There has been a great deal of work on voting science over the past ~200 years. Unfortunately, the conclusions are "it depends". Is the system you describe better than the current system? It depends on what is considered important.
Here is a summary of vote aggregation methods and some ways to measure their efficiency and fairness: http://lorrie.cranor.org/pubs/diss/node4.html Excerpt: The paradox of voting is the coexistence of coherent individual valuations and a collectively incoherent choice by majority rule. In an election with three or more alternatives (candidates, motions, etc.) and three or more voters, it may happen that when the alternatives are placed against each other in a series of paired comparisons, no alternative emerges victorious over each of the others: Voting fails to produce a clear-cut winner. William H. Riker, 1982 [86] The paradox of voting was discovered over 200 years ago by M. Condorcet, a French mathematician, philosopher, economist, and social scientist. However, it received little attention until Duncan Black [13] explained its significance in a series of essays he began in the 1940s. The importance of the voting paradox was not fully realized until several years after Kenneth Arrow published Social Choice and Individual Values [3] in 1951, which contained his General Possibility Theorem. The essence of this theorem is that there is no method of aggregating individual preferences over three or more alternatives that satisfies several conditions of fairness and always produces a logical result. Arrow's precisely defined conditions of fairness and logicality have been the subject of scrutiny by other scholars. However, none have found a way of relaxing one or more of these conditions that results in a generally satisfactory voting system immune from the voting paradox. Thus Arrow's theorem has the profound implication that in many situations there is no fair and logical way of aggregating individual preferences -- there is no way to determine accurately the collective will of the people. Social choice theorists have invented many vote aggregation systems and have attempted to determine the most appropriate systems for a variety of voting situations. Although there is some agreement about which characteristics are desirable in a vote aggregation system, there is much disagreement as to which characteristics are most important. In addition, the selection is often influenced more by political circumstances than by the advice of theorists. Thus the popularity of a voting system is not necessarily an indication of its fairness [66]. The choice of a vote aggregation system can influence much more than the results of an election. It can also influence the ability of analysts to interpret election results, and in turn the ability of representatives to understand the wishes of the people they represent and the satisfaction of the electorate that they have had the opportunity to express themselves. This is due to the fact that the various vote aggregation systems require voters to supply varying amounts of information about their preferences and that some systems tend to encourage voters to report their preferences insincerely. In addition, the choice of vote aggregation system could affect the stability of a government, the degree to which an organization embraces or resists change, and the extent to which minorities are represented. It could also affect the ability of the members of an organization to achieve compromise. This section explores the many types of vote aggregation systems.... _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
