Time for voters to get negative to find a way forward in face of Brexit debacle?

Modern technology should allow us to improve on political methods used by Athenians in the 6th century BC.

It took mathematicians a long time to come up with the idea of negative numbers. If our leaders cannot get a majority for any course of action on Brexit we can avoid paralysis by deciding which of the possible options has the smallest number of opposing votes.

This idea could also be used for parliamentary elections. It would be likely to increase the turnout of people who disliked all the candidates but despised one of them even more than the others. Politicians with a low negative score could claim a strong mandate.

We can improve the accuracy of measurement of a fluctuating variable if we take the average of many observations over a long period. This could be done by allowing electors to record a vote and subsequently change it. The decision could be taken by counting the number of days for which an opinion had been held multiplied by the number of people who had held it.

This would avoid the scatter of spot measurements at single instants of time which can be affected by weather, recent television programmes – or even sports results.

Writing as an 80-year old, I feel uncomfortable about my vote counting the same as one from a person who will have to live much longer with the consequences of political decisions. It should be possible to agree a graph of vote weight which would balance a combination of wisdom and life expectancy. I had expected that its maximum would be somewhere between 30 and 50 years but the recent actions of babes and sucklings suggests a lower bias.

STEPHEN SALTER Blackford Road, Edinburgh