Majority judgment: a new voting method

The traditional theory of social choice offers no acceptable solution to the problems of how to elect, to judge, or to rank. The classical model —transforming the “preference lists” of individuals into a “preference list” of society— is fundamentally flawed in both theory and practice. We propose a more realistic model where voters evaluate the candidates in a common language of ordinal grades. This small change leads to an entirely new theory and method: « majority judgment ». It is at once meaningful, resists strategic manipulation, elicits honesty, and is not subject to the classical paradoxes encountered in practice, notably Condorcet’s and Arrow’s. We offer theoretical, practical, and experimental evidence—from national elections to figure skating competitions—to support the arguments.