Marianne, Thanks for the explanation. This helps. Maybe we should'nt vote for people anymore, but for the goals we want them to strive for. Parafrasing your sentence, in would sound like this: Ideally, a voting system should take these millions of preference rankings as input, and return a single ranking of targets that makes reasonable democratic sense. Then candidates could come up with their proposals to serve this the best they can. Like a business plan... The best offer wins.