lThe appointment of Michel Barnier to the position of Prime Minister, while his party largely lost the legislative elections, rightly continues to spark debate and anger in France. Our two-round majority system is the subject of legitimate criticism and questioning, 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 mode more than ever as the only alternative to majority voting, although this voting method also has disadvantages.
In fact, there are others, some of which have been tested in situ (voters at several polling stations in France were invited, just after voting in the first round of the presidential election, to try other voting methods), either on the Internet with volunteers, or in research laboratories, or during local elections.
Seeking which method of appointment would be the fairest, Condorcet (1743-1794) imagined a system of voting by “judgments” based on “duels”more nuanced than our two-round single-member system, with 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 at that time, the winner of Condorcet: in the event of a duel with his two main opponents at the time, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, he would always I would have won. Thus, despite the fact that only 18% of the registered votes were obtained in the first round, Emmanuel Macron would also have won with another voting method.
A more mathematical method consists, for the voter, of assigning a score on a certain scale (for example, between 0 and 10, or on a scale of -1 to 1) to each candidate, and not just to one, the one who obtains the highest score. then most of the points are chosen. A variant of the “vote by grades”, which is already in force in the United States during the municipal elections in Saint-Louis, is the “binary vote by approval”. which is equivalent to giving a score of 0 or 1.
Eliminate the worst
The “majority ruling” is another voting method inspired by Condorcet: it asks voters to express themselves qualitatively about each candidate by expressing a judgment. Thus, each candidate receives from each voter not a rating, but a rating to choose from among six: excellent, very good, average, average, unfavorable, to reject. The designation of the winner is then more complex: it is not a question of simple arithmetic, but of choosing the one that has been best evaluated by the majority of voters. This voting method allowed the candidate to be nominated during the leftist primaries a few years ago.
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