The on-line preferendum:

a tool for voting, conflict resolution and decision-making

by Dr. D. R. Newman <d.r.newman@qub.ac.uk>,
School of Management, Queen's University Belfast,
and Mr. P. J. Emerson, The de Borda Institute.

Abstract

There has been a lot of work in Northern Ireland on consensus politics, since majoritarian votes, based on first choices, are predictably divisive. In meetings, Peter Emerson has used the de Borda preferendum as a tool to discover which options get most consensus support. Others have used option ranking and approval rating as a subtle opinion polling tool. Now David Newman has put the preferendum voting system on to the World-Wide Web, in a trial that has been running since last May.

Contents

• Introduction
• Preferendum voting for conflict resolution
  • The de Borda preferendum
  • Calculating the result of the vote
• Preferenda in opinion polling
• On-line preferenda
  • Early observations
  • Future plans
• Conclusions
• References