On Vote Poem by Marcel Aouizerate

There's a side of our voting system which I find grossly overlooked, and the more people become dissatisfied with their representative bodies, the more overlooked it is.

Force used to rule, and then divine powers, laced with those atavistic sources of legitimacy, crystallized also the path of consent; fighting tyranny was the primary reason why a (not even so much) democratic voting rule was adopted in ancient Greece. Pretty much everyone admits that the democratic voting rule is meant to put excessive power in check.

What's less apparent perhaps is that our usual form of voting, i.e. one man one vote, also works as a protection against the other side of the ledger: it protects us from excessive citizenry.

Think about it for a minute, should we adopt an intensity voting rule (à la Borda for example, where one could rate her preferences on a scale) then those most extremely convinced on a given issue, would surely steer our collective decisions toward the most extreme result.

And it pains me to think, but having turned wide open the spigot of barely disguised corporate bribery, the US have come very close to implementing an intensity voting rule. It should not surprise us that we get grimacing results in return.

I realise that I may state the obvious - I've been told, I made a speciality of this - so let me anchor the argument in something perhaps more aesthetically minded. In the Second Coming, W. Yeats wrote the following haunting verse:

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

This in my view summarises to the perfection with what our institutions, voting rules included, try to deal.

http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem)