Dear assorted people (mainly election- & pope-experts / enthusiasts): The Catholic popes between 1294 and 1621 were chosen by a process incorporating (what election methods experts now call) "approval voting." This is generally thought to be a better voting method than the one now (unfortunately) in most-wide use, "plurality voting." And I believe an even-better method is "range voting," also called "score voting."
Voting methods are important since they are the decision-making algorithm for the world. As a rough estimate, if the world were to switch to range voting, that'd save about 5500 lives per day in expectation. So it is important to study how well allegedly-better voting systems *really* work. Hence for some years I have tried to put together a history of all the pope-approval-elections. This is probably the largest-yet historical study of how approval voting works in practice in high-stakes elections. (Albeit it was not really "approval voting" alone since there were a few other crucial rule-ingredients also, e.g. 2/3 supermajority requiement and ubi periculum.) My goal was to ascertain how well approval voting worked in real life under severe stress. By "severe" I mean that these conclaves were some of the nastiest elections imaginable and every possible stratagem was tried to game the system. The summary-of-conclusions of my investigations is the following web page: http://rangevoting.org/PopeSummary.html and critique/discussion of those conclusions is http://rangevoting.org/PopeCritique.html and a great deal of information underlying all that is found on further subpages including: http://rangevoting.org/PopeElectionStories.html http://rangevoting.org/ApprovalPopes.html http://rangevoting.org/PopeApprovalSystem.html http://rangevoting.org/ListOfPopes.html Unfortunately I have little legitimacy as a pope-scholar or historian and feel considerable disquiet in acting as though I am good at that. The study in its present form is by no means the last word. Only reason I undertook this study was since nobody else did. I would prefer it if those who genuinely are qualified at that, would contribute. (In fact, I would have felt better if they'd done practically everything!) However, you can do so by sending me your comments, rewrites, etc... there is no reason the present wording or authorship must remain set in stone. -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step) and math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
