2024-10-03 07:00:03
thehe nomination of Michel Barnier as Prime Minister, while his party largely lost the legislative elections, continues, rightly, to spark debate and anger in France. Our two-round majority system is the subject of legitimate criticism and questions, given that it does not prevent the President of the Republic from appointing a Prime Minister of his choice. Many observers and actors in political life highlight the proportional method more than ever as the only alternative to majority voting, even if this voting method also has disadvantages.
In reality there are others, some tested both on site – voters at several French polling stations were invited, immediately after voting in the first round of the presidential elections, to test other voting methods – or on the Internet with volunteers, or in research laboratories, or during local elections.
Searching for the most correct method of nomination, Condorcet (1743-1794) imagined a voting system for “judgments” based on «duels»more nuanced than our two-round system with only one member, the ideal winner, known as “the Condorcet winner”, being the one who would win all of his duels. For example, before the 2022 presidential elections, Emmanuel Macron was, if we refer to the polls of the time, a Condorcet winner: in the event of a duel with his two main opponents of the time, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon , he would come out on top every time. Thus, despite only 18% of the registered votes collected in the first round, Emmanuel Macron would have won even with another voting method.
A more mathematical method consists, for the voter, in assigning a score on a specific scale (for example between 0 and 10, or on a scale from -1 to 1) to each candidate, and not to just one, the one who got the highest score. most of the points will then be elected. A variant of “note voting”, already in force in the United States during the Saint-Louis municipal elections, is “binary approval voting”. which is equivalent to assigning a score of 0 or 1.
Eliminate the worst
The “majority judgement” is another voting method inspired by Condorcet: it asks voters to express their point of view on each candidate in a qualitative way by expressing a judgement. Each candidate, therefore, is assigned by each voter not a vote, but a vote to choose from six: excellent, very good, average, fair, unfavorable, to fail. The designation of the winner is then more complex: it is not a matter of simple arithmetic, but of choosing the one who was best evaluated by the majority of voters. This voting method allowed the candidate to be nominated during the left primaries a few years ago.
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