Author: Peter Emerson, Director, the de Borda Institute, Belfast, Northern Ireland. MY RESEARCH At school, I was interested in politi...
MY RESEARCH
At school, I was interested in politics but, for reasons various, in 1961, I joined the British navy, to then become a submarine officer. Having seen some of the poverty that (still) afflicts this world, however, I resigned my commission in 1970 to then spend three years teaching maths and physics in a school for the poor in Nairobi, and oneyear travelling on a push-bike across ten countries in Central Africa. Having studied poverty as it were on the ground, I was ready to enter politics. I returned to the UK, but there was one major problem I knew little about.Accordingly, in January ’75, as the child of an English Catholic mother and Irish Protestant father, I then settled in Belfast, initially to work in youth and community work, and then in the peace movement.
“Are you Catholic or Protestant?” I was often asked. (“God knows!” was my favourite answer.) The other conflict of those days was the much bigger Cold War, but that too was based on a binary question, “Are you communist or capitalist?” Working as a community worker in North Belfast, Iwas crossing the ‘peace line’ on an almost daily basis; it was time to do the same in the other conflict, to cross the Iron Curtain, so in 1983, I started to learn Russian.
In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev took over in the Kremlin. The Cold War was no more. The British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke, said, 'The British Government has no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland' and, like day follows night, 1985 bore witness to the (long overdue) Anglo-Irish Agreement. But night returned: to a crowd of 100,000 at Belfast City Hall, Ian Paisley said, shouted, screamed, “Ulster says ‘NO’!” So one week later at the same venue, six of us stood, in silence, with a banner, “We have go to say ‘yes’ to something.”
We then organised an open, cross-community conference, the main purpose of which was to identify an acceptable constitutional settlement. Over 200 members of the public, persons from priests to paramilitaries, and politically from Sinn Féin to the UDA (Ulster Defence Association),sat in plenary in one large tiered circle, initially in silence;a poem, especially commissioned for the occasion, was then read by its poet, the late John Hewitt… and the atmosphere was palpable! Any participant could propose an option, as long as it complied with the UN Charter; every proposal was considered in separate workshops; and finally, everyone returned to plenary to cast their preferences on a ballot of ten options, but no-one said, (let alone shouted), and no-onevoted, ‘no.’ Instead, everyone said ‘yes’ to something or, in their order of preference, ‘yes’ to a few things… and sure enough, a consensus was identified: “Northern Ireland to have devolution and power-sharing within a Belfast-Dublin-London tripartite agreement,” a mini-Belfast Agreement, just 12 years ahead of its time. At best, such a consensus is the option which gains everyone’s highest average preference; the voting procedure is non-majoritarian.
A secondary purpose of the seminar was to experiment with that which is today called the matrix vote: it is the only colour-blind voting procedure by which an elected chamber may elect an executive, with every member choosing, in their order of preference, not only those whom they want to be in cabinet, but also the ministry in which they wish each to serve.
So – back to the no-one-votes-‘no’ ballot – why hadn’t this preferential decision-making voting mechanism been used before? I asked myself. After all, it’s so simple! I studied the science of social choice. Ah ha, it had! In the 19th, 18th, 15th and 13th Centuries respectively, Charles Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll), Jean-Charles de Borda and Le Marquis de Condorcet, Nicholas Cusanus and Ramón Llull had all spoken of preferential voting. While multi-option (but not preferential) voting, first used in government in China in the 12th, hadoriginallybeen proposed in the 2ndCentury by Pliny the Younger. So only the matrix vote was my invention; the preferential points system of voting had long since been in the public domain and on the academic (if not the political) syllabus: by accident of history, the methodology, first devised in 1433, was called a Borda Count, whereas the mechanism devised by M de Borda is now called the Modified Borda Count MBC.
We held three conferences on this theme, all of them cross-community… and then I went to study Russian in the Pushkin Institute in Moscow, cycling from The Hague across the Iron Curtain to Warsaw, and completing the journey by train.
TIME
I devised a prototype of today’s MBCin the late 1970s; the first thoughts were made public in a letter to the press in 1977; a book came out one year later, the subject matter including lots of aspects of peace-making; and in 1991, I published my first book devoted entirely to the subject of voting: a samizdat entitled Consensus Voting Systems, and itdescribed both the BC and the matrix vote.
