VENETIAN VOTING.

VENETIAN VOTING. The December Atlantic reported on this article, by Melinda Mowbray and Dieter Gollmann, which analyzes the rules the Venetians used to elect their doge for over 700 years, from 1268 until 1797. Table 1 in the article summarizes the procedure and displays its remarkable complexity. There were ten rounds in the procedure. Five of them were voting rounds and five of them involved a random selection of the voters in the next round. By the tenth round, 41 electors had been selected, and approval by 25 of them was enough for the election of the doge. The authors point out that there is uncertainty over the advantages of the procedure, even mentioning a theory that the procedure was chosen by the oligarchs for aesthetic reasons. I am inclined to the explanation that the random elements made it hard for permanent factions to develop. When they wrote our Constitution, our founding fathers were aware that most republics had had short lives. Complex voting schemes were helpful to the republics (or oligarchies using elections) that were successful. Venice certainly had a great deal of success over a long period. The Roman Republic had an extraordinarily complicated set of voting rules (with, as one example, two consuls serving for only one year). Florence had very complicated voting rules before the Medici found unofficial ways to get around them. The founding fathers were wise to construct a complicated system of checks and balances.