The historical development of preferential voting

Abstract

The story of the historical development of the various systems of preferential voting represents a fascinating study in the way institutions evolve and adapt over time. While a rank-ordering of preferences between different alternatives are a fundamental part of any decision-making process, it was not until the eighteenth century that electoral methods for such choices began to be formalised. Preferential voting as a concrete electoral system, rather than a theoretical decision-making rule, originally evolved as a compressed form of run-off election, in which a second round of voting takes place if no candidate secures a majority in the first round; the key to preference voting is its ability to aggregate preference rankings in one round, rather than having to go through successive sequences of elections. The possibilities of such aggregations of rank-orders, via assigning weighted scores to each preference rank, was originally suggested by the French mathematician Charles de Borda in the eighteenth century in relation to decision-making procedures for assemblies and committees, but was vigorously criticised by one of the giants in the field of voting theory, the Marquis de Condorcet, who instead advocated exhaustive pairwise comparisons between each candidate, rather than Borda's rank-order aggregations (McLean and Hewitt 1994, 45).