This essay provides a formal justification for qualified majority rules. Specifically, within an uncertain dichotomous choice framework, in which individual preferences are identical but actual judgments may differ, special majority rules emerge as decision rules that maximize the probability of...

This paper focuses on two properties of points voting schemes: their vulnerability to preference misrepresentation and their potential for preference expression. In the spirit of the seminal work of Buchanan and Tullock [2], this dual criterion might be used for the choice of an optimal points...