Storeable Votes: Giving Voice to Minority Preferences Without Sacrificing Efficiency

Abstract

[Introduction] The principle of majority rule is the foundation of democratic constitutions, but provides an immediate and fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of any government that the constitution empowers: the risk of excluding minority groups from representation. At least since Madison, Mill, and Tocqueville, political thinkers have argued that a necessary condition for the legitimacy of a democratic system is for no group with socially acceptable goals to be disenfranchised. In the history of constitutional law, ensuring fair representation to each group is seen as the crucial second step in the evolution of democratic institutions, after granting the franchise: once all individuals are guaranteed the right to participate in the political process, the problem remains how to assign appropriate weights to each group's political interest.The core of the difficulty is that the two goals seem inherently contradictory.

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