Winston Churchill is often quoted as saying that democracy is a very bad system, but all the others are worse. The last part of his saying meets with near-universal acclaim. But not enough weight is put on the first part.

At a minimum democracy requires majority voting. Here, however, one comes to an immediate snag. A majority has a clear-cut meaning only if there are just two candidates or two possible policies. Otherwise, one runs into the voting paradox that was discovered by the 18th-century French thinker the Marquis de Condorcet.