Nicholas of Cusa
Nicholas of Cusa - also known as Nicholas Cusanus or Nikolaus von Kues - was born in Kues in 1401 into a wealthy family. Kues is a small town on the Mosel valley situated between Trier and Koblenz.
He studied at the universities of Heidelberg, Padua and Cologne, had a very successful ecclesiastical career, becoming a cardinal, and died in Todi (Umbria) in 1464. He is generally considered as one of the greatest polymaths of the fifteenth century. He participated in the Council of Basel in 1433-34. It is during these years that he wrote his first major work De Concordantia Catholica (Nicholas of Cusa 1433) - an English translation, The Catholic Concordance, was published in 1991.In it, Cusanus devotes some paragraphs to the description of a voting method for the election of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. He considers an example with ten candidates. He assumes that each voter ranks the candidates without ties from the least preferred to the most preferred, giving marks from 1 to 10 on the basis of this ranking. He writes: “the teller must add up the numbers by each name, and the candidate who has collected the highest total will be emperor” (McLean and Urken 1995: 78). This is clearly Borda’s rule as it is now known. Cusanus adds:
By this method innumerable malpractices can be avoided, and indeed no malpractice is possible. In fact, no method of election can be conceived which is more holy, just, honest, or free. For by this procedure, no other outcome is possible, if the electors act according to conscience, than the choice of that candidate adjudged best by the collective judgment of all present. (McLean and Urken 1995: 78)
Cusanus does not mention the possibility of ties (whose probability is not negligible when the set of voters is small).