How Napoleon Killed the Borda Count

Jean-Charles de Borda presented his voting method to the French Academy of Sciences in 1770: instead of each voter picking one candidate, voters rank all candidates. Last place earns one point, second-to-last earns two, and so on up to the top rank, which earns as many points as there are candidates. The candidate with the highest total wins.

The method survived at the Academy for over three decades. Then Napoleon Bonaparte was elected to its membership in 1800, and in 1803 he pushed through a change in the Academy's election rules — returning to simple plurality voting. His reported remark was that the Borda method was "intended for the use of idiots," though the primary documentation of that phrase is secondhand.

The methodological case against plurality voting had been well-made by then. Borda's contemporary Nicolas de Condorcet had shown in 1785 that a candidate could win a plurality election while losing head-to-head against every other candidate — a phenomenon now called the Condorcet paradox. Borda's system, by collecting ranked preferences, at least forced voters to express more information.

Some researchers believe Napoleon opposed the method because he could foresee that it would disadvantage a well-known, polarizing figure — precisely the kind of candidate who tends to win plurality contests. That argument is plausible but undocumented.

The Borda Count remains in use. Nauru, a Pacific island nation, uses a modified version for parliamentary elections. The Eurovision Song Contest uses a Borda-adjacent weighted points system. The method Borda lost to Napoleon still turns up wherever voters need to aggregate preferences across multiple options.