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Majority Judgment

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Majority Judgment (Jugement Majoritaire) is a voting method developed by French mathematicians Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki, first published in 2007 and detailed in their 2011 book Majority Judgment: Measuring, Ranking, and Electing.

Rather than picking a single favourite, voters assign a grade to each candidate or option — for example: Excellent / Good / Acceptable / Poor / Reject. The winner is the option with the highest median grade: the grade that at least half of voters assigned or exceeded.

This sidesteps two well-known problems with plurality voting:

  • The lesser-evil problem — voters feel forced to back a frontrunner they dislike rather than their true preference
  • Strategic voting — exaggerating your preference to game the outcome is harder when the median, not the total, determines the winner

Majority Judgment is used in formal electoral experiments as well as everyday group decisions — choosing a restaurant, a meeting time, or a film — where the same "what does the group actually think?" question applies at a much smaller scale.

Extensions

Ways Majority Judgment can be combined with other mechanisms to cover cases it doesn't handle on its own:

  • Weighted lottery for repeated decisions. Like most voting methods, Majority Judgment is winner-take-all, so in decisions a group makes again and again, a consistent minority can lose every time (think of friends who pick a restaurant together every week, where the one vegetarian is always outvoted). A random ballot, which draws the winner by lot weighted by support, is one proposed remedy, with Majority Judgment's grades still used to rule out options most voters reject (see Random Ballot: Extensions).

Further reading

See also