Peter Emerson

The child of a mixed marriage, Peter Emerson was conceived in Northern Ireland (as far as he remembers) and born in England in 1943.  His first job was in submarines, where he rose - or sank - to the rank of first lieutenant.  But he gave it up to do voluntary work in what was called the third world, in Kenya.  Three years later, he cycled across Central Africa, and hence his first book, Inflation? Try a bicycle; “Dervla out-Murphied,” wrote The Irish Times.  He came to Belfast (from Africa) in 1975, initially just for a year, and was soon involved in the peace movement, both locally and in CND.  So in 1983, he started to learn Russian, cycled across the Iron Curtain in ’86, started work in Moscow two years later, cycled to the Urals in ’89, and wrote on consensus voting in Moscow News.  In 1990, his contract at an end, he went on his bike to Tirana, across Yugoslavia, which was imploding.  In Dec. ’92, he went to Sarajevo, to then cycle across Bosnia, twice, in winter and in war, in order to say on his return to Belfast, that majority voting doesn’t work well there either.

He now realised that his ’nobody-votes-no’ voting system had been invented already, in France, in 1770.  Hence, in 1997, the de Borda Institute, which today works internationally, from the Balkans to Russia and China, trying to wean people away from attempting to resolve contentious, multi-option questions (like Brexit, or NI, or Crimea, or Tibet) with simplistic binary votes.