The Real Preference of the Voters
Picture of the U.S. Constitution with a quote from Edward B. Foley.
Edward B. Foley’s latest article in the Wisconsin Law Review makes a timely and urgent case: if we want to preserve the Madisonian system of constitutional democracy, we must reform how we elect our leaders—especially the president and members of Congress.
Drawing from a largely overlooked 1823 letter written by James Madison, Foley shows that Madison, late in life, embraced the voting principles of Condorcet, a French thinker known for pioneering fair methods of majority decision-making. Madison’s key insight: sometimes, the candidate who is not in the top two in first-place votes is actually the true majority favorite—“the real preference of the Voters.”
Foley argues that today’s electoral system—driven by partisan primaries and plurality-winner general elections—is structurally incapable of producing candidates that reflect this “real preference.” That failure, he warns, is how a demagogue can be elected president and how Congress can be rendered powerless to check that president’s abuse of power.
Rather than scrapping the Constitution, Foley calls for fulfilling Madison’s own vision through Consensus Choice Voting: an election system that ensures the winner is the candidate who would defeat every other candidate in a one-on-one matchup.
In short, electoral reform is not just a policy preference—it’s a constitutional necessity. To protect our democracy from future authoritarian threats, we need elections that reflect the real preference of the voters.
Read the full article in the Wisconsin Law Review.
Subscribe to Ned Foley’s Substack newsletter, Common Ground Democracy.
