elated conditions that might affect the overall epistemic performance of modern democratic government";21(pv) although their main focus is on a different kind of decision problem.21(pp33-36) We can now state our quest for assessment criteria more clearly. Which traits of a voting method exhibited in a simulation would provide (non-conclusive) evidence for the claim that one method "performs well" for a decision problem? Which features would support the claim that a voting method "performs better" than another for a decision problem? Having a sound answer to these questions would provide useful tools for institutional design. Especially, it would allow us to run some tests on voting mechanisms over kinds of decision problems prior to their implementation. Our proposal consists in FI NA L DR AF T 9 assessing voting methods on a decision problem focusing on the following criteria: (1) Triviality validation. If all voters prefer the ideal outcome, then the voting method always yields the ideal outcome as a result. This ensures that the method can perform at its best under ideal conditions on the preference distribution: it will never yield a suboptimal outcome when provided with ideal inputs. (2) Convergence to optimum. The probability of the group choosing the ideal outcome converges to 1 as the size of the population increases. This is one of the promising ideas sparking from the Condorcet Jury Theorem. Some voting methods can produce better outcomes than the average voter, provided a competence threshold is surpassed; and their accuracy increases as the size of the voting population grows. (3) Fast-rate convergence. The method's ability to arrive at the ideal outcome has a fast rate convergence to 1 (it does not require a very large population). This criterion provides a further refinement on Convergence to optimum. It offers a comparative basis to acknowledge when a voting method is better at capitalizing the initial reliability of the preference distribution than others. (4) Initial low competence. The initial c