This was a New Yorker article in July 2010. Writer Anthony Gottlieb was reviewing a book with the intriguing title “Numbers Rule: The Vexing Mathematics of Democracy, from Plato to the Present.” Something he told I found fascinating.
In old Italy, when the time came for the city of Venice to elect a new doge (think of a mayor with royal powers), the process by which the city officials conducted this election was something to behold. Tprocess involved seven steps. Here was the procedure….
–An official went to pray in St. Mark’s Basilica. Along the way, he grabbed the first kid off the streets he could find and took back to the palace to pull out ballots from a box. Inside were the names of all the grand families of Venice. The child was selecting people for an electoral college.
–Thirty electors were chosen that way. Then, a second drawing reduced the number to nine.
–Those nine nominated forty candidates, each of whom had to be approved by at least seven electors to make it to the next stage. The forty were then whittled down to 12.