In 1994, having now understood the difference between the BC and the MBC, I decided to write a fuller text: The Politics of Consensus and this, I thought, was the definitive text. Silly me; I have now written another ten: the first half-dozen were all samizdats, but the last six have come from Springer in Heidelberg.
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
My principle research tool was (and still is) the practical demonstration, not only in these islands but also further afield.I critique binary voting, and then facilitate a multi-option debate on a contentious topic: in Northern Ireland, this always was and still is the constitutional question; in the Republic of Ireland, the chosen topics varied from electoral system to divorce reform; in Moscow in 1988, with Gorbachev’s perestroika well under way, the subject matter concerned business management; in Sarajevo in 1996, all the talk was again of the local constitution; in Edinburgh in 1997, it concerned Scotland’s relationship with London, and so on.
In the first experiments in Belfast, we used paper ballots, and an analysis of the voters’ profile was available only after a day or two… which was not so good. Accordingly, in 1991, the count was computerised; it was still a paper ballot, but while a well-known individual gave a key-note speech – on this first occasion, our guest was Michael D Higgins, the current President of Ireland – the data was fed into a computer and thus I could then present the voters’ profile to all the participants. Today, a further development is possible: participants can register on our de Bordasoft-ware programme www.debordavote.com and do everything on their smart phones. Everything includes:
+ compiling
the list of options;
+ casting
their preferences;
and
+ viewing
their voters’ profile.
The
last two items can be effected almost simultaneously. A report of our latest demo is on www.deborda.org
INSPIRATION
I was living in a war zone.
Changing an idée fixe is difficult. Living in Moscow in the late ‘80s, where so many had realised that they had just experience a horrible 50-year-long experiment in communism, people were interested in new ideas, and I was published in Moscow News and then, alongside Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in Russia’s leading literary journal, Novy Mir. But in these islands, influencing the media and academia was more difficult.
On returning from Moscow in 1990, by bicycle again, I visited the Balkans for the first time. Yugoslavia was collapsing. Slovenia had fought, Croatia was fighting, and Bosnia would be next. So for out next consensus experiment, the above mentioned 1991 gathering, I invited a guest from Sarajevo, PetarRadji-Histić, and we tried to say, please, no binary elections, not in Bosnia which, after its election (or sectarian headcount) of 1990 was divided 40:30:20 Muslim:Orthodox:Cathoic, so there was no majority! The Badinter Commission disagreed; the referendum was held; Radovan Karadžić had said it would start a war; and on the day of the vote, the barricades went up in Sarajevo. It was war.
So I went there. (Serbo-Croat is very similar to Russian); Petar helped me get a journalist’s UN pass, I first visited Sarajevo in December 1992, and then, from Zagreb via Banja Luka, Belgrade, Zvornik, Sarajevo and Mostar, I cycled across Bosnia, twice, in winter and in war, in order to say on my return to Belfast, that majoritarianism doesn’t work well there either. (A bicycle – a ‘no-skin’ vehicle – is the safest means of transport in a war-zone.)
There was little reaction at home, so I started to write in foreign journals, and I have now been published in peer-reviewed publications in Belgium (1), Canada(1), China (1), England (3), Germany (3), Indonesia (1), Ireland (1), Poland (1), Russia (1), Scotland (1), Ukraine (1) and the USA (2).
EDUCATION
Like Jean-Charles de Borda, I am a retired naval officer. He was the captain of a French frigate in the American war of independence, I was only a First Lieutenant. I did go to a university – to Queen’s in Belfast – in 1984, but I did not complete the course because, with one year remaining for a degree, I was offered a job as a Russian/English translator. So I remain unqualified; I’m now 81, but I’m learning Chinese and I recently participated in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences ‘Forum on International Democracy; the Shared Human Values.’
LINKS
The de Borda webpage is www.deborda.org
The
de Borda software is www.debordavote.com
My
submission to the Chinese Academy https://vimeo.com/919681575 There is a short introduction
in (my not very good) Chinese, but the rest is in English.
Research article:
https://globaljournals.org/GJHSS_Volume23/1-Evolving-Decision-Making.pdf
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