---
title: Majority Judgment
summary: A voting method where participants grade each option on a common scale; the winner is determined by the median grade rather than a plurality, reducing strategic voting and the "lesser evil" problem.
---

# Majority Judgment

Majority Judgment (Jugement Majoritaire) is a voting method developed by French mathematicians Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki, first published in 2007 and detailed in their 2011 book *Majority Judgment: Measuring, Ranking, and Electing*.

Rather than picking a single favourite, voters assign a grade to each candidate or option — for example: *Excellent / Good / Acceptable / Poor / Reject*. The winner is the option with the highest **median grade**: the grade that at least half of voters assigned or exceeded.

This sidesteps two well-known problems with plurality voting:

- **The lesser-evil problem** — voters feel forced to back a frontrunner they dislike rather than their true preference
- **Strategic voting** — exaggerating your preference to game the outcome is harder when the median, not the total, determines the winner

Majority Judgment is used in formal electoral experiments as well as everyday group decisions — choosing a restaurant, a meeting time, or a film — where the same "what does the group actually think?" question applies at a much smaller scale.

## Further reading

- [Majority Judgment — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_judgment)
- *Majority Judgment: Measuring, Ranking, and Electing* — Balinski & Laraki, MIT Press 2011
- [MieuxVoter explainer](https://mieuxvoter.fr) — French association promoting MJ adoption


## See also

- [Direct Democracy](direct-democracy.md)
- [Sortition](sortition.md)
- [MieuxVoter](../organisations/mieuxvoter.md)
