeed crazy!
Hence his innovation of plurality voting, first used on a three-option vote in 1197 by a Chinese (or rather Jurchen) government to resolve the question of war with Mongolia; much later, in 1894, New Zealand had its first of a few multi-option referendums, the most recent a five-option ballot in 1992.
Other multi-option methodologies include approval voting (1268), the Borda count points system (1433), two-round voting (1775), the Condorcet rule (1785) and the alternative or single transferable vote AV or STV (1821).” .
But Napoléon and countless other politicians wanted to use a system which they could control, so they maintained or re-introduced the divisive and exclusive majority vote. It has been used everywhere.
Hopeless
The Bolsheviks used it; indeed, this very word means “members of the majority”. But it was a tiny majority: in 1903, 39 members of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party voted on a relatively trivial matter, 19:17:3, ‘for’, ‘against’ or ‘abstain’. So there was no majority (bolshinstvo), just three minorities (menshinstvo), and the runners-up were called the Mensheviks.
In China, Máo Zédōng urged the majority to “smash the minority.” Later, “some 3.6 million party members were labelled or purged as rightists” and later again, in countless village tribunals, binary votes were used during the so-called Great Leap Forward… as sentences of death.
Furthermore, majority voting is still used today. In 1979, for example, the Chinese Communist Party Standing Committee took a singleton vote, it is said, when debating the students in Tiān’ānmén Square. It was military intervention ‘yes’-or ‘no’… as if only two options were possible… and it ‘won’ by just one vote.
Majority voting is also enshrined in the Constitution of North Korea: not that it’s used very often, for its parliament meets just once a year.
In summary, binary voting is inadequate, often inaccurate and invariably hopelessly inappropriate. Inter alia, it is now used by both sides of the new Cold War. And yet, as so often happens in countless disputes – domestic, industrial, party political, governmental and international – both sides are at fault.
Favourite
In their Conferences of the Parties COPs, as in COP29 in Baku (which this author attended), the United Nations accepted that nearly 200 nations cannot achieve a compromise by a majority vote.
Not yet, however, have they chosen a decision-making methodology by which a compromise is possible if not indeed probable, despite the fact that just such a procedure already exists.
It’s like this: the democratic debate which precedes the vote should aim to achieve, not a stark choice of just two options, but a short list of, usually, four to six options. In voting on such a ballot:
- she who casts just one preference (and says nothing about the other options) gets 1 point for her favourite (and nothing for the rest);
- she who casts two preferences gets her favourite 2 points and her 2nd choice 1 point;
and
- those who cast all five preferences get 5 points for their favourite, 4 for their 2nd choice, 3 for their 3rd, and so on.
Federation
The difference is always one point. She who abstains shall have no influence on the eventual outcome; she who participates partially shall have a partial influence on the results; while those who submit full ballots shall have a full influence.
A voter’s (x)th preference option, however, will always get just one point more than her (x+1)th preference option, regardless of whether or not she has cast that (x+1)thpreference.
The system is unbiased and fair. The effect is to encourage the voters to state, not only their favourite option, but also their compromise options - and if everyone does that, the collective compromise can easily be identified: the option with the most points.
This procedure, the Modified Borda Count MBC, was first devised in 1770 by the French scientist, Jean-Charles de Borda.
Peace is possible. Northern Ireland does not have to be either British or Irish; it could be under joint authority, or in a W-I-S-E (Wales-Ireland-Scotland-England) federation, or whatever.
Compromise
The debate is multi-optional. The means by which the matter is to be settled, the vote, should therefore also be multi-optional and, ideally, preferential.
In 1991, when Ukraine voted on independence, every district (oblast) voted in favour, many by as much as 80 per cent and more.
Only one, the Crimea, had a close result – a majority of 54 per cent. So maybe it would have been wiser, in 1991 let alone later, to allow Crimea to have a form of joint authority or some such compromise.
The Israeli democratic system means that the Arabs, currently 20 per cent of the population, have just 10 per cent of the MPs in parliament and 0 per cent of the government.
Critique
As stated above, however, democracy is for everybody, not just a majority. Accordingly, all-party power-sharing should be the international democratic norm, not just the exception for conflict zones.
In COP30 in Brazil and in all future COPs, no one country should ever have a veto - the basis of which is the very opposite of that of consensus. Instead, all should agree to accept a decision-making methodology which allows for the identification of the best possible compromise.
That’s the problem: both nationally and internationally, many individual politicians and certain nations do not want to compromise; instead, therefore, they often veto the use of any decision-making methodology which caters for compromise. From Napoléon and before, ’twas ever thus.
Given, then, that such pious souls as Ramón Llull – (in 1299, he spoke of preferential voting) – and Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa – (who in 1433 invented what became known as the Borda Count) – is it not time the religious and secular of this world got together to critique majority voting and propose a more consensual form of decision-making?
This Author
Peter Emerson is the director, the de Borda Institute. At the time of writing, Peter was on his Brompton in China, studying their use of binary voting, especially in village councils.