Electing the Doge of Venice: Analysis of a 13th Century Protocol

This paper discusses the protocol used for electing the Doge of Venice between 1268 and the end of the Republic in 1797. We show that it has some useful properties that in addition to being interesting in themselves, also suggest that its fundamental design principle is worth investigating for application to leader election protocols in computer science. For example, it gives some opportunities to minorities while ensuring that more popular candidates are more likely to win, and offers some resistance to corruption of voters. The most obvious feature of this protocol is that it is complicated and would have taken a long time to carry out. We also advance a hypothesis as to why it is so complicated, and describe a simplified protocol with very similar properties.