  We analyze Assessment Voting, a new two-round voting procedure that can be
applied to binary decisions in democratic societies. In the first round, a
randomly-selected number of citizens cast their vote on one of the two
alternatives at hand, thereby irrevocably exercising their right to vote. In
the second round, after the results of the first round have been published, the
remaining citizens decide whether to vote for one alternative or to ab- stain.
The votes from both rounds are aggregated, and the final outcome is obtained by
applying the majority rule, with ties being broken by fair randomization.
Within a costly voting framework, we show that large elec- torates will choose
the preferred alternative of the majority with high prob- ability, and that
average costs will be low. This result is in contrast with the literature on
one-round voting, which predicts either higher voting costs (when voting is
compulsory) or decisions that often do not represent the preferences of the
majority (when voting is voluntary).

Econometrics;Probability