We need to talk about decision-making; from elections through boardrooms onto blockchain, unfit systems adjudicate: First-past-the-post under-represents, public forums suppress, "trust me" passes for proof. For twenty-one years I wondered what free & fair governance means. I have my answer — and a voting system that delivers.

Score for influence. Don't pick one option; rate them all. Scoring sidesteps Arrow's impossibility, kills vote-splitting, surfaces group's actual want. Theorem: Scoring increases collective happiness — machine-checked.

A coffee-loving majority spreads affection between three cafés, while two monster-raving-loony Brits back tea as a bloc and win; score every option instead, and coffee, the real favourite, wins.

Encrypt for freedom. Mark in private, encrypt, tally under encryption, reveal collective decision. Theorem: Stakeholder vote is indistinguishable from any other with same collective score — individual stakeholder preferences are confidential — cryptographically guaranteed.

Secrecy buys honesty. A director who'd never challenge the chair marks their true preference. Encrypted throughout, only the collective decision surfaces, never the director's dissent.

Verify for legitimacy. Everybody lies; don't trust, verify. An absolute path from announced decision back to actual preferences. Garbage, unauthorised and superseded ballots discarded. Theorem: Collective score sums final stakeholder scores — cryptographically certified.

This isn't a whitepaper hunch — it's two decades of breaking and proving:

• Legitimacy. Found seventeen existing theories cannot detect vulnerabilities (IPL'20, IPL'22), pioneered new framework that does (IACR'21), then realised we'd all been mis-framing systems as verifiable.

Legitimacy differs subtly, checking whether system does what it's supposed to is uninteresting, we want computational legitimacy, slightly more than mere correctness, wherein computed decision is legitimate exactly when an absolute path ties it to inputs expressing stakeholders' actual preferences.

• Freedom. Secrecy definitions miss attacks involving manipulation of ballot collection, authors (including myself in several instances) inadvertently and implicitly trusted bulletin boards. Let the adversary control the board, and non-malleable encryption is sufficient (JCS'21) and necessary (IACR'24) for secrecy, noting mixnet systems for national elections fail to deliver (notes'24), and DAOs don't bother (BRAINS'24).

Reachability captures legitimacy (adversary cannot force invalid result, nor suppress genuine one); freedom demands indistinguishability along every possible unsealing of inputs from that collective score, the real unsealing of encrypted ballots is hidden among them.

• Influence. Score voting overcomes Arrow's impossibility — honeybee sidestep (notes'22).

Influence is measured, not asserted: Each preference carries utility, collective decision sums it, ideal system maximises sum — which first-past-the-post fails (our two tea-drinking Brits). Across some thirty governance systems in one-hundred-forty-four configurations, score voting drew the lowest Bayesian regret in every single one, honest or strategic (Smith'00).