Median Rating Voting

[Rob Lanphier]

Well, here's three posts in three hours after not really participating for
more than a year. 

I got to thinking about my reply to DEMOREP, using absolute preferences to
map to relative preferences in the tallies, and that got me thinking.  The
absolute numbers could more easily be calculated by just taking the median
of the votes for all candidates.  Since that could be done, it follows
that one might have a good voting system by letting people rate candidates
on a scale of 0 to 100 (or whatever range you like) and merely taking the
median rating of all of the candidates, and declaring the candidate with
the highest median rating the winner. 

I'm probably greatly oversimplifying things and I'm sure I've skipped a
very important step, but in my sleep-deprived state, this seems like a
very simple and elegant system.  It almost certainly can't be an original
thought, so I'm wondering what name this is in academic work.

Rob Lanphier
robla at eskimo.com
http://www.eskimo.com/~robla