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Majority Judgment

This project is a web application for creating, running and visualizing majority judgment polls.


You can use the app by visiting https://vote.sirtak.fr/en

Or if you want to host it yourself you can start with these instructions : Hosting instructions

To contact us, you can open an issue at https://github.com/AdrienJarretier/mj-polls/issues


Principle of majority judgment


The Majority judgment is a voting system designed to elect a winner based on the evaluation of all candidates by the voters. This system was shown to significantly reduce strategic and dishonest votes.

Indeed, this procedure offers several advantages over existing alternatives :

  • It allows voters to truly say how they feel about all candidates. This is a strong improvement over the widespread first-past-the-post electoral systems (AKA single-member plurality voting), where only one candidate must be chosen, and the voter can not express any opinion about the others.

  • By allowing voters to grade each candidate there is no Vote splitting anymore.

  • A voter can express strong judgment differences by exploiting the entire range of grades, or even give the same grade to candidates they equally value. None of these are possible in ranked voting systems, in which candidates are simply ordered by preference.

  • The need for Tactical voting is nullified

  • It does not suffer from Condorcet's paradox

  • By using common language to grade the candidates instead of a ranking them and assuming the question of the poll is precise, it avoids Arrow's impossibility theorem.


The voting process is as follows :

  • Voters give each candidate an ordered qualitative value reflecting their opinion. Traditionnally, the voters appreciation can be expressed within a list of grades, such as : Excellent, Very good, Good, Acceptabl, Poor, To Reject.

Poll Example

  • For each candidate, the majority grade is computed, and serves as a ranking metric among candidates.

  • The winner is the candidate with the best majority grade. If more than one candidate has the same majority grade, the winner is discovered by removing one vote from that grade in each of the tied candidates, this is repeated until only one of the previously tied candidates currently has the highest median grade.

Results Example

It was introduced by two INRIA researcher in 2007, Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki.

Balinski M. and R. Laraki (2007), A Theory of Measuring, Electing and Ranking, PNAS, 104(2), 8720-8725.


More ressources on voting systems :